Marlon Riggs' Black is, Black Ain't: A Personal Journey through Black Identity

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Marlon Riggs’ Black is, Black Ain’t: A Personal Journey through Black Identity (1994)
I didn’t want to write a poem that said blackness is
Because we know better than anyone
That we are not one or ten or ten thousand things
Not one poem…Elizabeth Alexander.
The words above are indeed deep and goes a long way in explaining what Marlon Riggs elucidated in the movie Black is…Black Ain’t. Riggs’ intention was to confront certain identities brought about by forces internal and external to the African Americans circles. These forces often try to reduce, at times consolidate, and also contain the experiences and lives of African Americans. The truth is blackness incorporates or embraces a myriad of experiences and should therefore, not be constrained within any particular rhetoric. The main question here or that Riggs wanted or sought to answer is: what does black mean? In all fairness, it is indeed difficult to offer a one line or one paragraph answer to this question because like Elizabeth Alexander said, African Americans are not one or ten thousand things. Since the first African American arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, the whites have often been guilty of limiting and distorting the black identity and this has had a tremendous effect on how the blacks view themselves. In the film, Angela Davis echoes the above statement when she says, “Perhaps we have an obsession with naming ourselves because for most of our lives we have been named by other people.” However, in Black is…Black Ain’t Riggs moved past the stereotypes and labels used by the whites and tackled the ...