The Evolution of Blackness, from The Birth of a Nation to Black Panther: A Study on the Changing Representation of African Americans in American Cinema

“I don’t want a Black history month. Black history is American History.”Morgan FreemanThe debates over race and illustration of Black people in films have been highly contentious for centuries now. Throughout history, Blacks have mostly been viewed and stigmatized as troublemakers, incapables, intellectually challenged, inferior, lazy and irrational, amongst the many different humiliating labels they have attached to them. The portrayal of blacks has changed in many ways over the years in cinema. The treatments in cinema have changed and nowadays the filmmakers have started treating black cinema as a category, or a representation of the black experience, and not as a visible negotiation between film as art and the discursiveness of race. The paper is a trial to discuss the changing dimensions of blackness in American cinema.