No Accident: from Black Power to Black Box Office Bill Lyne Western Washington University, William.Lyne@Wwu.Edu

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Spring 2000 No Accident: From Black Power to Black Box Office Bill Lyne Western Washington University, [email protected]

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It's no accident that people like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were destroyed at those moments of their political careers when ... they replaced William Lyne is Associate nationalism with a critique of imperialism. (hooks 37) Professor of English at Western Washington University. His work has appeared in PMLA, Arizona T he years between MalcolmX as the scariestthing main- Quarterly, and other journals. stream white America could imagine and Malcolm X as pitchman for movies, baseball caps, and t-shirts have been bleak ones for African American progressive politics. The various movements that held so much promise in the 1950s and '60s have, in the words of Cornel West, "been crushed and/or absorbed" (Keeping 246). Manning Marable has divided black politics into "three strategic visions, which can be termed 'inclusion,'... 'black nationalism,' and transformation"' ("History" 73). Generally speaking, "inclusion" and "black nationalism" have been defanged and absorbed, while those ideas represented by Malcolm X's "transformationist" last year have been silenced and crushed. Marable notes the way that the silence has been institu- tionalized when he points out that "most historians [have] characterized the central divisions within black political culture as the 150-year struggle between 'integration' and 'separation'" ("History" 72), with the poles represented in such easy binaries as Du Bois versus Garvey, Martin versus Malcolm, or Henry Louis Gates versus Molefi Asante. The yin and yang between the inclusionist and nationalist visions has led to the African American political gains of the last fifty years: the end of legal segregation, the increase in the dis- semination and study of African American culture, and the growth of the black middle class. But, at the same time, this political dynamic has also created conditions in which life for the majority of African Americans has become steadily worse. While the African American middle class has been moving to the sub- urbs, black enrollments in U.S. colleges have declined, real incomes for black workers have dropped through the floor, black life expectancy has gone down, and a staggering percentage of young African American males have been warehoused in prisons. The connections between the African American middle class and lower classes have been broken to the point that the increasing number of high-profile black leaders and elected officials rarely represent the interests of the African American underclass.1 Inclusionist and even nationalist political strategies have served the African American middle class with varying degrees of success, but they have done virtually nothing for those left behind in U.S. inner cities. The strategy with the most potential to change the plight of the African American underclass is transformation,

African American Review, Volume 34, Number 1 ? 2000 William Lyneyn

This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions which begins with the fundamental Another crucial fact that separates insight that "black economic empower- black transformationist politics from ment is impossible in the long run integrationist or nationalist groups is without a complete shift in the pattern its virtual absence from what passes for of ownership, the expansion of the political debate in the mainstream U.S. rights of labor, and the democratiza- What we call the "radical" black or tion of the relations of production feminist movements of the 1960s have within U.S. society" ("History" 85). been successful only insofar as they Marable's formulation leans heavi- have fallen back to mostly integra- ly on the Marxist tradition, but we tionist positions. For example, over the should be careful not simply to equate last thirty years large numbers of transformationism with Marxism. The women have found positions as both relationship between black liberation students and professors in U.S. univer- movements and Marxist/socialist sities that remain solidly patriarchal, movements has been and still is com- racist, capitalist institutions. The U.S. plex, and often antagonistic.2 African mainstream actively works to exclude American transformationist thinkers transformationist analysis, especially such as Cornel West, bell hooks, and from African Americans. Patricia Audre Lorde often emphasize ques- Williams, in her book The Alchemy of tions of ethics, culture, and gender that Race and Rights, describes the two tend to fall into the background of ways that black expression is heard: many Marxist analyses. But rather than For blacks, describing needs has been a get bogged down in the distinctions dismal failure as political activity. It between black transformationism and has succeeded only as a literary various Marxisms, let us focus on the achievement. The history of our need underlying dynamic that unites these is certainly moving enough to have traditions and clearly separates them been called poetry, oratory, epic enter- tainment-but it has never been treat- from more mainstream liberal strate- ed by white institutions as the state- gies. The most important element that ment of a political priority. (I don't transformationism takes from Marxism mean to undervalue the liberating is an emphasis on sweeping and fun- power for blacks of such poetry, orato- damental change. Unlike integrationist ry and epic; my concern is the degree to which it has been compartmental- strategies, which seek to expand partic- ized by the larger culture as something ipation in current arrangements, or other than political expression.) Some nationalist strategies, which seek to of our greatest politicians have been replicate current arrangements, trans- forced to become ministers or blues formationist strategies look to create singers. Even white descriptions of "the blues" tend to remove the daily new and different institutions, tradi- hunger and hurt from need and tions, and practices. The focus is macro abstract it into a mood. And whoever rather than micro, global rather than would legislate against depression? local. Thus, an NAACP-led civil rights Particularly something as rich, soulful, movement that tries to integrate more and sonorously productive as black expression.... But from blacks, stark African Americans into schools, corpo- statistical statements of need are heard rations, and elected office, or the Nation as strident, discordant, and unharmo- of Islam's attempts to create and expand nious. Heard not as political but only black capitalism, are not transforma- against the backdrop of their erstwhile tionist activities. In terms of broad musicality, they are again abstracted to mood and angry sounds. (151-52) strategic goals, transformationist groups like the National Black United Front or Williams's description of the way black the Black Liberation Army have much expression is heard easily fits an more in common with the Democratic "either/or" model-either something Socialists of America or the Socialist bluesy or soulful, or something discor- Workers Party than they do with the dant and angry. (A paradigmatic NAACP or the Nation of Islam. instance of this dichotomy is the Sixties

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions mainstream media representation of black nationalists (Baraka, Malcolm X). Martin Luther King, Jr., as the harmo- In the twentieth century, black thinkers nious, acceptable black spokesman ver- are usually exiled (the state harassment sus Malcolm X as the angry, unintelli- and eventual emigration of Du Bois), gible terrorist.) This binary creates the reviled and marginalized (the critical illusion of multiple and effective voices descriptions of later Baldwin as bitter of dissent. But Williams's analysis and shrill, of later Baraka as boring and shows the way in which a certain posi- irrelevant), or murdered (the assassina- tion is always not heard. Ralph Ellison tions of King and Malcolm X) as they is heard as soulful blues, Bigger become transformationists. Thomas is heard as "mood and angry sounds," and the Marxist vision of Richard Wright is silenced. Martin I continue to be astonished about the extent to Luther King's Christian non-violence is which our community's knowledges are so thor- blues, Malcolm X's Muslim separatist oughly shaped by the visual media. Not very long ago a young Black woman clerk appeared nationalism is angry, the Black quite excited that I was shopping at her store. Panthers' Marxism is silenced. Black "Aren't you the woman on 'A Different cultural nationalism becomes the nec- World?"' So, when I told the yotmg woman my essary, easily demonized and con- name, she said, "Oh, now I remember: the big tained Other that gives the illusion of afro!" I guess I am destined to go down in history as "The Big Afro." (Davis 422) oppositional space, while Black dissent that moves away from race and toward class and economics is excluded from the conversation. Transformationist strategy has vir- TA/shington Post reporter tually disappeared from U.S. politics Nathan McCall's 1994 autobi- over the last twenty-five years, to the ography Makes Me Wanna Holler: A point that black leaders like Lani Young Black Man in America is an Guinier and Eleanor Holmes Norton interesting thread to pull when we try have been deemed too left for public to unravel the disappearance of Black service. The last gasp of any organized transformationist discourse in U.S. mainstream political effort to represent popular culture. It comes as no sur- the black underclass comes with the prise that McCall's book is published unraveling of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow by a major corporate house to New Coalition in the wake of the 1988 York Times bestseller status. The book Democratic National Convention. This fits easily into a couple of established silence has also led to an historical mainstream categories for African amnesia. Despite its virtual invisibility American autobiography. By chroni- in mainstream debate, transformation- cling the details of his early life of ist thinking characterizes the mature racial hardship, criminality, drugs, and work of a long tradition of black intel- prison, McCall joins the tradition of lit- lectuals, most of whom are usually erary realism that runs from Frederick identified as either inclusionists or Douglass to hip hop. And by structur- black nationalists. Frederick Douglass, ing its story around McCall's metamor- W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri phosis from convict to solid citizen, the Baraka, Martin Luther King, Jr., and book echoes the conversion narratives Malcolm X all address issues of class, in 1960s autobiographies such as international economic oppression, and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and the dynamics of power in their later Malcolm X's Autobiography of work.3 And yet, in both scholarly dis- Malcolm X. But unlike Cleaver and cussions and the public imagination, Malcolm X, the raising of McCall's con- these thinkers tend to emerge easily sciousness does not lead to anything and completely as either inclusionists resembling revolutionary or transfor- (Douglass, Du Bois, Baldwin, King) or mationist thinking. Makes Me Wanna

