3.1.26 - Trailblazers of the Silver Screen: How Red Wing, Tsuru Aoki, and Eslanda Goode Robeson Inspire Us, 100 Years On
Published 7 days ago • 24 min read
Trailblazers of the Silver Screen
In just a couple of weeks, on March 15, the film industry gathers for the 98th Annual Academy Awards. I'm excited to see how many statues Ryan Coogler's Sinners will take away; though there are many other fine films I've watched, that movie really encapsulated and celebrated the Black American experience in a way that took my breath away (okay also the vampires took my breath away... ! That is soooo not my genre, and that is part of the brilliance of this movie, that I still loved it so much.)
Personally, I remember Michael B. Jordan when he played the teenager "Reggie" on my favorite childhood (and adult) soap: All My Children, so watching his performance as the twin brothers Smoke and Stack made me feel happy but also pretty old... (sure, write me to tell me who your favorite soap opera characters were... I'm here for it!)
But seriously, let's talk about the four main women characters in this film for a minute, and how "Brave Sis-esque" they are: Wunmi Mosaku's Annie, who represented such deep Diasporic-African spiritual knowledge and tradition, Jayme Lawson as the passionate and irresistible Pearline, Li Jun Li's portrayal of Grace Chow's cross-racial fluidity and solidarity, and of course Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary, a woman embracing racial borderlines and refusing to be boxed-in (after all, race was a construct designed by colonists and conquerors to justify their plunder).
Jayme Lawson, Hailee Steinfeld, Winmi Mosaku, and Li Jun Li
I love to celebrate these traits.
And while One Battle After Another is probably not my personal cup of tea, I was thrilled to see and hear Teyana Taylor's powerful Golden Globes speech, where she tearfully encouraged young Black girls to reach for their highest aspirations.
Let's also shout out Chloé Zhao, nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamnet; Sinners nominees Autumn Durald Arkapa, for Best Cinematography, and Ruth E. Carter (already an Oscar winner and up again for Best Costume Design).And from the world of animation: Domee Shi, up for Best Animated Feature for Elio; and the duo of Maggie Kang and Michelle L.M. Wong, nominated for Best Animated Feature for KPop Demon Hunters. We love to see this Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women shining in the industry!
So, having revelled in this contemporaneity, let's look back in history, as I love to do. I'd like to uplift the fact that Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women have been making a waves on the silver screen for decades—even to the dawn of the film industry. This edition of #SistoryLessons celebrates three trailblazers who used film, performance, storytelling, and activism to both challenge stereotypes and demand their full humanity.
Let's learn a bit about two of the women from my book, Red Wing and Tsuru Aoki, and a third grand inspiration, Eslanda Goode Robeson.
How Red Wing, Tsuru Aoki, and Eslanda Goode Robeson Inspire Us, 100 Years On
Red Wing (also known as "Princess Red Wing"; actual name, Lillian St. Cyr) was the first Native American woman to star in a silent feature film. She was born in 1884 on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska and attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, during the diabolical 1800s-1970s (!!!) campaign of forced assimilation.
After surviving her personal dehumanizing experience, Lillian moved into the world of live performance and early film, working alongside her husband, actor‑director James Young Deer—formulating what is often called Hollywood’s first Native American “power couple.”
I guess I have to interject with some more recent ethnographic and historical updates... while James did, back in the day, claim to be Winnebago/Ho‑Chunk, this was not true. In 2013, a film historian named Angela Aleiss located his birth, census, military, and death records revealing that he was actually James Young Johnson, a mixed‑race man born in Washington, D.C., with some Native ancestry but also white and Black American roots. Fascinating to ruminate over all of this: it's certain that in early 1900s Hollywood and on the stage, a “romantic” Indian identity could be marketable in those stereotyping Wild West shows and Western films, but a Black man? Forget it. I haven't come across any biographical information detailing how the couple navigated the racial and ethnic color line in their day, but maybe someone will do it and let us know!
Anyway, back to Red Wing. Between about 1908 and the mid‑1920s, she appeared in more than 70 silent films, from shorts like The White Squaw and The Falling Arrow to the hit feature The Squaw Man (Yes I know, the titles are super-cringey... if you have the stomach for it, the film White Fawn's Devotion is available to stream for free), where she did her own stunts and crafted many of her own costumes.
