—Kel McKnight, B1Daily

Hollywood loves to talk about representation. But for Black Americans descended from the people who endured slavery and Jim Crow in the United States, there is another question worth asking:

Who gets to represent our particular history, culture and experiences on screen?

Supporting Freedmen actors and actresses doesn’t require hostility toward Black performers from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain or anywhere else in the diaspora. Their success doesn’t diminish ours. But recognizing a shared racial identity shouldn’t require pretending that every Black population has the same history.

Freedmen have a distinct American story, and that story deserves performers, writers and filmmakers from the community helping tell it.

Representation Should Include Lineage and Culture

Hollywood increasingly operates internationally. Casting directors can recruit talented Black performers from London, Lagos, Kingston, Toronto, Atlanta or Los Angeles.

Artistically, that can produce excellent performances.

But representation becomes more complicated when Hollywood treats Blackness as completely interchangeable.

A descendant of American slavery portraying a Nigerian historical figure would not automatically possess intimate knowledge of Nigerian culture merely because both are Black. The reverse deserves consideration too when productions deal specifically with slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Black church, the Civil Rights Movement or uniquely Black American communities.

This isn’t an argument that actors should only portray people sharing their ancestry. Acting would become awfully boring under that rule.

It is an argument that Black American representation should include Black American opportunity.

The Entertainment Industry Is Also an Economy

Every successful actor represents more than somebody appearing on television.

There are salaries, residuals, endorsements, production companies, directing opportunities and eventually the ability to finance other people’s projects.

That makes supporting Freedmen performers an economic issue as much as a cultural one.

When audiences deliberately seek out movies and television shows featuring Black American talent, buy tickets, stream their projects and discuss their performances, they demonstrate that these performers have commercial value.

And commercial value speaks Hollywood’s favorite language: money.

We Need the People Behind the Camera Too

Actors are only the visible tip of the iceberg.

Freedmen representation should extend to screenwriters, directors, producers, cinematographers, casting directors, costume designers, composers and executives.

Otherwise Hollywood can create something that looks Black while very few Black Americans possess meaningful creative or economic control over it.

Imagine more historical dramas about Reconstruction written by descendants of the people who experienced it.

More Westerns about Black cowboys.

More stories about Freedmen towns in Oklahoma.

More films about Black Wall Street, the Great Migration, Black labor movements, HBCUs and the complicated lives of ordinary Black Americans that have nothing whatsoever to do with trauma.

Our history contains enough material for a cinematic universe without inventing a superhero.

Support Doesn’t Mean Exclusion

There is no reason this conversation needs to become another diaspora food fight.

Black British actors can thrive.

African actors can thrive.

Caribbean actors can thrive.

Freedmen actors can thrive.

The entertainment industry is enormous enough for all of them.

The problem arises when requesting specific investment in Black American talent is treated as somehow illegitimate while Hollywood routinely recognizes nationality, language, culture and heritage when discussing virtually every other population.

Black Americans should be allowed that same cultural specificity.

Build the Audience and the Industry Will Notice

Hollywood ultimately follows audiences.

So supporting Freedmen actors cannot begin and end with complaining about casting decisions on social media.

Watch their movies.

Support independent Black American filmmakers.

Talk about emerging actors before they become celebrities.

Support Black film festivals.

Demand historical authenticity.

And perhaps most importantly, encourage young Black Americans to enter the entertainment industry both in front of and behind the camera.

Because representation isn’t merely seeing someone who resembles you.

It’s having the opportunity to tell your own story.

For Freedmen Americans, whose stories have been interpreted by everyone from minstrel performers to Hollywood studios for more than a century, that distinction matters.

We shouldn’t demand ownership over every Black story.

But we should certainly maintain a meaningful place in the telling of our own.

—Kel McKnight, B1Daily