{"id":85,"date":"2026-05-27T11:10:46","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=85"},"modified":"2026-05-27T11:10:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:10:46","slug":"sterling-k-browns-is-god-is-role-sparks-misplaced-backlash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=85","title":{"rendered":"Sterling K. Brown\u2019s \u2018Is God Is\u2019 role sparks misplaced backlash"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Director Aleshea Harris\u2019 first movie, \u201cIs God Is,\u201d which was released in theaters Friday, has familiar stars, including Vivica A. Fox, Erika Alexander and Janelle Mon\u00e1e. But it\u2019s the movie\u2019s best-known male star, Sterling K. Brown, whose role has ignited the most ire. Not unlike the controversy that emerged more than 40 years ago when Danny Glover played Mister in Steven Spielberg\u2019s adaptation of Alice Walker\u2019s \u201cThe Color Purple,\u201d there are Black men, some of whom haven\u2019t even seen Harris\u2019 bloody revenge fantasy, who are hopping mad because Brown\u2019s character isn\u2019t \u201ca good Black man.\u201d In fact, his character, who set a fire that maimed his wife and twin girls years before the movie begins, is characterized in the trailer as \u201cThe Monster.\u201d<\/p>\n

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After years of not having contact with their father and believing their mother to be dead, daughters Racine (four-time Tony nominee and two-time Tony winner Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson of \u201cKindred\u201d) are summoned by their mother, who demands, \u201cMake your daddy dead. Real dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Instagram, the rapper Waka Flocka Flame amplified a post from a Black man who pointed at the words \u201cmake your daddy dead\u201d on the movie poster and said, \u201cYou will never see white movies like this.\u201d But in a movie whose driving force is revenge, there is a white movie it\u2019s like: Quentin Tarantino\u2019s \u201cKill Bill,\u201d which, coincidentally, also had Fox in its cast.<\/p>\n

To be clear, there have been Black men vocally supporting Harris\u2019 film, adapted from her award-winning stage play.\u00a0 Comedian Kevin Fredericks, better known as Kev on Stage, is one of those supporters.\u00a0But there have been others online calling for a boycott of the movie and everybody involved with it, including Brown.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love to surprise people as much as possible,\u201d Brown told Rolling Out about his decision to play a man who has done a monstrous thing. He said he chose to do the movie mainly because \u201cI love Black women, and I love seeing Black women win. I thought this was an incredibly creative script, something different and new, and I think that we, as a community, have been asking for creative and new stories, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cI also love the idea that Black women get a chance to be messy in this film, like hella messy. I feel like oftentimes we\u2019re asked, in many stories, to be voices of reason, sort of the sensible side component of a larger story, and that\u2019s not the case in this. That is exciting to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as to his character, he said, \u201csomebody has to drive the bus in the Rosa Parks story.\u201d Even though he\u2019s the antagonist, he said, \u201cI believe in the bigger story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, Essence magazine cited a 2017 statistic that only 7% of Black women in the U.S. date or marry men who aren\u2019t Black.\u00a0And NBC News reported in 2024 that Black women are six times more likely to be killed than white women, and quoted statistics showing that \u201c45% of Black women experienced stalking, physical and sexual violence in their lifetimes, and an estimated 51% of Black female adult homicides were related to intimate partner violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

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These are hard, disturbing facts, and as much as some men online may express worry about the historical images of Black men on film and, as one sociology Ph.D. student put it, \u201chow histories of racist caricatures of violent and dangerous Black men laid ideological groundwork to justify lynching and oppression,\u201d some of us Black women are left wondering why so many are expressing anger at the mother\u2019s instruction to her daughters to avenge her and not so much at the violence that the Black man inflicted on his family.<\/p>\n

Why is it wrong to acknowledge that some Black men have been violent with Black women? We just got reminders of that in two especially shocking crimes in recent weeks. Justin Fairfax, the former lieutenant governor of Virginia, murdered his wife, Cerina Fairfax, before he killed himself.\u00a0 And police say a man in Shreveport, Louisiana, killed eight children (seven of them his own) and shot his wife and his apparent girlfriend. Those crimes are as monstrous as the crime Brown\u2019s character commits in the film.<\/p>\n

A male colleague who hasn\u2019t seen \u201cIs God Is\u201d asked if it presented any context as to why<\/em> Brown\u2019s character was so violent. He explained that because of the trauma of white supremacy, Black men often took their frustrations out on those closest to them, their women.<\/p>\n

Is the existence of white supremacy supposed to mean Black women can\u2019t express\u00a0their<\/em>\u00a0rage? Can Black women characters not plot revenge against a Black male character who has burned and disfigured them? In a studio-held news conference moderated by Rotten Tomatoes awards editor Jacqueline Coley, who\u2019s also a Black woman, Harris told her that she \u201chad to get free\u201d and \u201cstop trying to create the story I thought I was allowed to make\u201d as a Black woman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIs God Is\u201d is a vision of Black women written and directed by a Black woman, green-lit by Orion Pictures President Alana Mayo, a Black woman, and produced by Black women Tessa Thompson and \u201cZola\u201d director-screenwriter Janicza Bravo.<\/p>\n

And isn\u2019t it about damn time Black women get to be human and flawed too, without being blamed for not protecting the men who harmed them and their children? Asked at that news conference what she wanted the audience to take away from her film, Harris said: \u201cThat Black women and girls are to be loved and taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Not unlike the controversy that emerged when Danny Glover played Mister in the screen adaptation of \u201cThe Color Purple,\u201d Sterling K. Brown is being criticized for his role in \u201cIs God Is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":84,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nSterling K. 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