She asserted herself where she could—insisting Native characters be portrayed with dignity, later advising white directors as a cultural consultant and pushing back when scripts reduced Indigenous people to props. And when her film career slowed, Red Wing separated from James and eventually moved to New York City, briefly remarrying a man named Joe Eaglefoot. During this time, she supported herself as an educator‑performer while also moonlighting as a costume designer and later, activist. Lillian helped found what became the American Indian Community House, an urban hub for Native people in the Tri-State (New York–New Jersey–Connecticut) region, and she lent her name and organizing talents to advocacy groups such as the Indian Unity Alliance, which campaigned for the establishment of a national Indian Day and broader recognition of Native cultures.
Let's discuss one of the first Asian actresses to achieve stardom in American cinema, Tsuru Aoki. Born in Tokyo in 1892, she emigrated to the US as a teenager to live with relatives who were themselves involved in theater. She first performed on the stage in Los Angeles, then followed work to New York before returning to California just as the motion picture industry was exploding.
By the mid‑1910s Tsuru had appeared in more than 40 films, often in leading roles, making her arguably the first Asian woman to become a widely recognized star in American silent movies—a decade before Anna May Wong arrived on the scene.
At a time when Asian characters were usually played by white actors in yellowface, Aoki’s presence on screen gave audiences a rare chance to see an Asian woman playing complex, sympathetic leads—even if scripts at that time still trafficked in exoticism and tragedy.
I won't vouch for the quality of these silent movies nor how they have withstood the test of time, but if you'd like to watch one, 1914's The Wrath of the Gods, it streams for free at the Internet Archive.
Aoki often appeared opposite her husband, the celebrated Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, and the couple briefly ran their own production company, where they hired other Japanese performers who would go on to become film stars in Japan. Their movies, including titles like The Dragon Painter, blended romance, Japanese cultural motifs, and Hollywood melodrama, creating a hybrid cinematic language that spoke to audiences on both sides of the Pacific. (Can we point out that dragons are more associated with Chinese culture than Japanese, but back then, very few people cared. Cultural history is never boring!)
Power Couple
Off‑screen, Aoki navigated the racism of early‑20th‑century America, where anti‑Asian laws limited immigration and citizenship, and where miscegenation statutes policed relationships across racial lines, such as even sharing a kiss between an Asian character and a white one. Despite these limits, Tsuru's visibility as a working Asian woman artist challenged the notion that only white actresses could be desirable, heroic, or emotionally deep.
By the late 1920s, talkies had arrived, but Hollywood’s narrow casting mentality actually intensified. Aoki gradually retired from the screen, dedicating herself to raising her and Sessue's three adopted children. By the 1930s, after the family resettled in Japan, she worked as an interpreter for the Asahi newspapers. She made a brief return to the screen with Hayakawa in the 1960 film Hell to Eternity—her first, and only, talkie! (This link sometimes works...)
Reflection: When have you had to push back to carry your authentic truth in the face of someone else’s expectations?
An anthropologist, writer, and activist, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson is far too-often introduced simply as "Paul Robeson’s wife"—but she has her own important role in history. Born into a prominent Black family in Washington, D.C. in 1896, she trained as a chemist, and in fact was the first Black woman to run the pathology laboratory at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital. But she eventually shifted her full-time focus from science to cultural and political work.
Another Power Couple: Eslanda and Paul
In 1921, she married an entertainer named Paul Robeson, most known as a globally celebrated singer, actor, and radical activist who used his artistic fame to fight racism and colonialism around the world. At first, Eslanda was his manager, negotiating contracts and guarding his interests in a segregated entertainment industry that was hostile to Black talent. But over time, she carved out a parallel path as a thinker and global witness, using travel, film, and writing to document anti‑colonial movements around the world.
