No White Guilt Here

I first wrote the tale of EASY MADE HARD as a short story. From there it morphed into a stage play and finally into the short film shot August 2009.

 I remember sitting in the back of the theatre watching the packed house watch the play. The actors were strong and the audience totally engaged. When the play was over, the director and actors were invited to the stage to answer questions from the audience.

 It was a lively discussion. In fact so lively, at times people were on their feet shouting at each other. Familial power, getting away with murder, DNA of the soul were some of the themes passionately discussed. I thought, if I can bring an audience to this level of emotion, I’ve done my job.

 And then somebody asked the question: “Who wrote this play?” I was invited to join the director and cast on stage. And that’s where the tenor of the conversation changed. No longer was the discussion about the characters and their choices, but it was about a white woman writing a story about black people.

 During the shooting, working with an integrated cast and crew, I heard none of that. Didn’t even get a whiff of that point-of-view. Not until I received the following email from an anonymous crew member responding to my blog about our first day of shooting when we were booted out of a neighborhood by young men who lived in the area.

 The missive went as follows:

 Uhhh… That script does perpetuate stereotypes, is glaringly ethnocentric, and almost erotically leaden with a masturbatory white guilt. It was everything bad about 90′s neo blaxploitation: the hamhanded politics and cheap melodrama of the whole Boyz in Da Hood phenomenon, which was okay then, for it was an exploited but consequently circulated voice from black people expressing black angst, but this … this was a white fetishist borrowing those used-up cliches and stereotypes to … what? To offer an allegory, “a cautionary tale” gifted to needy blacks by a sensitive and enlightened white person.

Those people were right that day. Their anger was palpable, but they weren’t violent, and their arguments about story and character were legit. I can remember one of them, in reference to the stereotypes portrayed by the script, saying, “This neighborhood has a community garden. All organic food, maintained by the residents. Why don’t you guys tell that story?” Also all the dumb shit in the script about “My Jesus is whispering to me,” expressed in a moment of melodrama by the Curtis character (a got a gun to his wayward thug sons head), inspired one of the upset black guys to snigger, “There are black agnostics you know.”

Anyway, I don’t think you meant any ill intent, but you have no moral, experiential, or intellectual authority to properly tell that story. You’re very out of touch and audiences will smell this and cringe. Those people didn’t want their neighborhood used as set dressing for another stupidly righteous act of exploitation. Seriously, I hate to hurt the feelings of a fellow filmmaker trying to create. God knows, we don’t all have to absolutely agree with each others’ work, but it’s my moral obligation to serve you this feedback.

Don’t you know how to write what you know?

 I wonder why this person who was so deeply offended by script, signed on to the project and saw it through? The story I told is based on an actual event that occurred in East Los Angeles. Therefore we cast the film with black actors. But that was the only reason. The power of a father killing a son resonated with such enormity, I felt I had to write it, no matter what color the characters were.

 The script was one of six chosen by the DC Shorts Screenplay Competition. In October I went to Washington to participate in a “table reading.” When no black actors showed up for the audition, I chose two of the strongest white actors to read the parts. True, some of the dialog would not be relevant if the tale was told about white characters, but the deeply felt motivations didn’t change with the change of skin color. An audience of 150 agreed.

 I harbor no white guilt. I only want to tell stories that open hearts and minds. I also feel that tiptoeing around racial themes only deepens the racial divide.

 And as far as writing stories I know, I’ve written ten year-old girls, psychopaths, women in their late seventies, men struggling with latent homosexual tendencies, a macaw and a duck to name a few. Do I have to be these characters and have lived their lives to write them?

 If the film reaches an audience through film festivals, there may be more comments like the ones I received from “Anonymous.” Any time anyone wants to talk about these issues, I’m available, but face to face conversations are preferable to hiding behind an email address I don’t recognize.