Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul displays many controversial portrayals of black people. Some roles shown are thieves and imposters. Pearl Browser and Louise Spence, writers for the University of Texas Press, talk about Micheaux’s film and how he dealt “the burden of representation”. In the essay Browser and Spence believe Body and Soul “provided images of victimization and poverty too reminiscent of racist portrayals that were supposedly defining characteristics of the race”. I understand why they think this way but I disagree with this argument because the images are a necessary evil that need to be shown to everyone. I believe the images are necessary because if they are not shown we will not realize the self-inflicted wounds we can cause on our communities. If the only black people we see on the screen are positive, we create this sense of false security that everyone around us always has our best interest in mind which is an…show more content… This is important to realize because, Micheaux’s movies weren’t meant to prove to white people that blacks were worthy of recognition but they were meant to show the black audience the many different parts of their community. Micheaux’s Body and Soul was created in order to get black people to really think about why they do things and what was going on when the preacher left the pulpit. In Browser and Spence’s essay they talk about what Micheaux said his intentions were “I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life, to view the colored heart from close range.” Micheaux acknowledges that his films are made for black people and are used as a way of getting us to truly see our race as a whole, seeing both the positive and negative people in our
