Viola Davis is an accomplished woman in popular culture who is known for her progressive ideologies and advocacy work. The dedication and passion she clearly harbors for her role as an influential actress gifted with an elevated platform has guided her to inspire millions to participate in important cultural and social conversations. Davis actively embraces opportunities to speak about racial and gender (in)equalities impacting not just her field of work but in our normal everyday lives as well. Her profound empathy has led her to become a philanthropist, advocate, and feminist. She is acutely aware of her own privileged position and strives to fight for those who have been silenced and marginalized. For years, Davis has been one of the boldest and loudest voices when it comes to speaking out about social issues afflicting all respects of life. And through the confident and intelligent manner in which she presents herself as a woman of color in pop culture, she has urged many minorities to be proud of their own identities and challenge the societal gender and racial norms that seek to diminish their voices. “You can’t be hesitant about who you are,” Davis said, adding that being who you are is truly the privilege of the lifetime.
Davis’s testimony is one of abject poverty. Born in 1965, Davis was one of the 17 million kids in America who didn’t know where the next meal was coming from (Graaf). She was the second youngest out of six children from a working-class family living in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She sacrificed her own childhood for food and grew up in immense shame (Graaf). She had stolen food, jumped into garbage bins in search of something to eat, and befriended kids whose mother cooked 3 meals a day (Graaf). In spite of that, Davis says that she was lucky enough to be a “geek” - a trait that enabled her to get into Rhode Island College and later Julliard Performing School of Performing Art (Graaf). It took her years to process the effect her traumatic past has had on her, but eventually, she managed to turn it into a driving force to advocate for those who are marginalized.
Davis does not try to hide her troubled upbringing. Instead, she used it as a constant reminder for herself that there are people out there who are suffering the same or worse fate that she had growing up. Her experience with poverty has truly made her understood the gravity of childhood hunger in America and has moved her to become an advocate for two national campaigns aimed at ending the epidemic: Hunger Is and No Kid Hungry. Besides that, Davis is also an advocate for the Rape Foundation which provides medical treatment, counseling and legal aid to sexual assault victims at its Rape Treatment Center and Stuart House (Cohen). She spoke about how her sister has been sexually assaulted when she was 8 years old at a corner store aisle, and all the police did was to ask the perpetrator to pay $10 per month (Cohen). The store owner’s response was this: “He does that to all the girls” (Cohen). The rapist can move on, Davis said, but the person who is left behind has to pay over, and over, and over again. Her capacity to empathize made Davis realized the influence her high-profile has on society, and she in turn lent her voice to these important conversations that are often ignored.
Perhaps the most defining moment in Viola Davis’s career is when she became the first African American woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress for her work on How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM). It was an emotional moment not only for Davis herself. Kerry Washington and Taraji P. Henson who were in the audience with tears in their eyes knew as well as Davis that this win meant more than just recognition for her brilliant acting, it was an affirmation that women of color were carving their own space in pop culture whether you like it or not. Davis hits the mark when she says, “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.” She knows that one simply cannot win an Emmy when there are just no roles for them to play. Many question why she would bring race into her winning speech, but they fail to realize that Davis’s career has been largely defined by her skin color, sometimes even against her own will. Since she was young, the one thing Davis was sure about was her identity as a black woman. This conviction will be reflected in all the roles she would go on to portray, and it is also what made her recognized that institutions like Julliard are not ready to accommodate the experiences of women of color. Davis says that Julliard tried to make her into “a small, white woman” by offering her roles about white characters to play in theatre (Wallace). She couldn’t see herself in any of them.
Viola Davis is a feminist. She has long since been a champion for overlooked women both in real life and through the fictional characters she plays. During her powerful speech at the Women’s March, she stood with arms at her waist as if she was the most confident woman in the crowd and called for the inclusion of all marginalized communities. “I am aware of all the women who are still in silence." With these words, Viola Davis established herself as a significant figure in pop culture who possessed an admirable degree of cultural awareness. She openly acknowledged that while it was easy for her to avoid being labeled as a “sexual assault survivor” now that she was an “award-winning actress,” other women did not have this privilege (Carlin). Davis promoted intersectional feminism when she declared that she was giving voice to those women who were “faceless,” “don’t have the money,” “the constitution,” “the images,” and “the confidence” (Carlin). She was one of us before she became a celebrated actress, and that was what made her words sound much more credible, especially to women of color. They see her as one of them, and she does not hesitate to cross the line to stand beside them.
Davis is not interested in being perfect. Perhaps one of the most empowering aspects of Davis’s presence in pop culture is “her image as a self-assured Blackwoman who seems to embrace her Blackness” (Sobande). There’s one scene in HTGAWM where her character, Annalise Keating, decides to take off her wig and makeup after an exhausting day at work. It’s a scene that exposes Keating’s vulnerabilities and presents “a more honest representation of beauty than the airbrushed actresses we are used to see on-screen” (McDermott). It turns out that Davis had specifically requested for this scene to be included in the show. “I wanted to see who [black women] are before we walk out the door in the morning and put on a mask of acceptability,” Davis elaborates (McDermott). With this performance, Davis addresses the pressure society has imposed on women of color to look “classically beautiful” (Sobande). This pressure no longer works on her, but back in 2014, but she admitted that there was a time she did not wear her natural hair out because she was so desperate for people to think that she was beautiful. Davis’s insistence on going sans wig not only in the show but in real life as well translates to her desire to represent the authenticity of being a black woman in the public eye. It also symbolizes her efforts to develop her celebrity image of a self-empowered black woman. Steve McQueen, the director of Widows, believes that Davis’s power lies in her depth for vulnerability as well. “She’s shameless,” he says. “That’s why she resonates with so many people” (Wallace).