In the 1930s Eslanda studied anthropology in London with Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of modern fieldwork methods, and in 1936 she and her young son embarked on a months‑long research journey across sub‑Saharan Africa. She visited Senegal, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar, the Belgian Congo and more, filling her journals with observations about race, gender, labor, and everyday life under colonial rule. Those notes became the basis of her groundbreaking 1945 book African Journey, one of the first widely read works to present Africa through the eyes of a Black American woman rather than the white gaze of European explorers or missionaries. In her book, Eslanda urged Black readers in the Americas to take pride in their African heritage. Well before the advent of the US Black Power or African decolonization movements, she insisted that the fight against racism at home was linked to struggles for independence abroad.
Eslanda was also a sharp political commentator. She wrote articles challenging Jim Crow segregation, colonialism, and U.S. foreign policy, and played a leadership role in the Council on African Affairs, an organization that connected African and African‑diaspora activists.
But wait, this is a newsletter edition about movies! Yes, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson had a few important film roles, mostly with Paul: Borderline, a 1930 avant‑garde interracial drama, Big Fella, a 1937 musical drama set in Marseille, and Jericho/Dark Sands, a 1937 WWI desert epic.
Off the screen, it is not surprising that Eslanda's outspokenness placed her under FBI surveillance and eventually played a role in the her and Paul's being blacklisted during the Cold War.
But regardless of this persecution, she refused to recant her criticism of racism and empire. Eslanda spent the rest of her life traveling worldwide and speaking, writing, and lecturing on world affairs and women’s roles in liberation movements. When she died in 1965, she left behind a body of work that anticipated today’s conversations about intersectionality, diaspora, and global solidarity. She was much more than just "a famous somebody's missus"!
Reflection: What big ideas and visions are most important to you?
Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone
In consideration of Red Wing, how do you use your talents to advocate for your community? Write about a time you used your skills for a cause.
Memorializing Tsuru Aoki: How do you bring depth to roles—literal or metaphorical—that only represent the surface of who you are?
If you reflect on the life of Eslanda Robeson, how has seeing more of the world (through travel, study, or stories) changed the way you understand yourself and your people?
HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color
Emulate Red Wing: When have you had to “perform” your identity—and what did you reclaim by doing so on your own terms?
Pay tribute to Tsuru Aoki and imagine a moment when you stepped into a space that expected you to be silent, passive, or ornamental. How did you insist on being fully human, not just a type?
Think about the legacy of Eslanda Robeson and tell a story about a time when connecting with global struggles—whether in another country or another neighborhood—helped you see your own community’s battles in a new light.
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
Celebrating Red Wing, support or participate in a cultural advocacy project. Study early Native actors and activists. Share their stories alongside Hollywood’s canon and name them when you talk about film history.
Thinking of Tsuru Aoki, learn more about the history of Asian women in early cinema. Watch one of Aoki’s surviving films and mention her when you celebrate pioneering performers at awards time.
In honor of Eslanda Robeson, read her book African Journey or some of her other writings on colonialism. This might inspire you to continue uplifting BIPOC women anthropologists, critics, and documentarians who continue her work of linking art, scholarship, and liberation
More on Their Lives
Red Wing (Lillian St. Cyr) (February 13, 1884 - March 13, 1974) Cinematic Trailblazer
Beyond her film roles, Red Wing was a one‑woman creative department: she wrote scenes, designed and sewed her own costumes, worked as a prop maker, and even did her own stunt work on set.
We know that once her Hollywood days drew to a close, she lived independently on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Some might raise an eyebrow at how she supported herself: crafting regalia and “Indian” costumes for toy stores, theater producers, Native performers, and, yes, even white fraternal lodges dealing in appropriation and fetishization.
Sometimes, however, people work in sneaky ways to effectuate change. Lillian believed the trinkets and costumes she designed also served as a way to help Native performers exert some control over their own image. And for the white clients, she considered that Native-made decorations were at least baby steps towards liberation
Further, Lillian put her money into culture-building, as mentioned, helping seed the American Indian Community House, campaigning for a National Indian Day, and publicly advocating that Indigenous presence had to be part of the very heart of American public life.
A century later, archivists are still discovering her credits and correspondence, reminding us that a Ho‑Chunk woman from Nebraska had power moves well before it was the norm: in Hollywood and beyond.
