Why I’m Telling Stories the Industry Refuses to Show Erased, Twisted, and Sold Back to Us For most of Hollywood history, Black stories were either erased or twisted to fit someone else’s agenda. In the early 1900s, white actors wore blackface to portray us as buffoons—unintelligent, lazy, clownish. Those portrayals didn’t just block Black actors from the screen, they branded us with caricatures that still echo today.   When Black performers finally did get roles, they were often boxed into one-dimensional archetypes: the maid, the gangster, the absent father. Hattie McDaniel made history as the first Black actor to win...