Months after I had watched Girlhood and on multiple occasions argued that it had raised the bar for a film about teenaged black girls, I found an interview the director, Céline Sciamma, gave to Indiewire. Sciamma said, “I’m making this universal, and I decide that my character, who represents the youth of today for me, can be black . . . It’s not about race. It’s not about struggling with racism.” Unlike Marieme and her friends, Sciamma is a white, middle-class woman. Her inspiration for Girlhood came from observing “gangs” of young black girls both in and around Parisian shopping centers and the Métro. I am not sure if Sciamma ever spoke to these young black girls, or whether she is aware that groups of black women are not always gang-affiliated, or engaged in fighting and theft. When she saw them, why did she even feel like she had a right to tell their stories? “I had a strong sense of having lived on the outskirts even if I am a middle-class white girl,” she told the Guardian. “I didn’t feel I was making a film about black women but with black women—it’s not the same. I’m not saying, ‘I’m going to tell you what it’s like being black in France today’; I just want to give a face to the French youth I’m looking at.”
Sciamma is right in that a film involving black female actors is not the same as a film about black women, but the rest of her reasoning falls short. Marieme and her friends were not black women, but black girls. White people readily conflate black girlhood with womanhood because black females are so sexualized that black girls can never be innocent. She also believes that she can relate to these poor, young black girls because like them, she, too, has lived on the margins, despite her being white and middle-class. To believe that, within her middle-class, white female body, Sciamma understands what it means to live on the outskirts of society grates on my nerves. And why does she assume a responsibility to “give a face to the French youth” when she does not even recognize that her understanding of it is framed through her white gaze? Granted, Sciamma has made films with white female protagonists, such as Water Lilies and Tomboy, but Girlhood cannot be analyzed through the same lens. The most obvious reason is because black female representation on screen is so scarce. It is illegal for the French state to gather data about ethnicity and race, but publications such as the New York Times have made estimates, and black Parisians only make up perhaps 4 percent of the French population; as such, they are automatically cast as Other. Yet black French girls already have faces and voices. For Sciamma to assert that she can give “a face” to poor black French girls speaks of appropriation, a kind of control that reinforces her role as a white benefactor, and that of her subjects as helpless beings whose stories are not theirs to tell. By providing “a face” to them, she is implying that they themselves are invisible, unworthy of being named, and unable to be named without her assistance.
Girlhood got many media critics arguing whether nonblack women should write about black women. My criticism of Sciamma doesn’t eradicate my feeling that Girlhood is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. I spent hours with one of my former roommates analyzing what black girlhood, femininity, and the juxtaposition of kinky hair versus weaves meant within the narrative, and if I were to watch it again I would find even more symbols and themes to unpack. Karidja Touré, the lead, was spotted on the street (i.e., “street casting”) in order to create “alchemy” and “energy.”1 However, the majority of the actresses have not been cast in a high-profile film since. If someone were to ask me if I thought Sciamma did a good job with the story, I would say no: I think that she did a great job. But I also believe that a black woman, especially one from a poor Parisian suburb, could have done an even better job because she would be able to fully engage in the story without being a spectator. I could say the same about the fourth season of the drama series Orange Is the New Black, which focused on racism within the prison system and prison brutality towards black women. I found myself enthralled by the storytelling—and annoyed when I found out that no one in the writers’ room was a black woman. Issues that concern black women like me were being exploited for profit and consumption by a white mainstream society.
At the 2015 César Awards, Sciamma was nominated for Best Director, and Karidja Touré was nominated for Most Promising Actress. No black woman has won Best Director in the César Awards’ history. (Euzhan Palcy, a black Martinican woman and director, was the first black person to win a César Award, for Best First Feature Film, for Sugar Cane Alley, back in 1984.) No black woman has ever won a César Award for Best Actress. The first black woman to be nominated in any acting category was A?ssa Ma?ga, for her performance in Bamako, in 2007. In 2016, Déborah Lukumuena became the first black woman and youngest person to win Best Supporting Actress for her role in Divines. I want more black, female-centered stories to be written and directed by black women across the diaspora. Women like Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Amma Asante are making great strides, yet I want more and more and more. But would a black French female director have had the opportunity to direct Girlhood? Could I, or anyone else, be comfortable with the fact that if it weren’t for Sciamma, already a respected art house director, Girlhood might never have received the acclaim that it deserved? The OITNB series came from a white, middle-class woman’s memoir. Would a black woman’s prison memoir have received the same attention and acclaim? Would it have even been published? Given the reality of the systemic barriers, should I resign myself to the fact that at least these stories are being told, even if by nonblack women?
Why is the film titled Girlhood (the French title being Bande de filles, or “Gang of Girls”) and not Black Girlhood, or even Marieme? The truth of the matter is that Girlhood is not a “universal” story, despite Sciamma’s efforts to make these black girls’ experiences collapse into the lie of universality and color blindness. She does not seem to realize that any premise of universality is only facilitated by her white lens, which always assumes whiteness is at the center of any experience. When she declares, “I’m making this universal,” “I decide my character,” “I just want to give a face to the French youth I’m looking at,” she’s forcing herself into a narrative that has nothing to do with her. These statements demonstrate how much she wants to have control over a story that was never hers to begin with. This signals to me, as a viewer and a black woman, that Sciamma did not observe these black girls’ bodies; she confiscated them in order to reproduce the white fallacy that social progress can only be achieved when racial identities are forgotten altogether. To divorce race and racism from Girlhood is to ignore the immense, often invisible forces that restrict the story and the characters. That black girls can simply be girls—that somehow we can share in the deliciousness of being unraced—is a fantasy. It also ejects black girls from being at the center of the narrative, a position in which they have never been privileged to reside.
I only have to think about this in the context of Lemonade—a pure, unadulterated visual experience of black women remaining at the center, codirected by a black woman—to realize I do not want to resign myself. Your eyes could not sift through any of the scenes without seeing a black woman, or several. Beyoncé would not allow that. You had to see. You had to watch. You had to stay. You were “going through” just as she was “going through.” That is the reality that we had to witness: a black woman’s pyrrhic journey, bloodied and beautiful from start to finish, with no hint of white skin to provide momentary relief.
I wish that, for once, a white director or screenwriter could talk about stories featuring women of color without trying to insert him-or herself into the narrative in order to make it more accessible. I do not want a white artist to have either sympathy or empathy for their characters of color. I do not want a white artist to pity a marginalized character’s fortune, as this too easily facilitates a savior complex. I also do not want a white artist to imagine him-or herself in the position of that character, because this puts the white experience at the center of a story, whitewashing it altogether. I am not even sure that such empathy for a character of color is possible.