Tsuru Aoki (August 9, 1892 – October 18, 1961) - Power Lady in Power Couple
Tsuru Aoki came from theater people. Her aunt and uncle were the theater artists Sadayakko (Sada Yacco) and Otojiro/“Otto” Kawakami, owners of the Imperial Theatre of Japan. They helped usher women back onto the stage after centuries of bans, clearly setting a precedent for their niece to aim high. When she immigrated to the U.S. in 1903, she got her start in the Los Angeles Japanese‑language theater scene, but it wasn't long before producers in the burgeoning cinema world took note of her poise and regality.
By the 1910s Tsuru was a headliner, in films like The Dragon Painter, where she portrayed a controlled, interior style of acting that contrasted sharply with the exaggerated gestures of many early silent‑film stars.
Her husband, Sessue Hayakawa deserves a special shout out: he was a veritable cross-cultural heartthrob, one of Hollywood’s first major male sex symbols. The industry promoted him as a “broodingly handsome” matinee idol and his most intense fan base was actually white women—this during a time when anti-Asian discrimination was law on the books, and despite the fact that his characters were often written through racist, “forbidden lover” stereotypes.
Beyond the fetishistic fandom surrounding him, Sessue and Tsuru remained a tight-knit marital and professional team, co-founding Haworth Pictures, where they built vehicles for themselves and other Japanese and Japanese American performers and technicians, effectively creating an early transpacific film pipeline decades well before the term even existed. (Their 1922 silent film, The Power of Love, is purported to be the first 3D film ever made! I'd love to find it, but there seems to be no existing copy left, alas!)
Eslanda Goode Robeson - December 15, 1895 - December 13, 1965 — Much More Than “His Wife”
Eslanda Goode Robeson‘s life and travels spanned the historiography of the 20th century: colonial Africa, Nazi‑era Berlin, the Spanish Civil War frontlines, newly socialist China, the early meetings of the United Nations, and the Civil Rights movement. Trained as a scientist, she originally ran a hospital chemistry laboratory before dedicating herself to politics, culture studies, and de-colonialism. Her 1945 book African Journey combined field notes, photographs, and political analysis at a time when Black women were rarely published as global experts.
She was of the same generation of two other bold Black women anthropologists and intellectuals: Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, though there is no public record of their hanging out together (another compelling story idea! See end note.)
Eslanda definitely crafted husband Paul Robeson’s global image, helping him move out of his original career in law (where he experienced serious discrimination) into the performing arts. She stepped in as his manager, shaping how he appeared on stage and screen, and brokering deals for dignified, politically meaningful roles. She alap authored an early biography of him that framed him not just as an entertainer but as an intellectual and race leader.
Paul’s fame grew, as did his outspoken support for labor struggles, anti‑lynching campaigns, anti‑colonial movements, and socialist causes. His trips to the Soviet Union, many with Eslanda, became central to both his politics and his public image. Beginning with a 1934 visit, he contrasted the dignity and respect he felt there with the racism and violence of Jim Crow America, saying it was the first place he was treated fully as a human being.
Over repeated visits in the 1930s and 1940s, the couple came to view the USSR as a crucial ally for oppressed and colonized peoples. Paul used his star platform to publicly praise the Soviet anti‑racist and anti‑colonial ideals and refusing to denounce the country, even as reports of Stalinist repression mounted. This love for “Russia” and its promise, intertwined with his broader leftist politics, later made them prime targets for hostility from the United States government. They were surveilled and ultimately blacklisted, with their passports revoked.
Through it all, Eslanda continued to write her own columns, give radio talks, and help lead the Council on African Affairs, one of the era’s most important Black internationalist organizations. Their one son, Paul Robeson Jr. (1927–2014) became a journalist, organizer, and left activist (including years in the Communist Party USA), working in media and political movements around Black freedom, labor, and anti-colonial struggles. He became the primary archivist and interpreter of his father’s life, writing books, advising films and exhibitions, and preserving Paul Robeson’s legacy as a radical intellectual and artist. Sadly, he did not devote the same energy to his mother's activities and archives.
