The Appropriation of Nina Simone

The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Robert Johnson, the distributor of the new eponymous biopic of Nina Simone. They asked Johnson’s opinion on the controversy over the casting of Zoe Saldana, as well the cosmetic alterations she’s undertaken for the film:

To say that if I’m gonna cast a movie, I’ve gotta hold a brown paper bag up to the actresses and say, ‘Oh sorry, you can’t play her’: Who’s to decide when you’re black enough?

This is bizarre. Zoe Saldana is donning make-up to appear darker for the film. Why do this if color is irrelevant? It is not any critic nor interlocutor who is asserting that Zoe Saldana isn’t “black enough.” It is the film-makers who made that determination and then—in the most literal and crudest sense—decided to make Saldana blacker.

More disturbingly, Johnson simply does not believe that a racist hierarchy exists within black America. In his eyes there is one racism and it effects all black people, regardless of skin tone, equally:

“That’s almost saying that dark-skinned black people have a special cross to bear than light-skinned,” he said. “That is exactly what was put on us, that’s the burden that was put on us by slave owners who separated us by color.”

This view betrays a deep ignorance of the social science of colorism. More shocking, it betrays a shameful ignorance of Nina Simone’s own life. “My mother was raised at a time when she was told her nose was too wide,” Simone’s daughter Simone Kelly told the Times. And “Her skin was too dark.”