Brooklyn-based writer Rahawa Haile has set up a Tumblr account for the black actors in Netflix’s Gilmore Girls who “rarely get to speak.” There are a good number of blacks in the show, which is set in a fictional town, Stars Hollow, in Connecticut that, if real, would probably have voted for Trump. What do the silent blacks of Stars Hollow do mostly? They endure.
But this whole thing has a history. Not many whites know this, but when watching movies, particularly those in the Golden Age of Hollywood, black viewers do recognize the black extras. Though they are at the edge of the story (serving food, waiting in a line, cleaning this, pushing that), they are instantly noticed because they are one of them. We see our friends and relatives in their faces and movements.
For example, there is in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, a bartender in a train’s dining car who is on the screen for only a few seconds but always catches my eye because he looks like an uncle of mine who worked for a steel company and died in a car accident in 2008. When I ever see this bartender or other black employees on that train, I automatically leave the main narrative, which stars the brilliant whiteness of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, and spend a moment in the edges, the black edges—that narrow zone of film inhabited by the briefest of black beings. Though they almost always say nothing, they represent for me a whole world of life—marriages, friendships, successes, failures, spiritual and material needs.
Now, if you notice a black person in the edge-space of the new Gilmore Girls, and he or she is not already captured and cataloged on Gilmore Blacks, then email an image of the scene—as well as three blanks (Name, Speaking Role, Purpose)—to GilmoreBlacks@gmail.com.
