What Do Black Women In Hollywood Deserve? We Asked Them.

Awards season isn’t over. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 16), The NAACP Image Awards will celebrate the best in Black entertainment and tonight (Friday, March 15) the Essence Women In Hollywood Awards will air on OWN. Year after year, these are the shows that recognize the talent that other awarding bodies exclude. Every year, we do the song and dance of lamenting which performances should have been nominated for Oscars (Teyana Taylor in A Thousand And One and Aunjanue Ellis in Origin are just two I’ve been yelling about all season) or Emmys (Dominique Fishback in Swarm, Danielle Pinnock in Ghosts, etc.) while The Image Awards and Essence consistently give Black artists – and specifically Black women — the shine they deserve. What Black women deserve is a topic that comes up often in Hollywood, especially since Taraji P. Henson shared so transparently about the struggles she’s still facing in her long and illustrious career during The Color Purple press tour. In an industry that undervalues, underpays and underappreciates Black women — even after they win awards — we have to demand that these artists get their due. 

On the red carpet at the Essence Women In Hollywood event, I asked multiple stars the simple question at the center of that demand: What do Black Women In Hollywood deserve? “I believe that we define culture,” Kathryn Busby, president of original programming for STARZ and one of the Essence honourees, told Unbothered. “We need to tell our stories and put them out in the world. I feel very grateful to have come up the ranks to a position of power where I really can have a say at what kind of stories are told.” Busby is a beacon of hope, but she’s also an exception to the rule. In Hollywood, the standard is that white executives act as barriers to Black creativity, gatekeepers of Black storytelling, and most of all, the roadblocks to Black wealth and pay equity.

“”We deserve adequate pay,” P-Valley star Shannon Thornton said. “We, across the board, all deserve a 75% raise,” Bel-Air star Cassandra Freeman added. “I want to start a hashtag called #BlackWomenPay and you use it like an insult, like ‘my god did they just Black women pay you? Nah, we ain’t doing that,” Freeman said. “My husband, who is Caucasian, got a quote from somebody and I said ‘Oh honey, they’re trying to Black women pay you. Say ‘not today, Satan!’ You got blue eyes, make that shit work!” Freeman laughs. “Anyway, that’s what Black women deserve!” 

Across industries, Black women make 64% of what non-Hispanic white men are paid (according to stats from 2021) and as white women close wage gaps, Black women fall further behind. Black women’s wage gap was worse in 2022 than it was in 2021. That gap exists in Hollywood, even if there isn’t as much hard data to back it up. What we do have are the anecdotes from Black women in the industry who continually share their frustrations while it seems like gender progress is reserved for white women only. We see that truth amplified during awards season. Emma Stone just won her second Academy Award. It’s not that she doesn’t deserve the accolade. Stone was incredible in Poor Things. But as Sarah Marrs wrote for LaineyGossip about Lily Gladstone’s loss (she was up against Stone for Best Actress and would have been the first Indigenous woman winner and only third woman of color), “The concern, always, is that there simply aren’t the same opportunities for women of color as their white peers. Lupita Nyong’o’s presence at the Oscars this year reminded everyone that in a decade, she has not had another role to put her in Oscar contention,” Marrs wrote. “Meanwhile, Jennifer Lawrence bagged four nominations and one win in five years, and in the same decade Lupita was an Academy Award winner, Emma Stone got four acting nominations and two wins…. there is more to a career than an Oscar, but even WITH an Oscar, it can be hard for women of color to advance.”

Da’Vine Joy Randolph won Best Supporting Actress this year for her work in The Holdovers. In a cover interview with Variety after her win, Randolph said that she hoped her Oscar win would be just the beginning. “The roles will get better, the money will improve,” she said. I hope she’s right. But we know that that’s not always the case. Halle Berry has been open about the lack of opportunities she faced after her Oscar win. And as journalist Robert Daniels noted on X (formerly Twitter), “Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, Octavia Spencer and Whoopi Goldberg are the only Black women to receive multiple acting Oscar nominations… For ‘many,’ it’s one and done,” Daniels wrote. To me, these stats are embarrassing for the Academy but they are also indicative of a general lack of respect — and opportunities — for Black women. “We deserve respect, and that goes in every way from how we’re treated to how we’re paid, baby,” P-Valley’s Brandee Evans said on the Essence Black Women in Hollywood carpet. “We want respect on and off camera.” 

