Director Aleshea Harris’ first movie, “Is God Is,” which was released in theaters Friday, has familiar stars, including Vivica A. Fox, Erika Alexander and Janelle Monáe. But it’s the movie’s 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’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” there are Black men, some of whom haven’t even seen Harris’ bloody revenge fantasy, who are hopping mad because Brown’s character isn’t “a good Black man.” 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 “The Monster.”
His character, who set a fire that maimed his wife and twin girls years before the movie begins, is characterized in the trailer as “The Monster.”
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 “Kindred”) are summoned by their mother, who demands, “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.”
On Instagram, the rapper Waka Flocka Flame amplified a post from a Black man who pointed at the words “make your daddy dead” on the movie poster and said, “You will never see white movies like this.” But in a movie whose driving force is revenge, there is a white movie it’s like: Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” which, coincidentally, also had Fox in its cast.
To be clear, there have been Black men vocally supporting Harris’ film, adapted from her award-winning stage play. Comedian Kevin Fredericks, better known as Kev on Stage, is one of those supporters. But there have been others online calling for a boycott of the movie and everybody involved with it, including Brown.
“I love to surprise people as much as possible,” 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 “I 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?”
He added, “I also love the idea that Black women get a chance to be messy in this film, like hella messy. I feel like oftentimes we’re asked, in many stories, to be voices of reason, sort of the sensible side component of a larger story, and that’s not the case in this. That is exciting to me.”
But as to his character, he said, “somebody has to drive the bus in the Rosa Parks story.” Even though he’s the antagonist, he said, “I believe in the bigger story.”
Last year, Essence magazine cited a 2017 statistic that only 7% of Black women in the U.S. date or marry men who aren’t Black. And NBC News reported in 2024 that Black women are six times more likely to be killed than white women, and quoted statistics showing that “45% 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.”
I also love the idea that Black women get a chance to be messy in this film, like hella messy.
sterling k. brown
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, “how histories of racist caricatures of violent and dangerous Black men laid ideological groundwork to justify lynching and oppression,” some of us Black women are left wondering why so many are expressing anger at the mother’s instruction to her daughters to avenge her and not so much at the violence that the Black man inflicted on his family.
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. 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’s character commits in the film.
A male colleague who hasn’t seen “Is God Is” asked if it presented any context as to why Brown’s 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.
Is the existence of white supremacy supposed to mean Black women can’t express their rage? 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’s also a Black woman, Harris told her that she “had to get free” and “stop trying to create the story I thought I was allowed to make” as a Black woman.
“Is God Is” 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 “Zola” director-screenwriter Janicza Bravo.
And isn’t 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: “That Black women and girls are to be loved and taken seriously.”
Ronda Racha Penrice is a veteran film and TV critic and the author of “Black American History For Dummies.” The Chicago native, with deep Mississippi roots, is a longtime Atlanta resident.