BLACK AND BROWN SISTERS ARE DOING VISUAL MEDIA FOR THEMSELVES

When the dominant visual media paradigm is one of hegemonic whiteness, there are a limited number of choices for women of color. Submit yourself to the hegemony and take whatever scraps casting agents, directors, producers throw at you even if they might be problematic. Or, smash that shit and begin carving out your own space. More and more black and brown women are choosing the latter, and it is glorious.

One of the queens of the breakthrough is Issa Rae, whose YouTube web series Awkward Black Girl got picked up by HBO in a stunning debut season renamed Insecure that was quickly renewed. Other than Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project, this was one of the first times I’d ever experienced visual media that was specifically tailored to a woman of color’s gaze. And what a gaze it is that has been missing from visual media.

While Mindy and Issa’s backgrounds and experiences of America (and American-ness) are completely different, where they intersect as women of color through their own presentations of self is in their inherent messiness. Both women are highly capable and intelligent, often socially awkward and straight-up off-putting, but they are still unapologetically themselves. They are whole women with real flaws and all. What sets Mindy’s and Issa’s work apart, though, is that while Mindy makes space for the white gaze in her project, Issa’s Insecure is staunchly produced for gazes of color. It’s not to say that you can’t watch Insecure as a white person, it’s just to say that, for once, a show wasn’t made with white people in mind really at all.

Both Issa and Mindy’s work is groundbreaking, and even revolutionary, in that neither women allow themselves to be subsumed by the stereotypes that shape her community, race, ethnicity, and where gender intersects it all. Because it’s not just more diversity in representation we need in visual media, it’s also more three-dimensional characters of color we are sorely lacking.

In another huge coup for brown and black women visual media creators, the web series Brown Girls has also been picked up by HBO for its star treatment. Written by Fatimah Asghar and produced and directed by Sam Bailey, Brown Girls explores the lives of two best friends, one of whom is a South Asian American and the other African American. Where Brown Girls will deepen the experiences of brown and black women on television is through these women’s active explorations of their queer identities and how they fit into (or don’t) with the expectations of the South Asian and black communities. Again, trailblazing stuff right here that will…

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