Grace Gipson on Hollywood's History of Portraying African Americans
From the inception of motion pictures and television, African Americans have often been depicted in unflattering ways; this includes portraying African Americans as being deviant, violent, dim-witted, or as comic relief for the film. BlackPressUSA TV discusses this with Grace D. Gipson, an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and an alum of BCNM.
From the conversation:
"Blackness is not monolithic — like we are not all the same. We don't all come from the same place, we have different backgrounds, we think differently, have different perspectives. And if you choose to only pick one [director to visit a class] then you're going to have [...] students [...] coming in thinking that this is how we all act."