Sex and the City has never been that kind to black people to begin with — with few African-Americans ever making so much as a guest appearance in a city as diverse as New York, (aside from Samantha’s brief dalliance with a music exec and a recurring role for Blair Underwood as Miranda’s love interest, both which seem to fulfill every existing myth about black male sexual prowess) but in “Does Sex And The City Hate Brown People?” one DC blogger claims the racism is even more blatant in the Sex and the City Films:
Despite the number of Black women who love and patronize SATC, the franchise refused to return the favor in the first movie. As Carrie’s personal assistant, Jennifer Hudson’s sole responsibility was to take care of Carrie and bring her “back to life.” And just like a mammy-god-mother should, she twitches her rented Louis Vuitton and disappears back into the country when her work is done.
In the second installment, during the pointless karaoke scene in which the girls sing some random female empowerment song that nobody knows, the only Blacks with speaking roles in the entire film are two dreded buffoons wearing sunglasses and loud outfits who are shuckin’ and jivin’ on the stage over the women from America.
Kind of makes me sorry I complained about mammy in the first movie.
She’s not alone in her complaints about the second film. Set in Abu Dhabi, Arabs and Muslims aren’t treated with any more sensitivity. In her Huffington Post
piece Jane Huckerby argues:
Sex and the City 2 turns truly ugly when it fixates on the wardrobe of veiled Muslim women in Abu Dhabi, UAE — the holiday destination of the film’s four main characters. The film is unsubtle in its disapproval of women who wear the veil: the characters crack jokes about burqinis and Carrie — in the film’s lowest point — openly mocks a local woman for eating French fries under her veil. When the gals stumble across a women’s book club and discover bright clothes (designer of course) lurk beneath the burqa, it is unclear whether they’re more shocked that veiled women eat, read, swim, and gossip or that they too like fashion. What is clear is the message that we can, and should, judge women and their entire religion or culture based solely on what they wear.
Salon’s Wajahat Ali describes the film as an “Orientalists wet dream” stating that:
Michael Patrick King’s exquisitely tone-deaf movie is cinematic Viagra for Western cultural imperialists who still ignorantly and inaccurately paint the entire Middle East (and Iran) as a Shangri La in desperate need of liberation from ignorant, backward natives… It’s like the cinematic progeny of “Not Without My Daughter” and “Arabian Nights” with a makeover by Valentino. Forget the oppressed women of Abu Dhabi. Let’s buy more bling for the burqa!
Ali also observes how, despite their critiques of the culture, the women fail to even attempt any real communication with Muslim women:
If our cultural ambassadors truly cared about saving Muslim women, they surely would try to help them during the film’s interminable two and half hour running time, no? Sadly, instead, these incredibly shallow mock-feminists can’t even bother to have one decent conversation with a Muslim woman, because they’re too immersed in picnics on the desert and singing Arab disco karaoke renditions of “I Am Woman.” In fact, Abu Dhabi is just peachy when it’s a fantasy land where they ride around in limos and get comped an extravagantly vulgar $22,000 hotel suite. However, only when that materialism is taken away do they worry, in only the most superficial way, about sexual hypocrisy and women’s oppression.
As beloved as the Sex and The City franchise has been, these critics all make very valid points. That said — should we still continue to support this franchise? How could the film have offered better representations of “brown people” and “brown cultures” while staying true to the brand?
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