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Holler's front cover and back flap pho- as scared of us as we are of them. tographs show the integrationist and Many of them are seeking solutions, just like us. (402) nationalist poles available for mainstream representation in 1994. The The political contours of Makes Me cover features a scowling McCall, Wanna Holler are not that much differ- sporting a gold chain and a vest in ent from those of the dozens of other African colors, seated in front of a graf- African American autobiographies fiti-covered wall. This conflation of published by mainstream presses in drug-dealing gangster and the 1990s. McCall may militant nationalist easily None of occupy a different rhetori- fits the six o'clock news cal space than Oprah image of a young black Spike Lee's Winfrey or Colin Powell, male, one of the images that films after but he is not out of place on drives a multi-million dol- the same book shelf. But lar fashion and entertain- Do the Right Makes Me Wanna Holler ment industry based on does deserve some atten- white middle America's Thing come tion in the chronicle of fears and fascination.4 The anywhere recent African American picture on the back flap political history. Nathan shows our civil rights fanta- near a radical McCall was coming to con- sy: a smiling McCall in political sciousness as Black trans- dress shirt and tie, seated in formationist politics was front of his keyboard in his vision. disappearing from the U.S. Post cubicle. mainstream radar screen, Between these covers, McCall and his book contains an interesting bears witness to black rage, describes embedded narrative of that disappear- his personal odyssey, and decries ance. "black-on-black violence" and the McCall was seventeen years old in wasted potential in so many black 1972, when it seemed to him that the youth gone wrong. His anger, articu- "lyrics from Curtis Mayfield's album lated in an engaging style that is part- Superfly were blasting from every street and part-Post journalistic real- radio and sound system in black ism, gives the illusion that McCall rep- America" (98). Mayfield's album is the resents a threat to the system he has soundtrack to the movie Superfly, a infiltrated. But the overall assimilation- central text in Makes Me Wanna ist stance of the book, represented in Holler. As 1960s Black Power transfor- what Jill Nelson calls McCall's "casual mationist politics is gasping its last misogyny," and McCall's relative breaths, McCall has Curtis Mayfield's blindness to and complicity with the falsetto ringing in his ears, and he various forms of systematic oppression watches Black Power disintegrate in a that fall outside of the racism that rush of swiftly changing style, while affects him personally leave Makes Me trying hard to emulate Youngblood Wanna Holler a long way from any Priest, the hero of Superfly: kind of transformationist politics. The Almost overnight, brothers shifted insight that McCall gains from his from Black Power chic to gangster buf- experience always comes back to the foon. Suddenly, cats who had been traditional liberal platitudes we have sporting dashikis and monster Afros broke out the platform shoes and come to expect from The Washington crushed velvet outfits that made them Post and Random House: look like clownish imitations of the flamboyant Priest. (100) I have come to believe two things that might seem contradictory: Some of our The political and economic shifts worst childhood fears were true-the establishment is teeming with racism. beneath these fashion choices have Yet I also believe whites are as befud- become virtually invisible to McCall. dled about race as we are, and they're The young black men who just a few

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions years earlier would have seen the Black In McCall's rock and a hard place uni- Panthers, the most explicitly transfor- verse, civil rights begging gives no mationist 1960s black dissident group,5 access to the white system, but at the as the most viable response to racist same time there is no systematic eco- capitalism now recognize only capital- nomic alternative to the thankless job ist alternatives as the way to beat The at the shipyard. This binary choice is Man. McCall and his friends see the the same one that drives Superfly. "new consciousness" and "Blood" and Early in the film, Priest's sidekick "Brotherman" rhetoric of a previous Eddie, his finger squarely on the pulse generation of "dudes coming home of the early '70s pincers closing on from the Vietnam War" as anachronis- black American political dissent, tic and ineffectual. This dismissal of describes the cocaine trade as the only Black Power politics is starkly drama- workable and profitable space "The tized in a pivotal scene in Superfly. Man" has left for black people. When Three men listed in the credits as "mili- Priest talks of getting out of the life, tants" and dressed in the turtlenecks Eddie laughs at him, deriding his abili- and berets that McCall would call ty to go shipyard straight and give up "Black Power chic" confront Priest the expensive clothes, cars, and women about his drug dealing in their neigh- that come with dealing drugs. The film borhood. He stares them down and allows Priest and Eddie only two tells them that their efforts have done choices, between drug dealing or nothing for the community. As soon as poverty and victimization, between they get some guns, he says, and start working the system or getting crushed really fighting back against whitey, by it. For McCall, the choices are virtu- he'll be right there with them. Until ally the same. The only narrative with then, they'd best leave him to his busi- any possibility for success is the one in ness. As they leave with their tails which McCall, like Priest, beats the between their legs, the "militants" have white man at his own game. not only bowed to Priest's superior In Superfly, the moment when masculinity, they have also relin- Priest frees himself from his white quished any claims on effective resis- masters and achieves complete self- tance. At almost the exact moment that determination is also the moment that the state police apparatus is mopping shows how Priest's ultimate victory is up in its war against the Black ultimately inscribed in the system he Panthers,6 one of the most popular beats. Priest outsmarts the corrupt movies in the U.S. is showing a drug policeman who is trying to prevent his dealer giving Black Power the bum's getting out of the drug business, but he rush. does so without disrupting the prevail- With the synapses between the FBI ing system. He may play the game a base and Superflysuperstructure firing little too well for members of the estab- so well, black transformationistpolitics lishment, but he does nothing to has been pushed out of the frame. The change the rules. Priest tells the cop only alternative to integrationism McCall that he is going to walk away can see is ghetto entrepreneurship. To his unscathed because he has used his way of thinking, selling drugs was drug money to purchase a contract. If anything happens to Priest the cop and no more far-fetched than the civil his family will all be killed. Both the rights notion that white people would welcome us into their system with cop and the audience know that Priest open arms if we begged and prayed means business when he drives his and marched enough. As for the risks, point home by telling the cop that this dealing drugs seemed no more risky is no idle threat, that he isn't trading in than working a thankless job at the any of "that old-time nigger shit." shipyard for thirty years, always under the fear of being laid off. It was six of Closeup on Priest telling The Man that one and half a dozen of the other. (99) he has hired "the best killers ... white

