France Bans Steve Harvey Blockbuster Movie “Think Like a Man” Due to All-Black Cast, Racial Profiling?

France Bans Steve Harvey Blockbuster Movie "Think Like a Man" Due to All-Black Cast, Racial Profiling?

France bans Steve Harvey blockbuster movie “Think Like a Man,” because of its all-black cast. Um, really? I thought France was a forward-thinking country and not stuck in the dark ages.

Fabienne Flessel at Global Voices reposted an excerpt from a NegroNews Facebook post republished on Martinican blog People Bo Kay offers this as explanation:

Black actor and producer Tyler Perry’s movies are never scheduled in any French movie theaters or are only released in DVDs, even though he has been used to leading the US box-office, as with ‘Why did I get Married’ and ‘For Colored Girls’. The French society acts hypocritically, when it refuses to show movies from black producers who earn millions from conveying a positive message to the African diaspora through their films.

[...]

The French state has had a sociopolitical strategy which favors interracial relationships rather than valuing communities. In the comedy ‘Think like a Man’, the focus is on black couples.

I haven’t seen the movie and I doubt I will see it at a movie theater, thought I may purchase the movie once it comes out on DVD, but that’s not because of the all-black cast. It’s just a matter of placing importance on seeing a film that’s so loathesome in its premise doesn’t factor high for me. Still, we can all relate to some of the characters — mama’s boys, underachievers, take-charge ladies, lazy dudes and players looking for love. But it’s a sad commentary that the movie was banned in France. Black films face an uphill battle on gaining studio funding and even being run-away box office favorites. Though “Red Tails” wasn’t an all-black cast, it was about an all-black unit in the U.S. military — The Tuskegee Airmen — and we saw how hard it was for George Lucas to gain funding for the film, having to put up the money himself.  Racial profiling in the French cinemas? Wow, I wonder if they will show the utterly ridiculous “Three Stooges,” that has one or maybe two black faces.