We are glad biographers like Barbara Ransby, institutions such as the Paul Robeson House & Museum, and projects like the Zinn Education Project and National Park Service profiles have “re‑centered” Eslanda as a major Black feminist intellectual in her own right, showing how her ideas about diaspora and solidarity anticipated today’s conversations about intersectionality and global freedom struggles.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
Hollywood loves to celebrate itself, and in March, things go into overdrive. But the fact that Red Wing, Tsuru Aoki, and Eslanda Robeson can still feel like “discoveries” in 2026 shows us how much the industry—and remember, Hollywood plays an outsized role in crafting the American psyche around race, gender, and other identities—has centered white, Western, and male perspectives.
Representation is more than just vamping on the red carpet; it’s about whose imagination shapes the stories, whose story and humanity is considered "deserving" of being shared, whose labor is rightfully compensated, and even who is remembered once the lights are unplugged. And this is a key reason why I produce these Brave Sis Project #SistoryLessons every two weeks: to help us de‑center default whiteness and to insist that Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women central creators, thinkers, and visionaries who need to be celebrated and remembered.
So, if you watch this year’s Academy Awards, maybe you'll imagine nimble Red Wing, first lady of Asian American cinema Tsuru Aoki, and global political thinker Eslanda Robeson, along with others who have brought inspiration and guidance in the century since. And let's also invigorate ourselves to ensure future trailblazers don’t have to wait a hundred years to be honored.
Speaking of the Academy Awards...
Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women have been central to film history from the beginning, but Hollywood and the Oscars have usually treated them as exceptions, not the norm. For every early breakthrough, history counters with a blatant exclusions.
Hattie and her award
Let's go back to 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Oscar, taking Best Supporting Actress for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind. It was a real vindication for a woman who had been barred from the film’s 1939 Atlanta premiere because Georgia’s segregation laws and the studio’s cowardice kept Black people out of the theater altogether. Her co-star Clark Gable planned to boycott the Atlanta world premiere, but Hattie persuaded him to attend.
When Oscars night came along, Hattie was forced to sit at a small segregated table at the back of the Coconut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel; when her name was called, she had to walk a long distance through a sea of white faces tas she was not allowed to sit up front with her co‑stars.
Even in death, racism followed her: the Hollywood cemetery where many of her white peers were buried refused her request to be interred there; she was finally honored with a cenotaph on the grounds decades later. Yes, I'd say Hattie's treatment was despicable, but she was the first Oscar winner, and that's something to celebreate. Here are some others we wish to note:
In 1936, Merle Oberon was nominated for Best Actress for The Dark Angel; only decades later was she widely recognized as the first woman of South Asian descent to be nominated, since the studio hid her mixed‑race parentage (white British father, mother with roots in what is now Sri Lanka) and invented a Tasmanian white backstory. To survive in an industry that refused to make a visibly mixed‑race South Asian woman a romantic lead, she changed her name, softened her accent, and lightened her complexion.
She did not win the Oscar, but Dorothy Dandridge's 1955 nomination for Best Actress, for Carmen Jones was a watershed moment. She became the first Black woman nominated for this award. Her career and life ended in tragedy, but her moment is one that opened doors for generations of Black actresses who name her as an inspiration—as celebrated later in the 1999 HBO biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, starring future first Black-woman winner of the statuette, Halle Berry.
Miyoshi Umeki became, in 1958, the first Asian person to win an acting Oscar, taking Best Supporting Actress for Sayonara, a romantic drama about U.S. soldiers and Japanese women in postwar Japan. A Japanese immigrant playing a Japanese character in a Hollywood film steeped in stereotyped "Orientalist" tropes, she nonetheless brought quiet dignity and emotional depth to a love story that both challenged and reinforced taboos around interracial relationships.
The Indomitable Rita Moreno – In 1962, she became the first Puerto Rican—and the first Latina—Oscar winner, earning Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story. She later joined the tiny circle of EGOTs, adding a Grammy (for The Electric Company cast album), a Tony (The Ritz), and multiple Emmys (The Muppet Show, The Rockford Files), while continuing to mentor younger artists and speak bluntly about racism and typecasting in Hollywood.
