Jill Scott says Zoe Saldana can play Nina Simone with 'prosthetic nose' and 'some darker makeup'
OPINION - In a recent interview, Jill Scott supported the idea that Saldana should play Nina Simone based on her proven acting abilities alone -- but with a fake nose and darker make-up that make her look more like the iconic singer...
She does not know her beauty
She thinks her brown glory
If she could dance naked under palm trees
And see her image in the river she would know
Yes, she would know
But there are no palm trees in the street
No palm trees in the street
And dishwater gives back no image
Nina Simone once revealed that, “the song was for the West Indian servant women who had come to toil in America but who would never know their true beauty in such an oppressive society,” according to the poetry journal Beltway. Apparently, the injustice this archetypal black woman faced in a poem penned in the ’20s is just as virulent today.
Even the biopic of Nina Simone’s life may fail to reflect her accurate image, if the filmmakers and their apologists have their way.
Ideally, there would be a level playing field for all actresses of color, and these kinds of skin tone choices would not matter. The cold reality that dashes our dreams of parity is that a large portion of black people we see in media — especially women — are lighter-skinned, bi- or multi-racial, or not of African-American descent, like Saldana. Her Dominican ancestry likely includes a higher percentage of non-African genes than that of the average black American woman, making her more appealing to producers and mainstream audiences because she — however subtly — better reflects them.
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Simone was a warrior against this kind of discrimination. If Saldana needs to essentially wear blackface to play Nina in a movie about her life, the next film about Dr. King should include a scene of him conversing with “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”
Blackface was used in minstrelsy to demean and dehumanize blacks. The stereotypical caricatures portrayed by whites who became blacks with shoe polish and props was a form of racist entertainment that allowed mainstream audiences to mock blacks without actually having to look at them. It’s sad that many in Hollywood don’t want to look at darker-skinned black women today. That is exactly why echoes of this historic tool of oppression should not be linked to this black woman’s story.
Not only does it emphasize the chilling bias in entertainment against casting darker blacks that persists, it reminds black women that people can’t accept them the way many of them are — not light, mixed or foreign. Just brown with thicker features — just like Nina Simone. As blackface humiliated all African-Americans, darkening Zoe Saldana would be an insult to black women with clearly African features.
Something has got to change. We don’t want to play these reindeer games when it comes to skin tone. But, when first lady Michelle Obama had to spend the first part of her husband’s term plagued by images of her in Google search that merged her face with that of a monkey (until the site that hosted it took it down), it seems clear that society has not progressed very far in terms of accepting darker black women as equally beautiful.
Note that this did not happen for President Obama to the same degree. The monkey picture of Michelle was nearly ubiquitous. It came up at the very top of her image searches; it was used as people’s avatars. No need to remind you who is bi-racial and who is of duskier appearance.
Nina Simone continues to thrill audiences with her voice, her jazz sound and her Afrocentric style, partly because she achieved her artistic goals despite this kind of discrimination. If having chosen Saldana, film producers darken her tone in echoes of minstrelsy, they will be telling black women that a woman who looks like Nina Simone is not good enough to portray Nina Simone. They will be missing the point of Nina Simone’s life — a big part of what makes her life perennially compelling to a racial rainbow of fans.
If Nina Simone’s biopic producers are that ignorant of these ramifications, I would not trust the veracity of any story they seek to tell about her life.
Follow Alexis Garrett Stodghill on Twitter at @lexisb.
