Depictions of white people, and more recently a genre of black men— Jerrod Carmichael and Donald Glover— are afforded a canvas-like blankness free of aesthetic assumptions. I think Janicza Bravo’s work is inching us closer to a similar reality for black women.

There are simply not enough images created by black women, so she’s undertaken the impossible task of building a world where a black thing by her— and maybe it’s the Zola story!— can exist.

When people criticize her or snicker about her aesthetic choices, I have to wonder if they know the extent to which she’s inherited a celluloid history bereft of black women’s contributions that only imagination will free us from, not willful myopia disguised as pro-blackness.

And can those same people be honest with themselves that they can’t have a world where A Black Lady Sketch Show offends their deeply held aesthetic biases AND find Janicza Bravo’s work to be white-identifying, for lack of a better term.

There’s a contingent of black people who are instinctively repelled by a show like ABLSS with “black lady” literally in the title, but wanna turn around and reflexively brand JB as white-washed. It’s unfair, and more importantly, it’s disingenuous.

I think that if Céline Sciamma, a white woman, can create images of black girls, Janicza Bravo can make a white thing, too, and when the canon of images authored by black women and of black women grows because of auteurs like Bravo, a lot of you will eat your words.

Recommended reading: https://thebaffler.com/bread-and-circuses/the-destructive-character-orr

Compare Niela's thoughtful handling of Janicza Bravo's work with this piece by Andrew Marantz crudely pointing out the obvious: "Bravo, who is black, tends to write roles for white actors, but for this project, she assembled a mostly black cast." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/25/making-movies-with-virtual-reality

It's audaciously tacky that The New Yorker, an institution that worships at the altar of whiteness, would print those words without at least an acknowledgment of the constraints Janicza Bravo is working within.

But that's whiteness for you. And when black people do it, that's whiteness, too!

If Janicza Bravo could squeeze herself in the growing canon of unselfconscious-of-identity-while-still-decidedly-black/Asian (Shaka King, Barry Jenkins, et al), she would have already done that.

It's not artistic negligence (or a betrayal of her blackness) that she's bright enough to know that anything less than putting the wagon in front of the horse, so to speak, is setting herself up to fail.