Blyden on Blyden

Perspectives on Edward Wilmot Blyden by Prof. Nemata Blyden from Professor Gloria Emeagwali on Vimeo. This short video featuring Nemata Blyden, a descendant of Edward Blyden is worth a listen. Blyden was one of the most intriguing figures in the history of pan-Africanism, one whose shadow looms large in many areas pertinent to Africa and its diasporas. Although Haiti was, from what I have read of Blyden's work, largely absent or seen as an example of colorism setting back an independent black state, I have long thought of the possible parallels between Blyden and his Haitian contemporaries. 

Rambling Thoughts on Blyden, Christianity, and Islam

Source 

This intellectual and pan-Africanist is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the fascination with Islam among African-Americans. West Indian-born Blyden, who chose Liberia and West Africa as his ultimate homeland, praised Islam in West Africa for encouraging education, discipline, abstinence from alcohol, and for not degrading Africans into servile conditions like Christianity. Blyden saw Christianity's spread in Africa by European missionaries as instilling a servile nature in converts whereas Islam, with its longer history in Africa, had promoted learning, trade, and, according to Blyden, was a step above 'fetishism' of African traditional religion. Blyden was so taken with Islam that he also traveled to Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, studying the Arabic language and the Koran.

Blyden had also promoted the study of Arabic in Sierra Leone and Liberia, at one point envisioning a partnership between Christian Americo-Liberians and the Muslim states of the West African interior. Of course, Blyden saw Islam as a preparatory step to the 'true' religion of Christianity, but was unique among Western writers for acknowledging many positive elements of the faith. It also becomes clear that he romanticized Islam in Africa, largely ignoring the slave trade, and his praise of Islam over Christianity was clearly tied to the masculinist impulse of black nationalism as a political project. Unlike Christianity, which allegedly connoted servility (and therefore, femininity), for black men, Islamic African societies were masculine, strong, independent, and assertive.

I contend that Blyden, though writing for European and West African readers rather than African-Americans, influenced the way US blacks perceived Islam in relation to their own history and struggles. Islam and the black nationalist imagination of Blyden influenced African-Americans. Without Blyden, would there have been a Malcolm X?

George Schuyler's Black Empire

George Schuyler's Black Empire, two novels of serial fiction printed together in a single volume, tell the magnificent tale of black unity and genius triumphing against imperialism and white supremacy in the 1930s. Using science fiction elements and the charged context of fascism, communism, and capitalism during that tumultuous decade, Schuyler's fantastic story of Carl Slater's involvement with Dr. Belsidus's Black Internationale is a tour-de-force. Satirizing elements of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, such as Garvey, Schuyler's ruthless Belsidus brings together the best minds of the Negro race to construct new technology, build a Temple of Love religion drawing on Ancient Egypt, conquer Africa, and defeat Europe. Belsidus's 'redemption' of Africa, however, is oppressive as it mercilessly punishes and kills those suspected of betrayal, installs Belsidus as dictator, and even imposes new diets and cultural practices on local African populations. Thus, a form of "authoritarian collectivism," identified by Moses as a pattern in black nationalist politics, appears throughout the text. Surely part of it is justified in this fantastic tale because of the extreme conditions against Belsidus and blacks across the world in the 1930s, but in some sense, Belsidus resembles the Barclay and the Americo-Liberians he overthrows. Viewed in that light, one can see how this novel was clearly influenced by Garvey, as well as possibly influenced Elijah Muhammad and perhaps Sun Ra, not to mention earlier 19th century black nationalists and the redemptionist narrative of Africa within Africana thought. As entertainment, this "hokum" of Schuyler's is irresistibly exciting and one can forgive some of the lapses in chronology or sequence. My only real question is, what was going on in the West Indies? Does the Black Empire of Africa plan on liberating the West Indies and India? Delegates from those parts of the world come to Kakata at the novel's conclusion...

Creative Conflict in African American Thought

"Douglass may be claimed by nationalists like Molefi K. Asante as a symbol of militant black messianism, or by George Will as a representative of some vaguely imagined, and yet to be glimpsed, color-blind society. Perhaps one reason for our continuing fascination with Douglass is the amorphous quality of his symbolism. He seems to encompass the continuing ambivalence of black men in America with respect to many issues, including separatism, integration, Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, and male-female relationships."

