Despite the efforts of pioneering directors and screenwriters like Spike Lee, John Singleton, Steve McQueen, and Jordan Peele, Hollywood has a long and torrid history of failing to authentically portray Black figures, their history, and the Black experience in the United States overall.
From Gone with the Wind and other films of the time casting Black actors mainly as domestic help to more recent portrayals of gangbangers and thugs in films like Training Day and American Gangster, Black Americans have been stereotyped and underrepresented for decades with their stories whitewashed and misrepresented on the big screen.
Yet as the old saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the case of former NBA star and civil rights activist Craig Hodges. The former Chicago Bulls shooting guard and three-point specialist made a name for himself off the court as a vocal advocate for racial justice and claims that the NBA blackballed him for his actions.
Now Hodges is currently locked in a bitter dispute with Wayfarer, the production company owned by actor Justin Baldoni and billionaire Steve Sarowitz, over the rights to turn his 2017 biography, “Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter,” into a documentary. The skirmish between Hodges and the production company – which he claims centers on the production wanting to make his story more “palatable” to the NBA – is just another example of the film industry attempting to whitewash the Black experience and make a story more digestible for white audiences.
This is a tactic as old as Hollywood itself, where mainly white producers and directors, decide to change history to purportedly appease a white audience. From D. W. Griffith’s horrific alternative history and portrayal of Black Americans in “The Birth of a Nation” and the questionable historical accuracy of “Amistad” to the casting of everyone from Laurence Olivier to Angelina Jolie to play Black characters to the genre of white savior films ranging from Gregory Peck’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” to Sandra Bullock’s “The Blind Side.”
Now with Hodges’ dispute with Wayfarer, Hollywood is moving away from dramatic retellings of history and looking to influence stories in the documentary genre in a move akin newspaper editors rewriting a report to make it easier for sensitive audiences to digest.
The dispute between the athlete-activists and the production company centers around who gets to tell Hodges’ story. As the subject of the documentary, Hodges’ wanted British-Indian producer Jivi Singh to be the one to tell his story, but Wayfarer wanted Kirk Fraser, a Black director who led the ESPN documentary Without Bias about Len Bias – with Baldoni arguing that “this is a very important thing of why it’s unique to America, why the director does need to be Black, I believe, and from America.”
While a Black director on paper does make sense for a story about an athlete fighting for racial justice, at the end of the day the most important voice in the argument is the Black man whose story is being told. For Hodges – an athlete who feels he was silenced by a league for speaking about uncomfortable truths and an activist who sees a history of white Hollywood coopting Black stories – it is understandable why he wants to control who directs his story and why wants his story’s authenticity to shine through.
Any person or group that has been historically marginalized will naturally be wary of someone else telling their own story and will understandably want to control their own narratives. On the flip side, a story told with authenticity will, in its own way, dispel misconceptions and stereotypes and help shape the public perception and understanding of Black experiences.
What is even more troubling is that Hodges’ battle with Wayfarer will not be the last instance of Hollywood attempting to coopt a Black American’s story, but it should serve as a warning to any other Black man or woman who wants their story told on the big screen. It should also put an emphasis on the need for subjects in both dramas and documentaries to have more creative control over who gets to portray them, shape their narrative, and ultimately tell their story.
Speaking about his career, the late actor Sidney Poitier once said “I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.”
While that was decades ago, Hollywood has done little in the proceeding years to ensure that each of those 18 million people have the ability to represent their own stories. That needs to change.
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