FEBRUARY 8, 2024 / LOISLANE5496 / EDIT
By Nadia Johnson
Our sister Mo’Nique has been dropping truth bombs on the internet. In her most recent interview with Shannon Sharp on Club Shay Shay she brings to light a lot of the issues that black actors and actresses are having in Hollywood and how we as a people are continually holding ourselves back by allowing gatekeepers to keep our follow brothers and sisters in check.
Mo’Nique is not one to shy away from controversy or scandal when it comes to standing up for what is right. Something that actress Taraji P. Henson is now acting upon in the fight to get equal pay. As you may all remember Taraji P. Henson was in the remake of The Color Purple, which was a flop at the box office of 2023. It was in recent interviews that Taraji was doing in promoting The Color Purple that she was asked “Why does she work so hard?” and the answer was because she needed to to survive. Now this comes as a surprise to many of her fans and people in general, because we think that someone who has as many awards and box-office hits and who has been in the game for as long as she has been in the game would have the wealth that went all with the fame. However, Taraji gave a rear look into how things truly work in Hollywood. In that interview in which she was in tears, she stated that she not only almost walked away from The Color Purple because the pay was too low, but that it had been over ten years since she had received a raise in her paycheck.
Now, let us go back to 2009 when MO’Nique was also starring in an Oprah Winfrey production. The name of that production was Precious, in which Mo’Nique won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Everything was fine with MO’Nique with the movie Precious wrapped because she had fulfilled all of the contractual obligations and she decided that she was going to spend time with her family. Most of us would say ok, she did what they paid her to do and she has every right to take time off and spend it with her family. However, this is where the controversy starts with MO’Nique, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and Lee Daniels. MO’Nique stated in the Club Shay Shay interview that she was approached by the powers that be to promote Precious overseas for free. Now this was a problem for MO’Nique because she is the hope of the black slave, which means she does not work for free and to ask a woman who at the time had young children with bills to pay to work for free is insulting. When she turned down the offer to promote the movie overseas for free, it started a 10-year dry spell in her career. According to Mo’Nique, Tyler Perry started to tell people in Hollywood that Mo’Nique was hard to work with, which to say that about a black woman in Hollywood is the kiss of death. These statements that were made by Perry and even Lee Daniels caused Mo’Nique to be blackballed in Hollywood. So even winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress would not be enough to pull her out of the hole that was dug for her in Hollywood.
The attacks did not stop there, for many people in the business started blaming her husband for her career tanking and not the fact that she was blackballed by powerful black Titians in the business for not working for free. So when Taraji started sounding the alarm over how she had not been paid what she was worth and how she had to fight for better pay from Oprah Winfrey should show us that sometimes when people get out of the bottom of the barrow, as we say in the black community, they forget that they are supposed to help more of their brothers and sisters to get out with them and not become a gatekeeper, which is something else that MO’Nique brought up in the interview.
According to Mo’Nique and other black entertainers like Katt Williams, some gatekeepers are put at the gates to make sure only so many black and minority actors and actresses get through to the promised land. One of the examples that she brought up was Kevin Hart. Now she said that Kevin Hart did help her and her family when they needed it and she gave the money back with interest. However, when she approaches him to do a show with her he says that he would because he saw her as his mother. Now in the black community when a man says that you are like his mother that means that he will take care of you and that you don’t have to worry about a thing. In essence, your word is your bond. So to her surprise, Kevin had a Caucasian manager who was not interested in working with MO’Nique. When MO’Nique called Kevin to address the issue about what his manager told her he would not be working with her. He told her that he would talk to his manager and get it straightened out and that was the last she heard from him. Now I know what you are thinking and that is the manager works for Kevin not Kevin working for the manager. So when Kevin told the manager that he was going to work with MO’Nique then that should have been that and if he didn’t like it then he should have been fired. However, this was not the case, for instead of standing beside his decision he decided to let corporate Hollywood dictate who he should and should not work with regardless if he told them that he would work with them.
This is the type of cowardice that MO’Nique is talking about when it comes to us standing beside and up for each other in Hollywood. Too many of us allow our fellow black entertainers to fall from grace, be stolen from, or blackballed just to get the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. When if we would stand up beside each other instead of getting the crumbs that fall from the master’s table we can both be sitting at the master’s table as equal partners and create our own master’s table. I think that later is more powerful than anything that corporate Hollywood could come up with, don’t you?
Happy Black History Month