Wilson Jeremiah Moses is now one of my favorite historians. A specialist on black nationalism and African-American intellectual history, Moses is blessed with a great wit and accessible style that articulates how and why African-American history, black nationalism, and philosophy matters. Both of these two aforementioned strengths are part of Creative Conflict in African American Thought. Indeed, by placing Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Du Bois, and Garvey into a broader realm of US, European, and African thought, one sees the importance and innovative character of their ideas and contradictions. Instead of confining these black historical figures to the intellectual ghetto, Moses excels in depicting their contradictory ideas and relationship with the intellectual waves in Europe and the United States. One cannot understand Du Bois without Hegelian idealism, nor can one understand Crummell without understanding Hamilton and the Cambridge idealists. 

Even Booker T. Washington comes out of this as a far more complex and intriguing figure in black history and thought, possibly predating Weber and other white writers on issues related to religion, Protestantism, and wealth. Moreover, by emphasizing the internal contradictions and competing ideas entertained by these intellectuals at various moments in their lives, the reader gains a deeper understanding of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. In fact, the nuances of their contradictions actually ameliorate some of the rather disturbing trends of black nationalism, such as the authoritarian collectivism mentioned in Moses's Golden Age of Black Nationalism. Seeing the parallels of Christian redemption, Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, and fundamentally undemocratic political ideals expressed by a variety of writers from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Jamaica (Garvey), and the US invalidates quick conclusions on New World black nationalists in relation to Africa. 

As for the above video, it's only relevant to one section of the text, a few chapters on the amazing bundle of contradictions encompassed by Frederick Douglass. Racial spokesman, amalgamationist, abolitionist, opponent of black emigrationism, proponent of Afrocentrism or racial mysticism connecting blacks with Egypt, Frederick Douglass's life is far more engaging than the deified narrative ingrained into our heads through Black History Month specials. In a sense, the decision of Moses to embrace the messy contradictions of these prominent African-Americans is reminiscent of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, as well as a challenge to some of the easy or misguided interpretations on the left and the right. 

The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925

"Black nationalism assumes the shape of its container and undergoes transformations in accordance with changing intellectual fashions in the white world."

As someone with a casual interest in African-American politics, history, and black nationalist "fringe" organizations such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Five Percenters, the Nation of Islam, and Malachi York's various outfits, and the black women club movement, I have long heard about Wilson Jeremiah Moses and his lauded work on black nationalism. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 lives up to the hype. Everything that ties together Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism, the "authoritarian collectivism" of Farrakhan, allegedly fascist tendencies of Garveyism, and black emigrationism is explained quite succinctly by Moses. The Ethiopianism strand of thought in African-American Christianity infuses all forms of black nationalism examined by Moses, and clearly has lived on despite the Islamic veneer of the Moors and Nation of Islam. All of these things, also explained in an interview by Cedric Johnson as black nationalism reflecting dominant trends in European philosophy and science of the time, prove beyond a doubt that black nationalism, black separatism, and notions of black identity cannot be understood as existing in a vacuum. 

Like the Haitian elite intellectuals who turned to folk culture under US Occupation, US African Americans turned to an embrace of the black lower classes around the time of the Harlem Renaissance, both cases indicating how shifting European opinion on the superiority of Western civilization led to primitivist phases and likely pressured Haitian and African-American intellectuals to embrace aspects of the lower classes and their culture, often based on essentialized notions of race and "blackness" in the case of African-Americans. Indeed, Moses book is Pan-African in scope, including West Indian and African black nationalists like Blyden and Garvey in his analysis, although Haiti or Latin American black nationalism is neglected, for the most part. 