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions killers," then cut to a longshot of Priest in movies-a black hero-and walking away triumphant, having out- expressed the frustrations of a lot of Manned The Man. young brothers, who were so fed up Trade the purple with the white man that they were pimp coat for a mask or a cape and he willing to risk prison, and even death, could be The Lone Ranger or Batman. to get away from him. Perhaps for the The same sort of solitary first time in this country's history, Emersonian self-reliance underwrites young blacks were searching on a large scale for alternatives to the white McCall's journey to mainstream mainstream. One option, glamorized respectability. There is no sense of by Superfly, was the drug trade, the community or solidarity in his under- black urban answer to capitalism. (98- standing of his predicament: 99) When I read about shootings in urban This passage is both a testament to the areas and at home, I often flash back to institutional suppression of African scenes in which I played a part. It's American history and the extent of hard for me now to believe I was once very much a part of that world, and McCall's assimilation by the time he harder still sometimes for me to adapt sits down to write Makes Me Wanna to the one I crossed over into. My new Holler. Transformationist dissent has life is still a struggle, harsher in some been so effectively erased that McCall ways than the one I left. At times I feel is able to see 1972 as "the first time ... suspended in a kind of netherworld, belonging fully neither to the streets young blacks were searching ... for nor to the establishment. (402) alternatives," missing hefty portions of both the immediately preceding It is not hard to imagine Youngblood decade and three centuries of black Priest moving into the same liminal struggle. Economic boundaries have space at the end of Superfly. Certainly become so constricted that he reads both Priest's and McCall's system-beat- Superfly as the "answer" to capitalism, ing maneuvers are grounded in the rather than the capitulation it actually same sort of insider knowledge. Priest is. learns police tactics and McCall learns to write. McCall's road to the Post newsroom has many of the same turns as Priest's road out of the ghetto drug L ooking back through the twenty business. The legal economy shuts him years of hegemony that condi- out, he turns to drug dealing, this tions McCall's memory, we see that sends him to prison, where, ironically Superfly is not the only black box office enough, he gains access to the educa- success in the early Seventies. Between tional system that gives him the tools 1970 and 1972 more than fifty feature to write himself into the legal econo- films were made with black audiences my. Makes Me Wanna Holler's story in mind, most of which we now lump may, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., tells us under the heading "blaxploitation," a (in a back cover blurb), lean on "such genre characterized by low production predecessors as Richard Wright's Black values, cops and criminals action, Boy and Claude Brown's Manchild in funky soundtracks, and big doses of the Promised Land," but its basic struc- sex that emphasize macho stud con- ture is right out of Superfly. structions of black masculinity. The Looking back over the twenty-two unexpected success of Shaft and espe- years between the release of Superfly cially Melvin Van Peebles' indepen- and the publication of Makes Me dent film Sweet Sweetback's Wanna Holler, McCall sees Superfly as BaadasssssSong alerted Hollywood to a milestone in the history of black resis- the profit potential in blaxploitation. tance: Sweetback, usually pegged as the original Almost instantly, Priest became a cult blaxploitation film, cost $500,000 to figure for brothers everywhere. Here make and took in over $10 million. was a film that gave us something rare This led the studios to turn away from

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions such fare as To Sir, With Love and ary morsels behind. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and After a series of frustrating experi- toward the blaxploitation formula to ences with major studios, Van Peebles boost black box office. Superfly, The chose to write, direct, star in, produce, Mack, Black Caesar, Cleopatra Jones, score, and arrange for the distribution and dozens of others cashed in on the of his story of a sex performer's evolu- new post-Sixties version of black tion into a black militant. Sweetback is empowerment. When groups such as significant not only for its status as a the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC blaxploitation originator and its black- objected to the film industry's cynical controlled production, but also for its exploitation of stereotypical black sex, use of Black Power ideology. In a 1971 violence, and misogyny, Hollywood interview, Van Peebles consciously executives pointed to box office opposed his work to Shaft in explicitly receipts and claimed that they were Marxist terms: "Black films should deal only giving black audiences "what with images of our position in the they wanted." superstructure. They should all work The studio blaxploitation pictures toward the decolonization of black were popular with black audiences, but minds and the reclaiming of black spirit is a stretch to suggest that they repre- it" (Murray 165). Huey Newton, in a sented what African Americans want- laudatory review in the Black Panther ed. As McCall points out, movies of newspaper, echoed these sentiments, any kind with black heroes were rare saying that Van Peebles "has certainly in 1972. Unlike the situation in the U.S. made effective use of one of the most popular music industry, African popular forms of communication ... in Americans had played little or no role revolutionary terms" (qtd. in Murray in the deployment and control of black 77). images in U.S. film. In the 1970s, there While Sweetback does contain the was no cinema equivalent of Motown regressive sex, violence, and misogyny or the long tradition of U.S. Jazz. The that would come to characterize future Seventies blaxploitation explosion is blaxploitation films, it also has progres- roughly equivalent to the early part of sive doses of solidarity and conscious- the century when white record compa- ness raising that set it apart from its nies began to record and market "race" successors. The plot turns on records. The means of production and Sweetback eschewing his identity as a distribution were (and still are) so com- cynical sex show stud who goes along pletely in white hands that, while to get along with the police. After aspects of the result may have standing idly by while two cops beat a appealed to black consumers, we can black revolutionary, Sweetback is sud- also be pretty sure that the notion of denly galvanized into action, turning "what they wanted" came to us heavily and beating the cops and rescuing the mediated. This mediation arcs across revolutionary. This leads to an extend- the relationship between Van Peebles's ed chase, where we see a variety of Sweetback and the studio blaxploita- instances of police brutality directed tion pictures. As Manthia Diawara has against black people intercut with pointed out, Black independent cine- scenes of Sweetback coming to under- ma, from Oscar Micheaux through Van stand his former exploitation and colo- Peebles to Spike Lee, has generated the nization. The film ends with "themes and narrative forms" that Sweetback, like Youngblood Priest, "mainstream cinema constantly feeds having outwitted white power, but not on" (4). Hollywood blaxploitation simply for personal economic gain and feeds heavily on the juiciest pieces of material comfort. Sweetbacks opening Sweetback, but, as with most main- credits list "The Black Community" as stream appropriations of black culture, its primary star, and throughout the it leaves the undigestable revolution- movie we see working and underclass

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions blacks providing solace and aid to sents possibility: Sweetback as he runs from the cops. Superfly influenced the style, think- This kind of solidarity stands in stark ing, and choices that a lot of young opposition to the lone-wolf maneuvers black men began making around that of Priest, whose moment of comfort time. I know it deeply affected me. I and rest comes with his white mistress came out of that movie more con- vinced than ever that the white man in a penthouse apartment high above and I were like oil and water: We did- the ghetto. n't mix. My partner Shell Shock was on The black male cool and machismo the same wavelength. He started as defined by Sweetback would thinking that maybe there was a future in dealing drugs. A few weeks after we become the commodity that saw the movie, we were sitting around Hollywood packaged in blaxploitation at his place getting wasted when Shell films like Superfly, with Van Peebles' Shock outlined his game plan, which independent revolutionary intent left was essentially a scaled-down version At the of the plan Priest had devised in the behind. same time, the flood of movie. "I know I can do it, man. Most studio blaxploitation pictures and of the white folks that got money did Hollywood's block-booking system something illegal to get it. Look at how effectively jammed distribution chan- the Kennedys got started. They boot- nels, making independent visions like legged liquor during the depression, then went legit. Now they millionaires! Van Peebles' virtually inaccessible. It All I gotta do is make enough money would be difficult to predict how revo- to start my own business, then I can lutionary black cinema would have quit the drug game." progressed had it not been coopted It was shortsighted, far-fetched fan- and absorbed by corporate Hollywood, tasy for sure. (99) just as it is difficult to know what This passage is a capsule summary of would have happened to the Black the black political possibilities repre- Panthers had they not been so explicit- sented in U.S. popular culture in the ly targeted by the state police appara- post-Superfly years. McCall comes out tus. Both Sweetback and the Panthers of the theatre with a separatist senti- showed some counterrevolutionary ment aroused, looking for ways to tendencies, especially in their attitudes dress right and dodge the white sys- about women. But no matter how tem. That younger version of McCall things would have evolved, we can be sees Priest as a role model, while the sure of the similarities in the way older, more "mature" McCall recog- things turned out. Just as the Panthers nizes him as an outlaw. Mature McCall were pushed by state violence into shows us he hasn't lost touch with his Cripdom, black film became blackness, hasn't gone the way of ineluctably linked to drug-dealing Uncle Clarence Thomas, by continuing gangsterhood as it became corporate to acknowledge Superfly's seductive blaxploitation. edge and refusing to lapse into a mor- It is significant that, from a host of alizing sermon about drugs and the blaxploitation movies, McCall chooses devil. But he also reinforces the same Superfly as the film that best represents binary choice between gangster and his generation. (Spike Lee has done the citizen built upon essentialist concep- same thing, identifying Sweetback as tions of race and drugs that recurs the only blaxploitation film that influ- again and again in the autobiographies, enced him and yet choosing to teach talk shows, movies, music, and wars Superfly in his African American film on drugs that would fill the Eighties class at Harvard.) The equally popular and Nineties. Young McCall's buddy Shaft and many other blaxploitation Shell Shock not only sees Priest as a films feature black policemen or James role model but also recognizes the Bond-type characters as their heroes. analogy to more "mainstream" forms But for McCall, Youngblood Priest the of criminal activity. This insight into cocaine hustler more realistically repre- the dynamics of power in the U.S.