Annalise Keating is celebrated as one of the most complex black women in television history and applauded for her “unflinching representation of Blackness” (Gupta). Her name is often mentioned alongside Olivia Pope from Scandal, played by Kerry Washington, who also works as a morally ambiguous attorney. When Davis was cast as Annalise Keating, she was 50 years old and definitely did not possess a size 2 body type. This is an outright contradiction to the issue of ageism we’ve read about in class. Davis is owning her age and doing nothing to hide her “decaying body.” It’s not new to have women in central roles on television shows, but it is noteworthy when that woman is not portrayed as a likable one. Keating is a bisexual black woman who is entangled in a constant struggle with alcohol abuse. Thus, the greatest achievement of Keating’s characterization is that she is able to represent not just women of color, but the LGBT community and people who suffer from alcoholism as well. However, Keating’s portrayal has been deemed controversial by many critics who also accuse her of conforming to many traditional and negative stereotypes of black women. For instance, Keating has been said to fit the stereotypical depiction of “the Mammy” character that dates back to slavery in the South for being an “all-knowing, all seeing, all hearing and all understanding” figure in the show (Toms-Anthony). Other examples include the “angry black woman” stereotype (Toms-Anthony). That accusation is not exactly unfounded, since Keating is indeed a cunning liar, an efficient manipulator, and a criminal in the show. But others point out that the act of stigmatizing Keating just because of her questionable actions is adhering to the double standards society has imposed on male and female antiheroes. It’s unfair to dismiss Keating’s antihero qualities as stereotypical writing when white characters like Walter White on “Breaking Bad” are allowed to embody them and be praised for it (Terell). What Davis’s portrayal of Annalise Keating has achieved is breaking through the one-dimensional and model citizen tropes minorities often fall victim to in storytelling (Gupta). She cries, grieves, laughs, and lashes out just like all her white counterparts would. She is a constant reminder that respectability politics would never give us an accurate representation of any minority groups in pop culture (Gupta). All in all, Annalise Keating undoubtedly pushes for the representation of marginalized communities and subverts the sexist trope of submissive female characters (Gupta).
Davis is compared with a lot of celebrities of her stature in terms of talent and influence. And one person she has been held in the same regard most times is Meryl Streep. In fact, Davis herself has given some of her brutally honest opinions about being called the ‘Black Meryl Streep.’ The truth is this: she does indeed have a career that is comparable to not just Meryl Streep’s but Julianne Moore’s and Sigourney Weaver’s (Byrne). They walk the same path as her, but somehow Davis is still nowhere near them, “not as far as money, not as far as job opportunities, nowhere close to it” (Byrne). The thing that separates Davis from her white peers in getting equal pay and recognition is the intersectionality between race and gender. And she knows it when she demands this issue to be addressed. Switching to the music scene, Janelle Monáe’s career looks to be identical to Davis’s at first glance: she’s a highly acclaimed actress and has received 8 Grammy nominations for her work as a singer and rapper. But there’s one thing that differs the two of them: Monáe identifies herself as bisexual (Brammer). This difference is significant because it adds another layer to the marginalization Monáe would most likely receive as a queer black woman in America. Thankfully, Monáe is not backing down anytime soon. She’s been a constant inspiration for the LGBT community for years now, and she’s not going to stop.
Davis’s co-star Aja Naomi King’s impression of her was that of absolute awe. King claims that every time Davis makes a win, “it feels like success for all of us because here’s the face of this beautiful, tall, striking, dark-skinned, natural hair- wearing black woman who is basically saying, ‘I dare you to tell me no.’” (Wallace). And Davis is cognizant of the responsibility she bears as an icon of representation and diversity. In an interview with the New York Times, Davis was asked to list three personal and professional challenges that have influenced her career. The first is the difficulty in finding great roles that she feels are worthy of her potential and talent and the second is always having to prove her ability. The third is responsibility. She confesses that the weight she felt for being the “great black female hope for women of color” has been a real struggle, especially when her own life hasn’t been the kindest to her (Murphy). Be that as it may, she still chooses to “take the role of leadership” and establishes herself as just the right kind of hope women of color are looking for (Murphy). But that doesn’t mean that Davis’s career has been a smooth sail. There are roles she had done and regretted. One of the roles is Abileen Clark from The Help. It earned her an Oscar, but in retrospect, she feels like the movie is not ready at all to tell the whole truth about racism. And despite the attention The Help was getting, Davis thinks that it “wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard” (Murphy).
Davis’s somber admittance shows us that she is still learning and growing. She never seeks to claim that she has learned everything there is to know about intersectional feminism or gender equality. She continues to explore diverse roles that embody her ideologies and dismantle any stereotypical norms that have been attached to her identity as a woman of color. This intelligent and empowering actress has done more than just demanding equality for race and gender; she has turned the challenges she had faced as a black woman into opportunities to better herself. If we are to reflect Davis’s gendered presence using one of Gilmore’s terms, we will find ‘intersectionality’ to be the most suitable choice. The intersectionality of gender, class, and race all have been important elements in shaping Davis’s character today, and she’s more than proud to be given the power to fight for those who are voiceless and whose experiences are defined by intersectionality just like hers.
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