More disturbing of an enlightening experience, Moses argues that James Theodore Holly, drawing on messianic and 'Anglo-African' Protestant black nationalism, believed African-Americans were necessary to guide Haiti to progress, much like Crummell, Garvey, and many more US black nationalists espoused a rather condescending vision of Africa and believed in their own role to improve or civilize Africa. These aspects of black nationalism, authoritarian collectivism, imperialism, and elitism, survive in varying forms today, but clearly illustrate some of the inherent problems with transnational black collaboration in the past. For instance, I always viewed Holly as a positive example of African-American solidarity with Haiti, but the religious, ethnic, and class biases of African-American black nationalists who ventured to the Caribbean or West Africa certainly poke holes in Pan-Africanism. Perhaps sentiment and skin color alone cannot forge meaningful politics or solidarity, certainly not any of the black nationalism modalities as defined by Moses. In addition to these problematic aspects of black nationalist projects of the 19th and early 20 centuries, troubling and religious understandings of black poverty and black family structure essentially paved the way for E. Franklin Frazier and Moynihan's troubling conclusions on the black family and black women, another indication that black nationalism is not, as Moses writes, invariably leftist or progressive. 

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

"To the extent that I focus on the sources of radical decline, this study is written against the grain of the prevailing vindicationist trend in the literature on Black Power radicalism."

Reading Cedric Johnson's Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics reminds one of Adolph Reed. Both Johnson and Reed share a leftist perspective, both scholars are critical of racial identity politics, and last, but certainly not least, both lament the decline of practical, everyday relevance of the sectarian leftists to the "masses." In fact, Johnson's Revolutionaries to Race Leaders is quite similar to Adolph Reed's Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era, and the two texts complement the other. Johnson and Reed persuasively connect the Jim Crow past, civil rights advances, and the post-segregation era of black politics in a direction that reveals the limitations of Black Power discourse and "unity without uniformity" thinking. For that reason, in an age when popular black memory of Black Power often obscures the shortcomings of black nationalism, and a current wave of identity politics has resurfaced, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders is an important, but challenging read for those in my generation who have lionized the activists and intellectuals of the zenith of Black Power in the late 1960s and 1970s, from Baraka and Carmichael to Malcolm or Newton.

If "Black America" is not a real corporate entity, and the divergent interests of African Americans could not be silenced or cast aside in the name of "black unity" or black nationalism, due to class, regional, gender, and political differences, then why continue to pursue a race-first agenda that falls apart? Johnson's critical overview of Harold Cruse's work on black nationalism, Amiri Baraka's significant work as a proponent of Black Power, and the various Black Power conventions and organizations, such as the African Liberation Support Committee or the 1972 Gary convention, analyzes how each failed, in part, for reasons described by Adolph Reed as Black Power embraced ethnic politics and elite brokerage instead of retaining a democratic base and practical relevance. The sectarianism of the "scientific socialists" described by both scholars, for example, Marxist-Leninists wings of the ALD, and the cultural nationalists, too, were vanguardist, elitist despite democratic rhetoric, and unable to challenge the New Right, the transition to the Corporate City, or the inherent restrictions of organizing based on race alone. 

Particularly relevant to today is the peril of sectarianism and racial essentialism among cultural nationalists, rooted in prewar notions of race as culture and a poor understanding of culture, often leading to a fictitious "blackness" to organize around. Some of this disturbing essentialism is common among certain identitarian circles and organizations, leading to poor understanding of race, culture, identity, and building practical coalitions. Some, despite the not-so-recent past, for instance, still prefer to organize based on explicitly racial lines because multiracial coalitions or alliances or ideas and theories from "whites" are considered unacceptable, or they seek to ignore class differences in the name of a presumably homogeneous "blackness." As a casual observer of the Left, the vanguardist strain remains ever-present, too, often culminating in minor organizations vying for influence and recruitment but mired in arguments over the Russian Revolution, Castroist Cuba, petty ideological differences as a premise for engagement, as well as a failure to collaborate or form alliances. 

