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May 14, 2010

Category: TV/Film

Just Wright: Gold Rings & Glass Slippers

Thanks to Linda Villarosa and the folks over at The Root (Teresa Wiltz & Sheryl Salomon), I had the opportunity to attend an advance screening of Just Wright and to interview Queen Latifah along with the film’s director, Sanaa Hamri for my first assignment for the “online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today’s news from a variety of black perspectives.” Here is my story (in part), which focuses on the Cinderella fairytale in the face of Black modern love and inspite of Nightline’s frivolous faceoff on Black single women finding husbands.

Recently, the media seems as fascinated by black women not finding husbands as it is the horrific Gulf Coast oil spill. Interestingly enough, both issues have socioeconomic ramifications, and both dilemmas seem to be mishandled and misunderstood.

As in the case of the spill, these media pundits (and so called “relationship experts”) are using the wrong tactics to address the dynamics of marriage within African-American communities. To advise women to, “act like a lady and think like a man,” as Steve Harvey does in his book by the same name, is like using a meager conical dome to contain a 3,500 square mile oil slick. It’s ignorant, inappropriate and dead wrong. You can’t out-slick slick, and you can’t make single black women’s achievement a problem. The news is dismal enough without having Harvey and Nightline pimp African-American women as pathology.

Research from Yale University suggests that highly educated black women are twice as likely to have never been married by the age of 45 as white women with similar education. Last month, The Economist dropped a bomb in its article, “Sex and the Single Black Woman,” when it reported that U.S.-born black women ages 30-44 who were married plunged from 62 percent to 33 percent due to the “explosive” incarceration rates of black men between 1970 and 2007. These stats are enough to clear any dance floor of women waving their left hands in their air singing, “If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it!” So what’s a single, successful black woman to do besides watch reruns of Carrie Bradshaw living it up on Sex and the City?

As Queen Latifah sees it, every woman (and man) needs to see her new romantic comedy Just Wright. (Well, she does have a movie to promote.) “I definitely think it can be empowering for women to watch this movie, because the average, everyday woman who works really hard and is successful will see herself in these characters,” Latifah says. “But I also think… (Click Here For Full Story)

Tags: "Sex & The City", Black love, Black single women, Black women, Cinderella, Cinderella Complex, Common, Just Wright, Linda Villarosa, movies, Queen Latifah, Sanaa Hamri, Teresa Wiltz, The Root, TheRoot.com, TV/Film