Jump forward to 1991, when Whoopi Goldberg won Best Supporting Actress for Ghost (1991), after an earlier unsuccessful Best Actress nomination for The Color Purple in 1985. She also holds Emmys (including a Daytime Emmy for cohosting The View and one as producer of Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel), a Grammy for Whoopi Goldberg: Original Broadway Show Recording (1986), an Oscar for Ghost, and a Tony as a producer of Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002), making her the first Black woman to achieve EGOT status.
Halle Berry – In 2002, she became the first Black woman—and the first woman of color—to win Best Actress, for Monster’s Ball. Through tears she dedicated the moment to “every nameless, faceless woman of color” before and after her, heartbreakingly, she has openly spoken about how, even after this historic win, she said she “was still Black the next morning,” and directors questioned whether casting a Black woman in certain roles would make a film “too Black” or hurt overseas sales, proving that the industry’s racism outlived the applause.
In 2007, Jennifer Hudson won Best Supporting Actress for Dreamgirls, delivering a breakout turn as Effie White that showcased her powerhouse voice and emotional range. Her win, for a debut film role, is a rare Oscar coronation, yet her trajectory still reflects how Black women’s star turns are often framed within musical or suffering‑centric narratives rather than a wide spectrum of leads. Jennifer is also an EGOT! (And if you are on Instagram, the spirit tunnel tributes to her talk show guests is the guaranteed smile of the day!)
Mo’Nique really continued the suffering-role trend in the 2009 film Precious, for which she won the 2010 Best Supporting Actress award. She delivered an unflinching, deeply unsettling portrayal of an abusive mother that confronted audiences with generational trauma.
Three Oscars later (2012) Octavia Spencer won Best Supporting Actress for The Help for her vivid performance as Minny Jackson, a maid in a story centered on white women’s awakening—and Black women's defiance. We cheer her win, but also lament how often the Academy honors Black women whose roles merely orbit the narrative trajectory of the white protagonist.
In 2014, Lupita Nyong’o took Best Supporting Actress for 12 Years a Slave, bringing harrowing grace and vulnerability to the role of Patsey, an enslaved woman subjected to sexual violence. The actress, born of Kenyan parentage but raised in Mexico, embraced how her win became a landmark for dark‑skinned Black beauty and African talent. At the same time, the role continued to reinforce the Academy’s pattern of recognizing Black women in suffering narratives—this one, slavery.
Tell me that we don't love the 2017 Best Supporting Actress win for Viola Davis in Fences—especially since she had lost the nod in 2009 in Doubt and 2012 in The Help. In her Fences speech she spoke about honoring “ordinary people,” clearly stating that Black women’s lives belong at the narrative center, not just in supporting, sacrificial roles. Viola is widely regarded as one of the finest actors of her generation. And she's an EGOT too!
If Beale Street Could Talk is a beautiful quiet film that netted Regina King a 2019 Oscar in the Best Supporting Actress category. It honored her portrayal of a Black mother fighting the system for her daughter’s future. In her thank you speech, she uttered some truly "Brave Sis" words: "I am an example of what it looks like when support and love is poured into someone.”
That same year, Ruth E. Carter became the first Black woman to win Best Costume Design, for Black Panther, and she won again for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2023), making her the first Black woman with two Oscars. She is in 2026 nominated for a third Oscar for her work on Sinners, extending her legacy of dressing Black futures and histories in ways that reshape how audiences imagine and revel in Blackness on screen.
In 2021, Youn Yuh‑jung became the first Korean performer to win an acting Oscar with her Best Supporting Actress turn in Minari, playing a sharp, tender grandmother anchoring an immigrant family. Her witty acceptance remarks about mispronunciations and her children highlighted both joy and the long road Asian actresses travel to be recognized as fully human and funny in Hollywood.
That same year, Chloé Zhao received the Best Director Award for Nomadland, and in so doing, she became the first woman of color and only the second woman ever to receive that Oscar. With her quiet, lyrical film about an older white woman living as a modern nomad in the American West, this China-born but US-based filmmaker both expanded what stories a woman of color director could tell at the center of awards season and underscored how rare that recognition still is.
In 2022, Ariana DeBose made history as the first openly queer woman of color to win an acting Oscar, taking Best Supporting Actress for Anita in West Side Story, six decades after Rita Moreno’s win for the same role. Her “there is a place for us” speech framed the moment as proof of possibility for queer Afro‑Latinas, while exposing how long the Academy took to make such a moment possible.
