an based movies are made for white audiences. Because of this, the representations of blacks in the medium of film are almost always white ideas of who black people are, not who they really are.The film The Color Purple has been the center of controversy since it was made in 1985. Many people feel the film is a terrible portrayal of black family life and that it is stereotypical in its depiction of black men as evil and brutal tyrants who imprison and mentally and verbally abuse woman. Consequently, most men despise the film and can not believe that so many women love it. The main purpose of Bobo's article was to find out why black women loved it so much and what they saw as good about the film. What Bobo found out was that though many women loved it, they also saw that there were things inherently wrong with the way black males were portrayed. However, because black females were mostly portrayed in a positive light, the black female respondents felt that the film was good in that respect. According to Bobo, "Black women have demonstrated that they found something useful and positive in the film," (101). The women enjoyed seeing a woman rise up against abuse and take control of her life. They identified with the search for power and their own identity. The Color Purple presented a new type of feminism to black women who were used to seeing black female characters depicted as slaves, maids or mammies. Bobo found that though black women were aware "of the oppression and harm that comes from a negative media history . . .[they] are also aware that their specific experience, as black people, as women in a rigid class/caste state, has never been adequately dealt with in mainstream media," (102). This was the main reason why the women liked the film so much. They were able to take their own past experiences and use those as a basis for their interpretation of the text. In this way, the black women didn't see the film as all bad,...
