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Telling Stories for White Folk to Consume
Black storytellers tell stories differently than white storytellers.
Telling stories is easy. Telling a good story is hard.
But what is a good story? Who gets to decide what is good?
White people decide what is good.
We must acknowledge all popular media is made to appeal to a white audience, particularly a young, white, mostly male, slightly conservative audience. This bias is sometimes called a “4 quadrant” audience, basically admitting that a piece of media text is made based on what a teenage white boy thinks is cool and we should just assume if that hypothetical teenage boy likes it, so will other audiences.
Stories told by and for Black people are usually considered inferior, but that is based on the rules white people decided. So Black creatives, artists, and storytellers are torn between creating and tailoring stories for white consumption and therefore making a decent living, or making decolonizing art and hoping enough people are giving you a dollar on Patreon to survive.
Tyler Perry happened exactly once and only because enough white people were also entertained. So Lionsgate kept giving him money until he had enough to tell them to fuck off. And then some white filmmakers who also happen to…