Racial Justice Fellow 2021-23

RHON MANIGAULT-BRYANT: I'm a Black daughter of the American South. I was raised in a little town called Moncks Corner, South Carolina about 30 minutes North of Charleston. I grew up in the low country, the land of the Gullah Geechee, and I'm its descendant. I go by Rhon, a nickname I earned during childhood from my days of romping with my older brother Maurice. I'm the daughter of William Leroy, for whom I'm named, and the late Gwendolyn Avis.  

I'm the granddaughter of Phyllis and of Annie Mae, who when I was [INAUDIBLE] delivered an unforgettable lesson about the power of humility. "Humble pie is meant to be eaten, La Rhonda. Shall I cut you a slice?" She asked.  

As a child I was drawn to stories and storytelling. I lost myself in books, and television, and movies. Yet even then, I couldn't help but notice that there were rarely if ever any stories that sounded like my family's stories, that mirrored what I heard in tale and in dialect, and that reminded me of what I saw and what I knew to be true around and within me.  

I've spent my life as an academic, an artist, and a filmmaker trying to see myself in the stories and looking at the ways Black women do everything we can to avoid being reduced to stereotypes. I want-- we want to see and find genuine, real representations of ourselves in what we hear, in what we read, and in what we see and especially, so in popular media forms like film and television.  

My career has shown me that documentary is a profoundly powerful way to see yourself represented on the screen. At its core, a documentary shows aspects of real life. And when done well, it's a medium most compelling because of that reality. Documentary, in short, allows you to represent yourself as you see yourself to be, rather than merely how others see you.  

My love for documentary has led me to create a new three act structure of sorts guided by Black feminism and womanism and made manifest in my production company Contra Girl Blue. In my three act structure, I document Black women's dynamic realities. I embrace Black women's multiple ways of knowing.  

I engage our storytelling as a practice of collaboration, rather than extraction. And I listen in to what Black women have to say in our words and in our voices. This sensibility has truly energized my own practice. My short film, Precipice on the Black Maternal, for example, documents how I nearly died during labor and delivery. It's a narrative about how I channeled ancestral energy and advocated for myself and how those actions saved me and my firstborn son.  

Now given the alarming rates of Black maternal and infant mortality, Precipice is a relevant story. But it's also a story about human resilience and situatedness. It's a story about Black women actively choosing life. It's a story of Black maternal connection. And it's my story.  

I have long sought to expand the limits of storytelling. As a child, I spent time at my mother's and grandmothers' feet trying to find myself, to hear myself, and to see myself in the stories before me on the page and on the screen. In the end then, the burning question that fuels me now is the very question that nurtured in my roots as a Black daughter of the American South.  

What can I do to ensure that there are more dynamic, more complex stories that center the experiences of Black women like me? That for me is the question. And the answer is everything I can.