In 2023, Michelle Yeoh’s Best Actress win for Everything Everywhere All at Once made her the first Asian performer to take home an Oscar in a lead acting category. The then-60-year-old's declaration—“Don’t let anybody ever tell you you are past your prime”—turned her genre‑bending role into a rallying cry for older women of color.
Special shout out to Blackfeet and Nez Perce tribe member Lily Gladstone became the first Native American person—and first Native American woman—nominated for Best Actress, in 2024, for Killers of the Flower Moon. She did not win the Oscar, but she did win the Golden Globe that year. (The list of Oscar "runners up" is a much longer list to compile!!)
The 2025 Oscars saw Afro-Latina Zoe Saldaña receive the Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Pérez, becoming the first American of Dominican descent to win an Oscar. Her win continues the pattern of women of color being recognized primarily in supporting roles, even as it marks a milestone for Latine and specifically Dominican‑diaspora visibility on the Academy stage.
Who's next? We'll find out on March 15!
What All This Hollywood Hoopla Means for Us Today
As you see from this long list of Oscar laureates, representation has improved in cinema, and we now see Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latina, and Middle Eastern women winning (not just Oscars, and not just in the US) in craft categories, directing prestige films, leading blockbusters, and also creating and show-running groundbreaking television (Shonda Rimes and Ava DuVernay come quickly to mind, but also I'm thinking of Britain's Michaela Coel, whose limited-run series Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You are genius works, in my opinion... and Robin Thede (if you don't know The Black Lady Sketch Show, please avail yourself of some great humor!)
All this said, “firsts” are still happening in the 2020s, and many more need to come. We are still in an entertainment and representation industry that is disproportionately white, Western, and male.
And you know, my friend, this is why Brave Sis Project continues to de-center default whiteness in all our storytelling and story-sharing. From Hattie to Halle and beyond, we know we are all better off when the winner's circle in all walks of life more accurately represents the cultural and racial kaleidoscope that comprises our society. Let's keep advancing that celebration as we celebrate the genius of their artistry, and in so doing, build new, more inclusive norms.
P.S.: I’m Already Writing a New Book, So I’ll Share this Idea with Someone Else: Brunch with Eslanda, Katherine, and Zora
Here’s the pitch:
Eslanda Goode Robeson an anthropologist, writer, and global freedom activist uses journalism and diplomacy to link Black struggles in the U.S. with anti-colonial movements worldwide. She would be surveilled, have her passport revoked, and be hauled before a Senate committee because her anti-colonial, pro‑Africa politics and writings were deemed subversive. Further, her visibility as a Black woman internationalist alongside her husband Paul Robeson made her a special target of Cold War racism and anti‑communism.
Katherine Dunham, pioneering dancer‑choreographer and anthropologist transformed Black diasporic ritual and movement into a modern dance language while rigorously documenting Caribbean cultures. She would go on to face retaliation from U.S. officials and funders for works like Southland that exposed lynching and racism. This would damage her institutional support and touring possibilities, and she would repeatedly be punished in housing, contracts, and diplomatic standing for insisting on desegregated venues and linking art to anti‑racist activism.
Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist who centered Black Southern vernacular life and folklore as rich, complex intellectual and artistic worlds in their own right. She was the toast of the Harlem Renaissance. While she would not be formally blacklisted, but she was deeply marginalized—dying in poverty with her books out of print—because her Black folk‑centered aesthetic and politically heterodox views alienated both white institutions and segments of Black leadership, contributing to her erasure during her lifetime.
But imagine these three contemporaries, who we are not sure ever met. They modeled a fearless Black women’s intellectual tradition that refused to separate scholarship, art, and political struggle, even when it brought punishment instead of reward. Their individual insistence on Black cultural sovereignty, deep knowledge of everyday people, and global freedom struggles would lay the groundwork for later 20th-century and also today's Black studies, diasporic feminist thought, and literature, and the performing arts, and show us that the most brilliant visionaries shine on well past their time on this Earth.
They meet for brunch at the hip spot Renaissance Harlem, where I definitely want to go next time I'm back in my hometown!