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.”