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions political system is dismissed by mature reactions from all points on the politi- McCall as "far-fetched fantasy for cal compass. sure." Like Priest and the Bloods and Given his body of work and his Crips after the police destruction of deep engagement with Madison Black Power, McCall pragmatically Avenue, it would be a stretch to acquiesces to the idea that his choices describe Spike Lee as anything like a no longer include transformationist revolutionary. Amiri Baraka is only politics. He has so completely suc- exaggerating a bit when he calls Lee cumbed to the ideology of personal "the quintessential buppie, almost the choice that he can hear larger structural spirit of the young, upwardly mobile, or class analysis only as far-fetched Black, petit bourgeois professional" fantasy. Again, this is not surprising, (146). But, unlike any of his other films, given that McCall writes from a main- Do the Right Thing shows a solid stream position for a mainstream audi- transformationist underpinning.8 The ence. In the last twenty-five years, story follows a variety of characters black transformationist dissent has vir- through a hot summer day in the life of tually disappeared from any popular the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood culture that passes through corporate in Brooklyn. From the beginning, it hands. And on those rare occasions works against our realist expecta- that something resembling transforma- tions-creating broad types rather than tionist critique does slip through, it is round characters; painting the screen quickly contextualized as ridiculous in overly bright, almost garish colors; and unrealistic. showing political murals and slogans (such as the Liberian flag and "Tawana Told the Truth") in the background; and staging several choral moments he careerof Spike Lee, especially with actors speaking directly to the the reception of his movie Do the camera. The film's central location is Right Thing, provides a paradigmatic Sal's Famous Pizzeria, owned and example of the fate of African operated by Sal, an Italian American, American transformationist politics in and his two sons Pino and Vito, who mainstream representations. After the commute into Bed-Stuy each day. The heyday of blaxploitation, the next sig- plot is engendered in the morning nificant eruption of blackness into when Buggin Out, one of the neighbor- mainstream U.S. film would come with hood's residents, demands that Sal the arrrival of Lee in the late 1980s. (As include some pictures of black people Melvin Van Peebles points out, "In the on his Pizzeria's "Wall of Fame," cur- years after Sweetback, there were less rently filled with autographed pictures than twenty films actually controlled of white Italian American celebrities. In by African Americans"[7]). The success response, Sal invokes the classic U.S. of his independently made first film liberal bourgeois notion of property She's Gotta Have It led to his emer- rights, telling Buggin Out that, as long gence as a bankable Hollywood direc- as the pizzeria is Sal's, the wall will be tor, and cleared the ground for such covered with "American Italians" and films as Boyz N the Hood, New Jack that as soon as Buggin Out owns his City, Straight Out of Brooklyn, and own pizzeria he can put as many Juice.7 Lee has worn his status both "brothers" as he wants on the wall. flamboyantly and uneasily through a Buggin Out, occupying a more pop- series of feature films, including School ulist position, reminds Sal that the Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo' Better black people in the neighborhood Blues, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X. Of spend "much money" on his pizza and these movies, Do the Right Thing is thus are entitled to some rights in his easily the most original and controver- establishment. An altercation is avoid- sial, provoking a plethora of vigorous ed when Mookie, Sal's delivery man

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions (played by Lee), hustles Buggin Out that immediately precede the final through the door, reminding him that credits) would result in the spillage of such agitation could endanger gallons of critical ink across hundreds Mookie's job. of pages of newspapers, magazines, This stew of economic imperialism, and academic journals, much of which ethnic solidarity, and labor relations revolves around questions of responsi- bubbles throughout the day, as we bility and motivation: Is Buggin Out a watch Buggin Out try to organize a political activist or just a b-boy with boycott of Sal's, Mookie try to balance too much time on his hands? Is Sal jus- his job with his responsibilities to his tified in breaking Radio Raheem's tape girlfriend and son, and Sal try to keep a player? When Mookie throws the lid on his older son's seething racial garbage can through the window is it anger. The movie snaps with the intel- an act of heroism or vandalism? What ligence, pace, and humor for which Lee is Spike Lee trying to say by following has been rightly praised, and by clos- a Martin Luther King, Jr., quote about ing time, as Sal counts the till, both he non-violence with a Malcolm X quote and the audience have had "a really claiming that violence in self-defense is good day." Were it to end at this point, justified? with Sal telling Vito and Pino that the One interesting exchange of this pizzeria will someday be Sal and Sons, sort takes place between W. J. T. and promising Mookie that there will Mitchell and Jerome Christensen in always be a delivery boy job for him at Critical Inquiry. Mitchell calls Mookie's Sal's, Do the Right Thing would no garbage can toss "an ethical interven- doubt have been the feel good hit of tion," and goes on to tell us that "at the the summer. We have been treated to moment of Mookie's decision the mob an hour and a half of colorful ethnic is wavering between attacking the people doing colorful and relatively pizzeria and assaulting its Italian- unthreatening ethnic things. If the American owners. Mookie's act directs music swells (some melancholy jazz, the violence away from persons and please, no Public Enemy) and the cred- toward property, the only choice avail- its roll here, then critics probably end able in that moment. Mookie 'does the up comparing the movie favorably to right thing,' saving human lives by sac- other ethnic romances like rificing property" (897-98). But Moonstruck.9 Christensen questions both Mitchell's But instead Sal opens the door to reading of the scene and the ethics of make four last slices for some local Mookie's action: teenagers ("They love my food," he There are cries of "They did it again, says). Buggin Out and Radio Raheem just like Michael Stewart, Eleanor (the biggest guy on the block with the Bumpers" (vicitims, like Radio biggest boom box) follow them in, Raheem, of police violence), but you blasting "Fight the Power" and shout- can run the tape backwards and for- ing their demand for pictures of black wards, fast or slow, and you will not hear a single threat of physical vio- people on the wall. Sal smashes Radio lence against the American Italians. Raheem's box with his baseball bat, When Mookie makes his decision (he and the ensuing fight spills out into the wipes his eyes as if stripping away street and draws the cops, who end up delusion), he is partially framed by a killing Radio Raheem in a choke hold. background figure (by appearances a Latin) who is standing casually with As an ominous crowd gathers around hand clasping wrist. When Mookie Sal and sons, Mookie tosses a garbage picks up the garbage can and begins can through Sal's window, which leads his approach he passes in front of a to a riot and the eventual burning of cluster of curious black onlookers (are they a mob? part of a mob? moblike?) the pizzeria. This violent ending (along who stand in casual poses with arms with two quotes about violence from crossed. It is only when Mookie accel- Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X erates toward the window that the uni-

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions fying motion ripples through the doesn't throw the garbage can, some- assembly; Mookie's act galvanizes the one else will. If no one throws a group; violently he provokes a violence that, because it has no claim to garbage can, some other violent caul- "self-defense," should be called, dron will bubble over. according to Malcolm X's criterion, not Given the rest of the movie, this is intelligent but stupid. (585) the most obvious reading of the scene. Mitchell and Christensen obviously Do the Right Thing is an excellent por- hold very different views regarding trayal of the dignity and humor of Mookie's intentions, but they both read ghetto life, but it also pulses with the the scene through the same lens. At tension and potential violence that stake for them is Mookie's individual come with economic exploitation and character and the specific consequences abandonment. Sal begins the day com- of his act, understood in a traditionally plaining about the heat and saying that liberal, ethical context that demands he feels "like I'm gonna kill some- that we read the pizzeria incident as body." This sets the tone for a day of though it were taking place in the sub- confrontations: between Sal and urbs. As Christensen puts it, "ethical Buggin Out, Pino and Mookie, Radio judgment entails respecting cases" Raheem and a group of Hispanic (584). teenagers with a stereo almost as big as But for Spike Lee, the context is his, Radio Raheem and a Korean gro- very different: "So many times white cer, Da Mayor and the Korean grocer, people have said to me: 'Oh, Spike, Buggin Out and a white guy in a why did Mookie throw the garbage can Celtics jersey who scuffs Buggin Out's through the window of Sal's?' But I've clean Nikes, Mookie and his girlfriend never, ever had a Black person, an Tina, Pino and the mentally handi- African American, ask me that ques- capped Smiley, the cops and the kids tion. Not ever, it's understood" (By who open a fire hydrant, Sal and Any Means 4-5). Lee's division of his Mookie over the way Sal looks at audience into a (white) class that can't Mookie's sister. These flashpoints are understand the garbage can scene and so consistent, punctuating the film like a (black) class that easily understands a second sound track, that it is difficult it suggests that we are to see the scene to understand them in terms of indi- as typical rather than exceptional, as vidual psychology or imagine them one case among many similar cases happening in a neighborhood with rather than as a unique situation with more wealth, space, air conditioning, its own ethical contours. In this con- and economic opportunity. Lee text, it makes no difference what deploys his incidents in a way that Mookie's specific motivation is as he demands that we ask questions about hurls the garbage can, or whether the social and economic forces of Wall Mitchell or Christensen is reading it Street and Gracie Mansion that have right. Mookie's anger and frustration helped shape this block in Brooklyn. extend well beyond the moment and So once the violence does erupt at connect with systematic forces that, the end of the movie, we have to according to Lee, all African Americans understand it according to the same understand, the same way that the criteria. Radio Raheem's death and the crowd in front of Sal's sees the death of burning of Sal's are inevitable banali- Radio Raheem as coming from the ties, not tragic accidents that could same place as the deaths of Michael have been avoided if only certain indi- Stewart and Eleanor Bumpers. If viduals had made better choices. No Mookie chooses not to throw the matter how hard the characters try to garbage can, the conditions that could do the right thing they cannot over- lead to the burning of Sal's or any come the centuries of wrong things number of other violent eruptions have that have been done to them. This in no way been changed. If Mookie reading accounts for Lee's refusal to

