Critical Noir: The Color Purple Controversy Revisited
By Mark Anthony Neal, AOL BlackVoices columnist
For those of us who came of age listening to sweet romantic soul like Rick James and Teena Marie's "Fire and Desire," Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots," Debra Laws' "Very Special," Atlantic Starr's "Send for Me" or Glenn Jones' "Show Me," the controversy over the release of the film version of Alice Walker's novel, "The Color Purple," was a jarring introduction to the gender debates within the black community. The controversy was not new -- when Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" hit the Broadway stage in 1976, the author was accused of demeaning black men. The same cries were heard three years later when Michele Wallace's "Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman" became a best seller in 1979. But the public disputes within the black community over "The Color Purple" took it to another level. Indeed, the seemingly fractious nature of black male and female relations became a national obsession.
Originally published in 1982, "The Color Purple" was greeted with critical acclaim -- Newsweek called it a novel of "permanent importance." Set in rural Georgia, "The Color Purple" focuses on the travails of Celie, who comes of age as the object of all kinds of abuse: emotional, physical and sexual, often at the hands of the black men in her life, including her step-father and husband. Celie finds spiritual redemption via the letters she writes to God, her friendship with Shug Avery, a blues singer and former mistress of Celie's husband and the womanist moxie exhibited by Celie's daughter-in-law Sophia. The year after its publication, "The Color Purple" was awarded the American Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
One of the many folk who read "The Color Purple" was director Steven Spielberg and with the help of his friend Qiuncy Jones, Spielberg was able to convince Walker that a film should be made of her book and, more importantly, that he was the director to do it. Best known at the time for films like "Indiana Jones" and "E.T.," not everyone was sold on Spielberg as director. Noted New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote that the finished product was like a combination of "Tobacco Road," "The Wizard of Oz" and "Imitation of Life," though he admitted that the film would not have been made if it wasn't directed by Spielberg. That a white director -- and one that specialized in fantasy at that -- helmed "The Color Purple," was arguably a secondary thought for those who felt that Walker had colluded with "White Hollywood" to further demonize black men. In the parlance of the day, Alice Walker was a dirty feminist.
When the film opened in Los Angeles in December 1985, it was met by protest. As one young man told the Los Angeles Times, "It is degrading to black men...makes us all look like wife beaters and rapists." Journalist Courtland Milloy made the inevitable connection between Walker's book and the white power structure stating that he "got tired a long time ago of white men publishing books by black women about how screwed up black men are. Those same white men get intimidated when a black man writes a book saying that the real problem is the white man." But Milloy's comments neglected the reality of black women's oppression. As legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw has so brilliantly highlighted in her concept of "intersectionality," black women catch hell because of both their race and gender (and we could add sexuality to the mix) and all too often the demands of "closing ranks" around the race has led to their unwillingness to call out black male sexism and misogyny for what it is. It was this kind of thinking that Walker and black feminists have long tried to challenge. As Walker told The Washington Post shortly after the publication of "The Color Purple," "If I write books that men feel comfortable with, then I have sold out. If I write books that whites feel comfortable with, I have sold out."
But of course there were those who felt that Walker had sold out the black community, notably, journalist Tony Brown who mounted a year-long campaign attacking the film, often comparing it to the racist "Birth of a Nation." But the importance of the film was perhaps best captured by Oprah Winfrey, then a Chicago talk-show host, whose first film role was as the aforementioned Sophia. As a rape survivor, Winfrey argued forcefully, "If this film is going to raise some issues, I'm tired of hearing about what it's doing to the black man. Let's talk about the issues of wife abuse, violence against women [and] sexual abuse of children in the home."
March 9, 2005