As for black politics today, we are still plagued by these lingering ideologies from the Black Power era, and the current movements and campaigns based on race leave me uncertain yet optimistic at heart. I see disturbing trends among overt identitarians that leave one wondering if it is 1968 instead of 2015. That said, surveys and other evidence on political behavior of 'Black America' does suggest some general, progressive hope which means black 'nationalism' can remain useful. Glen Ford from the Black Agenda Report has talked about Black America as the most left-leaning group in the US, the most "Scandinavia-like." Johnson's commentary on the 1972 Black Agenda from Gary and subsequent convention agendas or programs belie this point, which suggests, to some extent, race-based politics and bringing together the mostly progressive, left social democratic orientation of most African-Americans may be politically useful, particularly in the labor movement or anti-imperialism. One can also see, maybe light at the end of the tunnel in aspects of  'Black Lives Matter,' the Fight for Fifteen, and other struggles connected to the daily, lived experience and practical needs of people.

From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964

Millery Polyné's From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964 manages to examine U.S. African-American-Haitian collaboration and solidarity through the lens of Pan-Americanism in a variety of fields, such as international relations, economic uplift, black nationalism, tourism, dance, and education. In some ways quite indebted to Plummer's work on Haiti and U.S.-Haiti relations (as well as reminiscent of her work on the role of African-Americans in shaping US foreign policy), Polyné introduces the reader to several interesting figures who shaped African-American relations with Haiti, and in turn, U.S.-Haitian relations. Pan-Americanism as an important area for the African Diaspora of the Americas also has relevance here.

Moton, Barnett, Lavinia Williams, Frederick Douglass, etc. all shaped US relations with Haiti in important but understudied ways. Black nationalist sentiment, African-American sincere belief in US-centered Pan-Americanism (but critical of white supremacy and imperialism), and Haiti's legacy as a testament to black freedom motivated U.S. African-American involvement with Haiti, but due to the aforementioned motivations, sought to improve Haiti's economic and political turmoil from the late 19th century to the rise of Duvalier. Although I felt the chapter on Douglass was initially overly long in its coverage of Douglass's support for annexation of the Dominican Republic in the 1870s, one can see that chapter's relevance to later chapters of the text (specifically, some of the shortcomings of African-American Pan-Americanism that favored U.S. rule or capitalist development under inter-American policies dominated by the U.S.).

In the case of some African-Americans, inter-American relations were further weakened by a reluctance to criticize sovereign black leadership abroad, as in the case of Claude Barnett's influence in the U.S.'s black press and a refusal to repudiate Duvalier (something Polyné refers to as a nadir of African-American-Haitian relations). African-American deviance from Anglo-American Pan-Americanism, however, is another important theme in the text that illustrates how African-Americans have played a significant role in challenging US imperialism. In addition, African-American Pan-Americanism faced the economic constraints of the Great Depression (which undermined business initiatives connecting African-American capitalists and Haiti, though the success of Major R.R. Wright's investments in coffee and the African-American pilot, James O. Plinton, in starting a small airline and laundry service in Haiti demonstrate important examples of how African-Americans with capital and skill contributed to Haiti's economy, albeit not helping much with the rural sector).

Nonetheless, African-American dancers (Lavinia Williams, Haitian dancer Destiné, Moton, and Walter White (of NAACP fame) played an important role in promoting Haiti's tourism industry and cultural heritage (by bringing 'discipline' to folkloric dance, capital and advertising in tourism, and commissions to recommend changes in education during U.S. Occupation (besides uncovering and disseminating news of racial oppression, violence, and economic disaster under U.S. rule). African-American criticism of the paltry aid given to Haiti during the early Duvalier years, calls for increased investment, debt relief, cultural programs, defending Haitian sovereignty (exemplified by Douglass during the negotiations for the Mole St. Nicolas) and appreciation for Haitian history (as well as other forms of solidarity and intellectual exchange, such as cultural, literary, and Pan Africanist programs and movements) indicate additional ways African-Americans have shaped US-Haitian ways for the better.

Carlos Cooks: Dominican-American Garveyite and Black Nationalist

Carlos Cooks, a Dominican-American black nationalist who influenced much of radical Harlem back in the day. He reminds me of Arturo Schomburg as one of those rare Afro-Latinos who moved to the US and became a part of various forms of Black intellectual and political circles in New York. This faithful Garveyite designated Garvey's birthday a black holiday, helped organize buy black campaigns in NYC (although an African-American Muslim called the "Black Hitler" by Jews who accused him of anti-Semitism also shaped 'buy black' consumerism in Harlem by organizing boycotts of white-owned stores in Harlem), influenced Malcolm X and shaped various forms of Pan-Africanist organizations and ideals. 

