According to bell hooks, while considering feminism and the “inferior status accorded women under …show more content…
Due to issues of colorism, the privileging of light skin tone over dark skin tone in a racial group, we often find black actresses in Hollywood, especially women with dark skin like actress Viola Davis, are limited to playing certain characters. In this paper, I am arguing that dark skinned actresses have not been granted access to the same roles that other actresses and even other African American actresses have been granted because of their skin tone, and apparently, when they are, they are met with hostility and criticism, as we will come to see. In films, the dark skinned woman is often “oppressively unique”, left playing stereotypical and/or oppressed roles that leave their characters without love, relationships, families of their own and ultimately without any agency or power. As Rebecca Wanzo says, “…they have walked a fine line between minstrelsy and grace, between depicting stereotype and suggesting complex personhood despite confining narratives” (136). They become quite peculiar in films, lost between challenging authority or submitting to it all