Should the film-makers behind Nina be concerned about what message they are sending to the broader country? Should they worry about what messages they are sending to black girls in general, and to dark girls in particular? Should the distributor even bother to educate himself on his subject’s life? And we have the twin phantoms of America racism and sexism, which haunted Nina Simone in life, chasing her down in death. We have a distributor who is manifestly ignorant of the subject of his own film. We have a director willing to continue in the unfortunate tradition of “darkening up” black actors. We have a production team that is almost entirely white. Beyond being thick-witted, this is text-book appropriation-actively profiting from an experience while denying the experience actually exists.Īnd so the situation stands. “You think Rosa Parks’ pain was less than Nina’s when she had to endure not sitting on a bus?” he said. Johnson apparently believes Simone was making all of this up.

It’s bad enough to be born black in America, but to be burdened down with the problems within it is too much. What I’m doing is getting rid of the load ’cause I have been just burdened down with all these problems.

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