What might the actress Constance Wu, the fictional character Tracy Flick and the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old lynched in 1955, have in common, other than the fact they were all featured on the Atlantic Festival’s Ideas Stage last week in DC? You guessed it. They were or are all strong women who overcame trauma and tried to make the world a better place.
Let’s start with Constance Wu, who was being interviewed by Shirley Li, a writer for The Atlantic. Wu was surprisingly open for a movie star (she broke into fame with a leading role in the sitcom Fresh off the Boat and then starred in the hit movie, Crazy Rich Asians). Wu talked about how she was sexually harassed by an Asian-American producer on the sitcom for years until she finally found the courage to tell him off. But when she tweeted in 2019 that she wasn’t happy about the sitcom’s renewal, she was viciously attacked on social media and tried to kill herself.
“The thing that drove me to a suicide attempt was the hatred on social media,” she told Li.
After surviving the suicide attempt, Wu says she went into therapy, and now, the mother of a young child, she has emerged stronger and more in touch with her feelings. After a three-year hiatus, Wu is back on social media to both promote a new memoir, Making a Scene and “to remind people who need to know that there’s help out there.”
Like Wu, Tracy Flick, the fictional character in two of Tom Perrotta’s books, is the target of enormous hostility, particularly when as an overachieving teenager, she tries to run for student council president and the principal of her high school does everything he can to sabotage her candidacy. You may remember the 1999 movie based on Perrotta’s first book, Election, which features Reese Witherspoon as the ambitious young Tracy who tries to play by the old boys’ playbook and fails miserably? I sure do; movie-goers disliked Tracy (as played by Witherspoon) and weren’t unhappy when she fell flat on her face. Perrotta, who was interviewed on The Atlantic’s Ideastage last Friday shortly after Wu, talked about the hostility that greeted Tracy’s candidacy and why he decided to revisit her character in his latest book, Tracy Flick Can’t Win. In the 1990s, “our culture did not have a paradigm for what a female leader should look like,” Perrotta told interviewer Sophie Gilbert, another writer for The Atlantic. “A very unfit male leader won over a very competent female leader.” Hmmm; does that remind you of any recent U.S. Presidential elections?
In his sequel, Perrotta said he was interested in examining not only the arc of feminism in the 21st century (when true equality is still “shimmering” in the distance) but also what happens to a character when she doesn’t achieve her dreams. As a high schooler, Tracy Flick fantasized about becoming the first female President; when we revisit her in Tracy Flick Can’t Win, she is a high school teacher recovering from a failed marriage and trying to figure out where she went wrong. I won’t tell you what happens in the sequel; I just want to point out that she’s another strong woman up against a flawed and sometimes cruel patriarchy.
And that brings me to Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, who was tortured and lynched in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman, and to the woman who directed the upcoming movie of Mamie’s life, Chinonye Chukwe. Chukwe was also interviewed on the Atlantic’s Ideastage last Friday, and she talked about how the film, Till, (due out in October) traces Mamie Till’s journey from a grief-stricken mother to becoming an inspiring activist who made her son’s death into an touchstone for the civil rights movement. Just this year, President Biden signed into law the Emmett Till AntiLynching Act, which finally makes lynching a federal hate crime. (Emmett’s murderers were acquitted in 1955 despite the fact that they openly admitted killing him; they were never brought to justice).
“This is a story imbedded into the fabric of American history,” Chukwe told her interviewer, Vann Newkirk, also a writer for The Atlantic. “It’s still a wound, especially since there’s a movement afoot in several states to erase this history.”
I love the idea of one strong woman, Chinonye Chukwe, telling the story of another strong woman, Mamie Till, who refused to let her grief and the grievous racism of the time get in the way of her mission. I’m looking forward to seeing Till when it is released, and as a woman who has faced her own obstacles, I applaud the Atlantic for shining the spotlight on women who have overcome trauma and hostility to make a difference and still find joy in the world. I’ll let Chukwe have the last word: “As a black woman, there is a lot stacked against me. But that doesn’t take away from the joy and life and laughter that can exist alongside the trauma.”
This blog is also posted on medium.com.
