There have been many debates surrounding the choice to cast
Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic “Nina”. On the one hand,
there are arguments for the casting choice, which essentially say Saldana is an
excellent actress and a woman of African ancestry so what’s the issue? On the
other hand, there’s an argument against the choice and it specifically takes
issue with Saldana’s light skin and with the Hollywood tendency to “whitewash
and lightwash a lot of stories, particularly when black actresses are
concerned.”
I
agree with the latter argument.
This
isn’t an attack on Saldana or on her acting abilities (although to be honest,
the movies I’ve seen her in haven’t given her the capacity to exercise her
acting skills for me to judge whether or not she is a good actress). However, I
do take issue with the fact that rather than finding a dark-skinned actress who
looks more like Nina Simone, the writers/producers/director have chosen to cast
a light-skinned woman, fix her with a prosthetic nose, afro wig and – wait for
it – darken her with makeup.
Sure.
Actors and actresses have physically altered themselves to look like the
characters they play; they dye their hair, gain weight, grow a beard, put on
accents. However, none of those practices are rooted in racism and carry the
emotional and historical and colonial baggage that blackface does. Yes. I do
consider Saldana darkening her skin to look more like Nina Simone – who
incidentally wrote “Four Women” a song about the histories and skin tones of four
Black women – an act of blackface. Further, I find the choice an insult to Nina
Simone’s legacy in that she did not adhere to what show business at that time
deemed acceptable aesthetics and celebrated her dark skin and wide nose when
she was told that those features did not embody beauty.
For
more context surrounding the aforementioned Hollywood tendency, one just needs
to take a look at Thandie Newton and the controversy surrounding her role in
the film based on Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”, which deals with the
Nigerian Civil War; there is also the fact that Jacqueline Fleming, who is
biracial, was cast as Harriet Tubman in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”
As
Tiffani Jones, founder of the blog Coffee Rhetoric, says: “When is it going to be O.K. to not be
the delicate looking ideal of what the media considers blackness to be?”