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions finger any single character or cluster of Spike Lee as a consistent purveyor of characters as directly responsible for radical politics. It is to show that Do what happens. Sal and Mookie are the the Right Thing, both in its intent and most sympathetic characters in the its execution, has a political kinship film, Buggin Out has a point about the with Sweet Sweetback's Wall of Fame, and Radio Raheem BaadasssssSong and is an intelligent shouldn't have to die just because he articulation of the conditions that plays his music too loud. We have even should lead to a transformationist poli- seen the police earlier in the film as tics. That it is a movie with transforma- having a grudging respect for the tionist possibilities becomes clear with neighborhood residents (taking their even a cursory glance at its critical side against a rich white guy in a con- reception. Do the Right Thing may vertible), and the cop who strangles have struck the same nerve with the Radio Raheem is portrayed as a fright- corporate press that the Black Panthers ened young man whose adrenalin gets struck with J. Edgar Hoover,10 but by the best of him. Lacking a convenient 1989 transformationist analysis had villain, and unless we want to resort to become so scarce and unintelligible in the standard mainstream idiocy of the mainstream public sphere that it describing the violence as "random" or almost never appeared in the many "unmotivated," we must look for discussions surrounding Do the Right explanations in the larger forces of col- Thing. Lee's own discourse tends to onization and economic imperialism. veer pretty quickly from economics to In many of his discussions of Do a quasi-essentialist notion of race. And the Right Thing, Lee makes it clear that the rest of the mainstream arguments he wants us to see the film in these about Do the Right Thing, both posi- larger terms. In his production journal, tive and negative, consistently organize Lee writes that the movie is about the themselves around questions of violence, aesthetics, and drugs. black underclass in Bed-Stuy, a community that has some of the highest Do the Right Thing has the distinc- unemployment, infant mortality, and tion of being the film that inaugurated drug related homicides in New York the now familiar panic about black City. We're talking about people who movies as incitement to violence. In the live in the bowels of the social-eco- same way that blaxploitation films nomic system, but still live with dignity and humor. (qtd. in Morrison 25) were blamed for drug use, Do the Right Thing and many of the black In various interviews, Lee also shows films that were greenlighted in its that he understands the long history of wake (such as Juice, NewJack City, black oppression and the difficulty of and Boyz N the Hood) have been por- conveying the effects of that oppres- trayed as potential catalysts for riots. sion to an affluent white audience: Joe Klein, writing in New York maga- I don't think [white people] should be zine, had this to say about Do the Right scared. I have sympathy for them if Thing- "If Lee does hook large black they have strong emotions about this audiences, there's a good chance the film. But if white people look at this message they take from the film will film and feel uncomfortable for 15 minutes, I think that's going to be increase racial tensions in the city. If good-because they have no idea how they react violently-which can't be black Americans have lived for 400 ruled out. . ." (14). Arguments such as years! If they have to feel uncomfort- this are some of the most pathetic and able for 15 minutes, then that's all racist attempts to look beyond the eco- right. The movie's going to be over, and they'll go back to wherever they nomic oppression that leads to inner- live [while] black people still make up city violence.11 Lee offers the obvious the large permanent underclass. response to critics like Klein in an (Sterritt 7) interview with Michael T. Kaufman: Again, the point here is not to paint "The only thing that really hurts are

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions those articles that are saying that 'Do of questions Mitchell and Christensen the Right Thing' is going to cause riots. debate: Did Mookie do the right thing? 'Do the Right Thing' was not showing the week of the Superbowl in Liberty Is Sal a racist at heart? Will that City," he said, citing the Miami neigh- Malcolm X quote lead volatile black borhood where rioting erupted last people to torch theatres across winter. "To my knowledge, what hap- America? As long as this is the focus of pened there was that a cop killed a the black kid on a motorcycle who suppos- discussion, serious consideration of edly had robbed someone. That's what the conditions that create the conse- started the riot. Better talk about the quences we see at the end of Do the conditions that make things like that Right Thing will never take place. happen." (HI) A more subtle but equally effective But the mainstream press was intent on way to divert transformationist discus- taking seriously the idea that Do the sion of the film is to critique it on the Right Thing could, by itself, constitute basis of aesthetics. In this effort, main- one of those conditions. The New York stream reviewers can employ a Times, for example, "staged an instant received formalist vocabulary of "art" symposium of experts on ethnicity and that has trickled down from academia urban violence" (Mitchell 891). In this as the dominant critical discourse in discussion, even those who supported the U.S. in the twentieth century. Juan the film accepted the notion of Do the Williams, for example, in a Right Thing as a potential powder keg. Washington Post review titled "Why Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offered this Spike Lee's New Film Ultimately defense: Fails," finds Lee guilty of "an artistic copout" (G1). The same ambiguity and I want to address the question of the incendiary nature of the film. I think open-endedness that Gates celebrates that is the importance of the ambigui- leads Williams to see the film as hope- ty-not only at the end, but through- lessly muddled and confused. Leaning out. He could have made a coercive heavily on the New Critical value of movie that would show only one side closure, Williams claims that Lee "for- of all the larger questions here, but he didn't. This is a porous movie, this is a gets about his responsibility as an artist movie about choices. The moviegoer is to say something-to take his story even left with a choice, put there liter- toward a significant end that tran- ally through the two quotes of scends the details and offers a vision" Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. That's why it's not, I think, incendiary. (G9). This lack of responsibility is It allows you to bring choice and inter- embodied in what Williams sees as pretation to it. And that's what I think Lee's four failed attempts to bring Do will keep it from causing social prob- the Right Thing to a satisfactory end- lems in the hot summer. (New York ing. The closing of Sal's Pizzeria, the Times 1) fight between Sal and Radio Raheem Although Gates feels that Do the Right that precipitates the riot, and the morn- Thing is not incendiary, he still allows ing-after scene between Sal and for the possibility that a movie could Mookie are all false starts toward the cause "social problems in the hot sum- ultimate failure of the quotations from mer." Thus the terms for the debate are Martin Luther King and Malcolm X tightly drawn. We may disagree about that finally do end the film. Here Lee whether or not Do the Right Thing will not only fails to finish to Williams's spark riots, but we must always under- satisfaction, he also sins against generic stand that it could. Rather than reject- coherence as he "abandons his medi- ing such terms, like that "radical" and um-film-and tries prose." This potentially irresponsible young film- analysis allows Williams to deliver his maker Spike Lee, we should take the final judgment on Spike Lee: "With his view of his sympathetic but more "rea- flawed attempts at an ending he has sonable" critics like Gates. And we are slipped from artist to propagandist" left to make judgments about the kind (G9). In Williams's unexamined for-