Amber Riley answered the question with one word: “More,” she said. “More roles, more directors, more money for projects. Just more. I think we’ve proven time and time again our power and our creativity and what it is that we can do specifically in Hollywood. Black women need more.” Danielle Pinnock agreed. “More money. The pay gap is real, “she said. “We deserve to have hair stylists and makeup artists that know how to do our hair and makeup on set. We deserve safe working environments,” Pinnock continued. 

When I spoke to Randolph before awards season about her work in The Holdovers, she told me she had to fight “tooth and nail”  for authentic Black hair & makeup on set. “When I tell you I fought tooth and nail to the point where I was like, ‘if you don’t hire this person for hair or this person for makeup, if you don’t hire them, I’m not coming back,’” she said. The hope is that with the accolades Randolph has racked up this awards season will come more agency, trust, and empowerment. Next time she’s on set, hopefully she won’t have to fight to get the basic necessities to do her job well – the resources that her white peers are given and expect, that Black women have to beg for. 

“We deserve the best things. We deserve things that are in alignment with the talent we have and all of the beautiful things we bring into the world,” actress Kiki Layne said, speaking to the reality we all know: Black women have the talent and the work ethic to back up any requests made. “Hollywood gotta match that.”

So how do you move forward when Hollywood isn’t matching your work with your worth? As many of the Black women I talked to echoed, multiple NAACP Awards nominee, Oscar nominee, and Essence honouree Danielle Brooks said it’s all about patience and giving yourself grace. “The first thing that came to my mind when you said that is to be patient with ourselves during these journeys. We want a lot of things but more than that, we deserve a lot of things. Along the way, be patient with yourself.” Tika Sumpter was on the same wavelength. “We deserve grace,” Sumpter told Unbothered. “I think the grace to be many different people. I think a lot of people get grace in who they can be in different variations of this business and I think we deserve that too.” 

The beautiful thing about Essence Black Women In Hollywood and the NAACP Image Awards is that you are reminded that the roles are there, the talent is there, and that the breadth of Black storytelling does exist on film and TV. The recognition just needs to catch up with the output. Whether the awarding bodies — outside of our own — acknowledge it or not, the best performances of the year, always, are Black. One of those stellar acting achievements that I haven’t stopped thinking about since I saw it was Kali Reis’s work in True Detective. “Especially women of color deserve to get the recognition of all the hard work that we have been putting in for centuries, for generations before us,” the Afro-Indigenous boxer-turned-True Detective-star said on the carpet. “It shouldn’t be a novelty. It shouldn’t be, ‘oh look and there’s a Black woman or woman of color here!’ It should be equality… What everyone else knows, we should know as well… everything should be transparent. We deserve to know everything and make decisions based on all the information we have.” 

“What do I think Black women in Hollywood deserve? The world!” Insecure star Yvonne Orji exclaimed. “Baby, we built every crevice of this world. We need it all!”

“We are more than what the limitations are set for us to be,” Letitia Wright added. Wright mentioned watching Angela Bassett (whose only Oscar is an honorary one) and Keke Palmer growing up and how they inspired her to be an actress. She now wants to be that example for the next generation. Another Essence honoree, Nkechi Okoro Carroll, summed up Black women’s contributions to this industry on the carpet: “We’re the backbone of [Hollywood]. Seriously, we feel like we’re the least appreciated, the least loved in all sorts of aspects but that’s why I love this event. We’re giving Black women their due.”

So what do Black women in Hollywood deserve? According to Okoro Carroll, “Everything.”

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