Author Pops-Off on Anti-Black Hollywood
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The Dirty Girls Social Club, which is about six Latina friends from widely varied backgrounds. Unfortunately, she optioned her book to Hollywood and as any enlightened one would expect, Hollywood has ruined it.
The book is being turned into a TV series and Alisa is not happy with how the writers have taken her inspiring Latina characters and turned them into oversexed stereotypes. Much to my enjoyment, Alisa is poppin’-off on her blog at NBC and George Lopez’s ex-wife, Ann Lopez, for their TV adaptation of her book, which she says is “racist and sexist”.
The TV adaption was written by Luisa Leschin for Ann Lopez’s Encanto Productions and submitted to NBC for consideration for the fall 2011 season, but after reading the script, Alisa says it “holds zero appeal for me.”
I’m not familiar with her work, but Alisa says the TV adaption of Dirty Girls was written so that it’s “white man” friendly. According to Hollywood, white folks can’t comprehend anything that is not served to them in the form of “white” or a “stereotype”.
Alisa’s blog is amazing and I applaud her for putting racist Hollywood on blast. I did a bit of research on Alisa and I was surprised to read blogs, comments and stories about her being a notorious “liar” and “crazy”. But I didn’t read anything crazy or untrue about what she said about Hollywood.
Below are expects from her blog, and after she posted the following, NBC had the nerve to send her a cease-and-desist letter, and CAA will no longer represent her on The Kindred: a young adult trilogy set to launch next year. LOL @ the Hollywood Backlash against this woman of color because she is speaking the kind of truth that Hollywood would prefer to remain ignorant to.
Keep it up, Alisa.
So I got the script, but not from my executive contact, who is far too professional for such things and ought to be left out of this discussion and should not be included in any of the drama I stir up now. I got it from a lowly “no one” in the company who is, like so many “no ones” across this world, loyal to the book’s message of dignity for all walks of life and all people.
I was horrified by what Luisa had done to my book – and even more horrified to discover NBC had requested I be brought in as the writer, only to be told no by Ann.
There are many, many problems with Luisa’s approach, and I intend to use this blog to address them one by one over the coming weeks. I do this because I am offended and disgusted by the stereotypes, racism, sexism and general idiocy this writer brought to the material.
The problem I wish to address is the way Luisa managed to weed out every non-US African diaspora character. Put simply, she killed off all the black folks in my story. In her hands my black Colombian character Elizabeth becomes “a sizzling Colombian” (because we might as well employ cliched language in addition to de-Africanizing her); my mulatta Puerto Rican/Dominican character Usnavys becomes African American, non Latino, and ends up adhering to every stereotype of the fat-n-sassy oversexed negress “diva” that Hollywood has ever flung at the viewing public; and my Nigerian-British millionaire heartthrob, Andre Cartier, becomes Andre Carter, an East Indian by way of London.
There is no discernible reason for these changes, other than anti-black racism. Luisa, who brags in her online bio that she is the daughter of the former president of El Salvador, comes to my work with a white upper-class Latin American point of view, a point of view I now see has more in common with David Duke than Jose Marti. She appears to have no interest in showing the American public that there is, in fact, a huge population of “black” people all over Latin America – knowledge that, if it were widespread, would lead to blacks and Latinos forming coalitions rather than being set up, as they presently are, by the media to fight one another for scraps.
Fully 95 percent of the African slave trade took place in Latin America, not the United States, and yet Luisa knowingly and gladly continues to myth that there are no black people anywhere but the US and Africa. No black Latinos. No black Brits. It is outrageous, and, given that she did it to all three of my non-US African diaspora characters, it is obviously a systematic weeding of dangerous information from the US public.
Luisa’s need, too, to remove some of the Latinas in order to make the show “more mainstream” is idiotic. Racially, the Dirty Girls are already diverse. There are two black, two brown and two white Dirty Girls in my novel, and they are all ethnically Latina. Luisa ostensibly found the specter of explaining this to America too daunting, and resorted to stereotype.
Why does Luisa feel that with such an enormous population we still have to “tone ourselves down” to be palatable?