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions malist world, this slip is a cardinal sin similar, but, despite its ingenuity, it for the "artist." And the accusation doesn't succeed. As the long, sticky day goes on and the exchanges itself effectively forecloses any conver- between the characters get edgier, nas- sation about those subjects that fall tier, more elaborately insulting, we under the heading of "propaganda." begin to feel something ominous Unlike cruder critics who rave about creeping in, which at the time we may take to be our realization that racial violence and other social consequences violence is inevitable, but which later outside the magic circle of the artifact, on we may identify as our intuition of Williams the aesthete finds the film a different kind of disharmony-the unfaithful to the pure terms of art. jarring incongruity of Lee's "open" This same familiar set of assump- manner and his open-and-shut argu- ment. (79) tions lies behind the review of Do the Right Thing in The New Yorker, the Rafferty sets the standards for formal magazine to which most good liberals judgment by putting Lee in a tradition look for the final word on the current of white filmmakers who make similar cinema. In "Open and Shut," Terrence collage movies-showing us that deep Rafferty offers an even-handed, down all communities are the same, purring refinement of the aesthetic dis- that a slice of any life will resonate missal: with any other. He goes on to praise In form, "Do the Right Thing" is a the movie's easy use of this form, the multi-character, portrait-of-a-commu- way it draws its disparate elements nity movie. When this sort of picture is toward harmony. But as soon as we done skillfully, it can be exhilarating: begin to be drawn to the "realization Renoir's "The Crime of Monsieur that racial violence is inevitable," Lange," Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," and Scorcese's "Mean Streets" Rafferty pulls us back, making sure come to mind. The pleasure of commu- that we know that our heightened nity movies is their open-endedness, response is not due to the representa- the (relative) freedom they allow us to tion of a social inevitability, but just an observe the particulars of relationships artistic mistake on Lee's part. in small, self-contained social units; they seem unusually responsive to the Several times Rafferty invokes ambiguity and variety of experience. Martin Scorcese to let us know that he For long stretches, Lee's movie is isn't squeamish about violence, but he enjoyable in this way. Characters are is careful to make sure that we recog- introduced, and while we wait to find out what they'll have to do with each nize the proper sources of violence: other we can take in an abundance of [Lee's] model is clearly the Scorcese of atmospheric details-the lack of air- "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver," but conditioning in the apartments, the in Scorcese's films the final bursts of way the sunlight looks sort of hopeful violence are generated entirely from at the beginning of the day and then within, from the complex internal turns mean, the street wardrobe of T- dynamics of the communities and indi- shirts, bicycle shorts, and pristine viduals we've been watching. Lee's cli- Nikes-and listen to the casual speech max only seems to have that sort of of the neighborhood's residents, learn terrible inevitability. In order to to hear in its varied rhythms how peo- believe it and to find the characters' ple who have lived too close for too behavior in these disturbing scenes long express their irritation and their wholly comprehensible, we have to affection. As we get our bearings, the accept a proposition that's external to movie has an easy colloquial vivacity, the terms of the movie, an abstract and a sensational look. The superb cin- notion of the kind that no movie can ematographer Ernest Dickerson (who truly demonstrate: that we're all bigots has worked on all Lee's movies) gives under the skin. (80) the images a daring, Hawaiian-shirt glare: if the light were just a touch Proper movie violence is always the brighter, the colors a shade bolder, product of individual psychology or we'd have to turn away, but Dickerson "internal" community pathology. If we somehow makes these clashing sensa- tions seem harmonious. Lee's script need a "proposition that's external" to seems to be trying to do something understand either the violence or the

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions community, then we're watching a does not even occur to most reviewers. movie that's neither whole nor com- Superfly probably didn't seduce black prehensible. And if we insist on paying America with its depiction of the drug attention to these externals, Rafferty life, but along with other blaxploitation makes sure to draw us to the wrong films and a barrage of mainstream one: the "abstract notion" of individual popular representations, it did help racial bigotry rather than the systemat- convince white America that "the drug ic creation and perpetuation of a per- problem" almost always has a black manent underclass that drives the face. Critics like Micah Morrison events in the movie. When he does talk invariably bring a high-handed moral- about the economic source of the riot, istic sensibility conditioned by blax- Rafferty is dismissive, telling us that ploitation to their negative reviews: "lashing out at Sal because he's white The omission of drugs is far from acci- and owns a business and is therefore a dental. Wish them away, and the peo- representative of the racist power ple become victims of outside forces structure ... is a woefully imprecise entirely beyond their control-in a word, racism. As Spike Lee sees it, image of fighting the power" (80). moreover, racism is embodied not just Riots do tend to be woefully imprecise, by brutal white cops but also by well- but they are generally not random or meaning pizza-parlor owners. In the unmotivated. movie, the people are more threatened Perhaps Rafferty feels that it would by pizza than by drugs. (Morrison 25) be more consistent with the internal Like Juan Williams and Terrence dynamics of the community if Buggin Rafferty, Morrison assumes a world in Out and Radio Raheem were to lead which people choose to be "victims," the crowd across the Brooklyn Bridge where disenfranchisement follows and down to Wall Street to fight the from drugs freely chosen, rather than real power. This desire for a surrealistic the other way around. For him, there but more precise ending would be are no systematic connections across pretty ironic, given the critical hue and the inner-city landscape. Brutal cops, cry about Lee's choice to leave drugs pizza, and drugs couldn't possibly out of Do the Right Thing. From the flow into Bed-Stuy from the same "out- right and the left, from The National side forces." Review to the Village Voice, reviewers The cumulative effect of the critical found Lee guilty of violating the law of reception of Do the Right Thing is a lot verisimilitude by not littering his film of smoke generated from a familiar with illegal drugs. They feel that no and easily contained fire. From the black community can be properly rep- pages of such institutions as The New resented without a crack dealer on York Times, The Washington Post, The every corner, a junkie on every stoop. New Yorker, the Village Voice, and In the Voice, Stanley Crouch complains The National Review, Spike Lee that when no "villains such as drug emerges as a righteously angry young dealers appear" Lee "creates a fantasy black man. But the real insights of his Bed-Stuy neighborhood" (qtd. in best film, the insights probably most Morrison 25). Lee, recognizing the responsible for provoking so much racism in this criticism, responds that charged commentary, are buried the same magazines that describe beneath a lot of harmless bluster. As drugs as a problem infecting all areas long as it provokes only talk about of society never "ask the people who black art inciting violence, or how close made 'Rain Man' or 'Wall Street' why a black director gets to white aesthetic they did not include drugs in their pic- principles, or how no movie can possi- tures" (Kaufman H20). Drugs and bly claim black authenticity without African Americans have become so getting most of its characters high, Do inextricably linked in the popular the Right Thing, despite its obvious imagination that this obvious question transformationist message, poses no

