In her forthcoming memoir, Viola Davis reveals that after being cast in How to Get Away With Murder, her darker complexion saw her beauty and looks scrutinized by other black actors.
The experience is chronicled in a lengthy New York Times profile in which the Oscar, Tony and SAG winner has grappled with racism and colorism throughout her career — everywhere from Juilliard to the Broadway stages to television — both in new interviews as well as in Finding Me : A Memoir, out April 26 from HarperOne, in partnership with Ebony Magazine Publishing.
When it came to the hit ABC series, Davis wrote that she already had a lot of experience with her race and deeper skin tone in the predominantly white industry. But one of her more lasting memories was of getting the role of the sharp, brave and beautiful attorney and law professor Annalize Keating.
Davis revealed that after her casting, a friend came to her after hearing several actors and actresses – all black – say that “she wasn’t pretty enough to pull it off,” according to the Times. The experience was unlike the other colorist, racism and anti-black criticism the then 47-year-old star had to endure because she “couldn’t shake” that feedback.
Her experience in the upcoming film The Woman King, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and based on actual events in the African kingdom of Dahomey in 18 Times. “The Woman King reflected all the things the world told me was limiting: Black women with frizzy, curly hair darker than a paper bag, who were warriors.”
In the memoir, Davis also draws on her childhood experiences of racism, describing an anti-Black assault in third grade — one of many times she returned home in Central Falls, Rhode Island, from a group of about eight or nine boys was hunted. who regularly threw insults, insults, stones and bricks at her.
That day, the group caught them physically, and while some of the boys restrained their arms, the leader of the group — of Cape Verde and black people like them, though he “identified as Portuguese to distinguish himself from African-Americans,” according to the Times — called she’s both ugly and a “black fucking” N-word. When young Davis replied, “You’re black too!” he hit her.
At another point, Davis discussed the impact of anti-Black racism not only within physical communities but also within institutions, including her drama school, Juilliard. The Fences star said she felt trapped after enrolling, “constrained by her strictly Eurocentric approach”. Her time there resulted in her forcing her hair into wigs “that never fit over her pigtails” and listening to white classmates marvel aloud at how good things would have been in the 18th century. “The utterly shameful goal of this workout was clear — to make every aspect of your blackness go away,” she writes.
The Woman King star’s profile also touches on her experiences with an abusive father with alcohol addiction, fertility issues and adoption. Davis shares that her appearance in Seven Guitars for the stage finally allowed her to afford premium medical insurance, which resulted in the removal of nine uterine fibroids and later both a myomectomy to remove 33 fibroids and a hysterectomy, while she was having surgery for an abscessed fallopian tube.