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions threat to power. "vulturistic." The events central to both Sadly enough, neither does Spike Haley's book and Lee's film are Lee after Do the Right Thing. None of Malcolm's break with Elijah Lee's subsequent films come anywhere Muhammad, ascribed to Muhammad's near a radical political vision. It would, infidelities with Nation of Islam secre- of course, be unfair to judge each of taries, and his trip to Mecca, where he Spike Lee's films based on some sort of learned that Islam is big enough for transformationist litmus test. Do the everybody. As both George Breitman Right Thing is much more the excep- and Manning Marable point out, a tion than the rule among Lee's films in focus on personal differences with its concern with economic oppression. Elijah Muhammad and the spiritual But a look at Lee's work in the wake of uplift of Mecca erases the primary role the controversy surrounding Do the of transformationist politics in the Right Thing gives us some insight not years leading up to Malcolm's death.12 only into Lee's individual vision but Haley's book and Lee's film elide or also into the way that the mainstream erase Malcolm's trips to revolutionary reception apparatus works to suppress Africa (trips that were much longer transformationist dissent. Two "Spike than his pilgrimage to Mecca) and Lee Joints" in particular, Malcolm X meetings with leaders in newly inde- and Jungle Fever, are excellent exam- pendent countries. They leave out the ples of films that have been portrayed years of growing tension between as transgressive but end up only rein- Malcolm and Muhammad over ques- forcing mainstream values. tions of political engagement (choosing instead to focus on the single "chickens coming home to roost" incident). And they minimize the long-term presence M alcolm X is the image that has of the FBI in Malcolm's life (the feds most come to symbolize black don't appear in Lee's film until late in opposition and resistance in the late the last reel) and its significant role in twentieth century. While he was alive, his death. mainstream representations of Lee's focus on discrete, epiphanic Malcolm X depicted him as a terrorist, events is an American storytelling tra- the violent, frightening flip side of dition (Columbus discovered America, Martin Luther King, Jr. In death, the Lincoln freed the slaves, Brown vs. terrorist has been redeemed, turned Board of Education desegregated our into an icon and allowed to speak schools) that combines with the cre- through texts like Alex Haley's The ation of an isolated, messianic person- Autobiography of Malcolm X (a staple ality to obscure the ongoing, but less assignment in many high schools) and dramatic, forces and patterns that lie Lee's movie (which spawned the lucra- beneath official history. As Marable tive Xparaphenalia industry). Unlike points out, this sort of representation Malcolm X's actual words in his later helps curtail social action: speeches (collected and published, but Both Lee and Haley ignore the long far less popular than the Haley book or history of African-American national- the Lee film), these texts have little or ism in the USA, preferring to see no relationship to transformationist Malcolm as a "reaction" to white politics. The recent Malcolm explosion racism and prejudice, rather than as a in print, film, and music has generally product of a long and rich protest tradition.... The film-maker's goal was ignored the founding of the to create a cultural icon.... The cre- Organization for Afro-American Unity, ation of charismatic cultural Messiahs Malcolm's travels to visit revolutionary may be attractive to a middle-class leaders in Africa, his offers of alliance artist like Lee, but it represents a political perspective grounded in conspiracy with other progressive groups, and his theories, social isolation, and theoreti- repeated description of capitalism as cal confusion. If African-Americans

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions conclude that only the genius of a playing down the role of Malcolm's Messiah can elevate the masses of trip to Mecca: "The Malcolm I know oppressed people to the level of activism, no social protest is possible. was not impressed with rituals. You (140-41) couldn't take Malcolm to Mecca and show him some blond-haired, blue- The context in which Lee creates his eyed white man walking around a Malcolm does not allow for this kind of black stone and knock Malcolm out" activism and protest. In the interviews (By Any Means 56). When Lee protests he gave around the production of his that "those letters weren't fabricated," film, Lee describes the Autobiography Farrakhan reminds him that Malcolm of Malcolm Xnot as a fulcrum for mass had been to Mecca once before (in activism but rather as a bible for per- 1959) and talks about how "politically sonal improvement: astute" Malcolm was. He goes on to The main reason Malcolm X told his tell Lee that the significance of Mecca's story to Alex Haley was to put his life ghettoes and "white Arabs, throwing up there as an example for African bread to Nubian women like they were Americans-or anybody, really-that feeding pigeons," would not have been you could change your life around if you really apply yourself. He says, lost on Malcolm (57). The letters, "Look, people, I was a criminal. I ped- Farrakhan suggests, were part of dled grass, I was a steerer, I was a Malcolm's strategy for creating criminal, I snorted cocaine. I got so alliances with civil rights leaders when depraved that even in prison I was he returned to the U.S. called Satan." But he turned it around. (qtd. in Simpson 66) The most cursory look at Malcolm's activities and speeches in Haley's book surely justifies this read- 1964 and 1965 shows that the ing, and Lee's sympathy with the sen- DuBois/Farrakhan interpretation is sibility of the Autobiography leads to much more faithful to Malcolm's last the fundamentally flawed ending of his year than are Haley's and Lee's repre- movie. sentations. For Marable, this is the The James Baldwin-Arnold Perl result of class blindness: screenplay that Lee inherited was I would suggest that the ideological unfinished, and the ending of the story limitations of both Haley and Lee keep was left for Lee to write. Following their interpretations of Malcolm locat- Haley, he chose to emphasize ed on safe, religious grounds rather Malcolm's 1964 haj] to Mecca and the than on the more dangerous terrain of race and class struggle. Haley was a now famous letter he wrote to his wife longtime Republican, and a twenty proclaiming this trip as having opened year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard. his eyes to the humanity of white peo- Lee is primarily a product of the post- ple as the central events of the end of civil-rights-era black middle class .... his life. Lee chose this ending despite (140) having others explicitly offered to him. It is important to recognize that the While he was researching the film, Lee ideological limitations of Haley and spoke to W. E. B. Du Bois's son David, Lee are also the ideological limitations who was in Cairo with Malcolm. Along of the society that celebrates their with describing the U.S. government images of Malcolm X. Just as Du Bois surveillance that dogged Malcolm, and Farrakhan pointed Lee toward a Du Bois told Lee that Cairo and Accra transformationist Malcolm, Pathfinder were "near the high point of African Press, George Breitman, and Manning liberation" during Malcolm's visit, and Marable have worked to make the that "it was this mood of liberation that politically radical side of Malcolm Malcolm attached himself to when he available to the larger society. Lee's came to Africa" (By Any Means 39). deafness to Du Bois and Farrakhan is a Louis Farrakhan, when Lee inter- product of the same pervasive ideology viewed him, was even more explicit in that cannot hear Pathfinder, Breitman,

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions or Marable in the mainstream institu- Hollywood power structure over tions that finance and make possible bringing his vision of Malcolm to the popular representations. We can see screen. The book makes it clear that this in the way that the mainstream Lee takes his responsibility to press reported the feud between Lee Malcolm's legacy seriously and that he and Amiri Baraka over the making of was determined that control of the film Malcolm X. Baraka, a longtime remain in African American hands. Marxist/socialist and a consistent critic And certainly Lee has been the victim of Lee's films, felt that Lee's sensibility of what he calls a "plantation" was far too middle class to do justice to Hollywood system. But reading By Malcolm's legacy. His objections were Any Means Necessary it becomes clear very similar to Marable's, focusing on that almost all of the battles between the way that the film did little to create Lee and Warner Brothers were fought useful images for real African over money-how much of it the stu- American resistance. The popular dio was going to make. The only thing press, very comfortable with reporting about the film that threatened prominent black people fighting with Warner's executives was Lee's insis- each other, described the dispute as tence that it run three hours. The being about Lee's portrayal of Malcolm of Malcolm X is the same Malcolm's incarnation as Detroit Red, Malcolm available in other forms of generational conflict, or the question of popular culture for oppositional pur- who speaks for black people-any- poses-personally engaging and thing but ideology or class conflict. rhetorically fierce, but not much of a In this atmosphere, it is easy to see threat to the real relations of power. the popularity of the Autobiography of Any doubts we may have had about Malcolm X and the film Malcolm X as this were erased a few years later when flowing from their conformity to cor- the film's ending set piece of a rainbow porate ideology, rather than the indi- of children telling the camera "I am vidual visions of their creators. Had Malcolm X" became a television com- Haley and Lee chosen political visions mercial with inner-city children using farther to the left, their texts would the same cadences to chant "I am Tiger surely have been marginalized, and the Woods" in an effort to sell sporting custodianship of Malcolm X's image goods for Nike, one of Lee's longstand- would have been entrusted to someone ing employers. else. But on a radar screen where Between Do the Right Thing and Baraka shows up only as a cranky Malcolm X, Lee made Jungle Fever, a black nationalist foil for Spike Lee, and film that predicts the politics of writers like Breitman and Marable Malcolm X. Lee expected Jungle Fever don't even appear, Haley and Lee to make even more noise than Do the emerge as progressives, rather than the Right Thing: "We had fireworks on Do political conservatives that they are. the Right Thing, but I feel they are The popularity of the Autobiography small compared to the fallout that will and the phenomenal success of Roots come after this new one. Do the Right (both the book and the television mini- Thing was about race and class, but series) have established Haley in the Jungle Fever combines those two, plus public mind as a major voice for sex, and this makes a much more com- African American civil rights. Lee's bustible combination" (Five 16). The own brash self-promotion and fiery question of interracial sex did make a rhetoric allow him to pass as a radical. few critical waves, but compared to Do In his book By Any Means Necessary: the Right Thing, Jungle Fever was just The Trials and Tribulations of the another movie. No one convened a Making of Malcolm X . . ., Lee special symposium, no one worried describes what he sees as his daring about riots. The reviews varied in their and dangerous battle with a white intelligence and sensitivity, but neither

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the overt nor the underlying premises it, signs reading "drugs" and "crack" of the film provoked the hysteria that float around Samuel L. Jackson's name Do the Right Thing did. Jungle Fever in Jungle Fever's opening credits. The does deal with class, but in a way critical consensus is that Jackson's por- almost diametrically opposed to Do the trayal of Gator is the best thing about Right Thing. The film's central relation- the film, a judgment that has as much ship is between Flipper, a middle-class African American male architect, and to do with the way that Gator fulfills Angie, a working-class Italian mainstream expectations as it does American temporary secretary. with Jackson's performance. In Jungle Beneath the focus on the problems of Fever Lee capitulated to those critics interracial romance, the film pushes us who felt that any portrayal of an inexorably to see Flipper's affair with African American community must Angie as a threat to the domestic stabil- include scores of drug addicts, replac- ity he has created with his wife and ing Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, and daughter. When the affair ends and Mookie with Gator, his girlfriend Flipper tries to earn back his family's Vivian, and a "Taj Mahal" full of trust in Harlem, and Angie returns to addicts whose only concern is to "suck the limited horizons of Bensonhurst, we are watching not only the restora- on that glass dick." These people tion of the racial order, but also the frighten and repulse Flipper at the reinscription of idealized middle-class same time that they reassure the main- values. The ideology governing the stream critical establishment that its plot dynamic has much more in com- decadent, stoned vision of the black mon with Fatal Attraction than it does community is the correct one. with Do the Right Thing. Juxtaposing Flipper, the successful, While Angie stands on one side of educated professional, with his brother Flipper representing the threat of Gator, who steals from his own parents his temptation, crackhead older broth- to buy drugs, confirms the prevailing er Gator, representing the African talk show notion that the American underclass, flanks him on inner-city the other side with the fear of falling. drug problem is strictly one of personal All the talk about Bed-Stuy and drugs character and choice. Unlike Do the must have struck the same middle- Right Thing, Jungle Fever does nothing class nerve that led Lee to write in his to make us question the structural production journal: "I'm still deciding causes of the drug epidemic. whether to include some stuff about Ultimately, Jungle Fever allows drugs. Not to acknowledge that drugs Lee to do the same thing that Nathan exist might be a serious omission in the McCall does-make peace with the film. The drug epidemic is worse than corporate power structure while main- the plague" (Morrison 25). If drugs taining a veneer of militant dissent. were a serious omission from Do the Lee's movie offers the Right Thing, then Lee certainly made same choices as up for it in Jungle Fever. Given Lee's Makes Me Wanna Holler (and always active engagement with his crit- Superfly13): between citizen and crimi- ics, it is easy to see Gator as a direct nal, angry assimilation and nihilistic response to the reception of Do the addiction. None of these choices poses Right Thing. Just in case we don't get any threat to power.

1. See Marable and Mullings. Notes 2. See West, "Marxist."

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 3. For a discussion of how the canonization of African American literature excludes transformationist dissent, see Lyne. 4. For a thorough genealogy of the relationship between white America and black culture, see Lott. 5. The Black Panthers are generally portrayed in mainstream representations as a nationalist and separatist group, but their explicit politics were always Marxist/socialist. See Foner, Seale. 6. For a detailed discussion of the FBI's COINTELPRO war against the Black Panthers, see Churchill and Vander Wall. 7. As Manthia Diawara points out, Lee takes his place in the long relationship between Black independent film and mainstream cinema: ". . . a look at the relations between Oscar Micheaux and the Hollywood 'race films,' Melvin Van Peebles and the Blaxploitation films, Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), Haile Gerima (Bush Mama), and Spike Lee and the rethematization of urban life in such films as City of Hope, Grand Canyon, Boyz N the Hood, and Straight Out of Brooklyn reveals that mainstream cinema constantly feeds on independent cinema and appropriates its themes and narrative forms" (4). 8. This distinction between Do the Right Thing and Lee's overall career is reflected in the debate between W. J. T. Mitchell and Jerome Christensen in Critical Inquiry. Mitchell, in "The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,"focuses on Do the Right Thing and finds it oppositional. Christensen focuses on Lee's overall career and finds it "corporate populism." 9. The desire for this sort of ending is expressed in MurrayKempton's review in The Washington Post "'Do the Right Thing' is the newest entry in the expanding catalogue of films inspired by Italian- American family virtues. If it is less engaging than 'Moonstruck,' it can be commended for the earnestness of its effort to convey the suffering and final defeat of a rational man by an irrational world" (C3). 10. In 1968, Hoover declared the transformationist Panthers the greatest threat to U.S. domestic security. 11. See Smith 60: "Reviewers and certain viewers grant these films a proximity to and power over real life that is rarely seen in discussions of other types of films. Perhaps the most salient example of this sort of conflation is evident in the panic that surrounded the release of Do the Right Thing. Likewise, law enforcement officers, theater owners, and local merchants all voiced concern that the release of New Jack City and Boyz N the Hoodwould precipitate gang wars." 12. See Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X and "Malcolmas Messiah." 13. We can see the nadir of Spike Lee's capitulation to the ideology that demonizes African Americans and drugs in his adaptation of Richard Price's novel Clockers.

Works Baraka, Amiri. "Spike Lee at the Movies." Diawara, Black American Cinema 145-53. Cited Breitman, George. The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder, 1967. -. "Malcolm as Messiah: Cultural Myth Versus Historical Reality." Marable, Beyond Black and White 137-41. Christensen, Jerome. "Spike Lee: Corporate Populist." Critical Inquiry17 (1991): 583-95. Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End P, 1988. Davis, Angela. "Black Women and the Academy." Callaloo 17.2 (1994): 422-31. Diawara, Manthia. "Black American Cinema: The New Realism." Diawara, Black American Cinema 3- 25. Diawara, Manthia, ed. Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Foner, Philip S., ed. The Black Panthers Speak. New York: Da Capo P, 1995. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Do the Right Thing: Issues and Images." New York Times 9 July 1989, sec. 2:1. hooks, bell. "Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy: Third World Viewpoint Interviews Bell Hooks." Z Magazine 8 (Dec. 1995): 37. Kaufman, Michael T. "Ina New Film, Spike Lee Tries to Do the Right Thing." New York Times 25 June 1989: H1+. Kempton, Murray. "Spike Lee's Self-Contempt." Washington Post 3 Aug.1989: C3. Klein, Joe. "Spiked?" New YorkMagazine 26 June 1989: 14-15. Lee, Spike, et al. Five for Five: The Films of Spike Lee. New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1991. Lee, Spike, with Ralph Wiley. By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X. New York: Hyperion, 1992.

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This content downloaded from 140.160.178.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:01:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lott, Eric. Love and Theft. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Lyne, William. "TigerTeeth Around Their Neck: The Cultural Logic of the Canonization of African American Literature."Arizona Quarterly 52 (1996): 99-125. Marable, Manning. Beyond Black and White: Rethinking Race in American Politics. New York: Verso, 1995. . "Historyand Black Consciousness: The Political Culture of Black America." Monthly Review 47 (1995): 71-88. Marable, Manning, and Leith Mullings. "The Divided Mind of Black America: Race, Ideology and Politics in the Post-Civil-Rights Era." Marable, Beyond Black and White 203-15. McCall, Nathan. Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America. New York: Random, 1994. Mitchell, W. J. T. "The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing."Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 880-99. Morrison, Micah. "The World According to Spike Lee." National Review 4 Aug. 1989: 24-25. Murray,James P. To Find an Image: Black Films from Uncle Tom to Superfly. Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill,1973. Rafferty, Terrence. "Open and Shut." New Yorker24 July 1989: 78-80. Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time. New York: Random, 1970. Simpson, Janice C. "Words With Spike." Time 23 Nov. 1992: 66. Smith, Valerie. "The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African American Film."Black Popular Culture. Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay P, 1992. 58-66. Sterritt, David. "Spike Lee's Hotly Debated New Film."Christian Science Monitor27 June 1989: 7. Van Pebbles, Melvin. "Right On, As in Right on Time." Lee, Five 6-7. West, Cornel. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge, 1993. . "MarxistTheory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 17-31. Williams, Juan. "WhySpike Lee's New Film Ultimately Fails." Washington Post 25 June 1989: G1+. Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

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