It really shows one how transnational and transcolonial Marcus Garvey's UNIA was in the circum-Caribbean world, probably spreading to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Central America through West Indian workers (and from them to New York, where Caribbean immigrants have shaped black resistance and radicalism since the early 1900s. 

Sources:

http://moorbey.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-contributions-of-carlos-a-cooks/

http://unapologetically-black.tumblr.com/post/5921374218/carlos-a-cooks-the-ideological-son-of-marcus-mosiah

http://unapologetically-black.tumblr.com/post/5921374218/carlos-a-cooks-the-ideological-son-of-marcus-mosiah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xwhv9oqXNs

Malcolm, the Nation of Islam, and Haiti

Check this out. Who knew there was a significant influence from a Haitian on Elijah Muhammad via Theodore Rozier! Also, I always wondered why Haiti was conspicuously absent in Malcolm's speeches, or in the Nation of Islam. Perhaps that deserves further inquiry?

African-American Settlers in Boyer's Haiti

Estimated destinations for African-American settlers in Hispaniola under Boyer's rule, 1818-1843. This is based on low estimates of a total of 6,000 free African Americans rather than the high estimate of perhaps 13,000. Many if not most of these African-Americans returned to the US due to cultural differences, religious differences, and a lack of interest in agriculture (or lack of support). Map taken from here.

I recently re-read Sara C. Fanning's thought-provoking "The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans' Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century," which can be found here. Fanning also wrote a fascinating thesis that goes into great detail on interests of Haitians and African-Americans in supporting the emigration plan, particularly regarding Boyer's government's interest in US recognition as well as other economic and social factors that pushes as many as 13,000 African-Americans to settle in Haiti. I shall return to her thesis for a future post on the fate and experiences of African-Americans who did immigrate to Haiti during Boyer's presidency. Anywho, here are some interesting facts one can 'gleam' through  Fanning's article. 

1. One of the many reasons free African-Americans were interested in Haiti and emigration was due to increasing persecution and racism across the United States. States considered legislation that placed additional limits on the movement of free black people. Voting laws were established in places like New York City that disenfranchised the mjaoiry of the free black population. Southern states such as South Carolina passed laws that prevented black sailors from staying in Charleston, decreeing that they must stay overnight in the city's jails at their own expense. Since maritime labor was a large source of employment for free black males living along the eastern coast and major cities of the United States, laws such as this, with obvious discriminatory intent and impact, became another push factor for African-Americans to leave the United States.

2. Another reason African-Americans would have felt an interest in Haiti is the lack of interest and connection to Africa. The American Colonization Society, which included free blacks, white slaveholders and abolitionists, sought to convince free blacks to emigrate so as to rid the US of them, thereby removing a potential influence on other slave population. Haiti, unlike the largely unknown African ancestral homeland, possessed a republican ideology of government, presented itself as a defender of the African race, and its military success against France and other European powers in the Haitian Revolution inspired African-American resistance as well as fueling nascent black nationalism. The notion of a strong, independent black state in the Caribbean with a republican government, progress covered in American newspapers, and a militaristic, black masculinity embedded in Haitian political culture, must have appealed to free black men in the US who were victims of white attacks and racist laws. Indeed, the tale of the Haitian Revolution has a long history of praise and emulation in the US, where African-Americans, slave and free, were proud to be Haitian.

3. The free black Masonic lodges across the US were another source of Haitian interest. Like the Masonic lodges in Haiti itself, a zone of male privilege and politics, Masonic lodges for free blacks provided insurance for the community and social spaces where black men could come together on their own terms. Fanning highlights Prince Hall's A Charge to African Masons, which illustrates solidarity and African diasporic bonds with the people of Haiti. It would be interesting as a field of inquiry in itself to examine how Freemasonry in Haiti and African-American Freemasonry intersected. Indeed, the first New York African Mason Lodge opened under the name Boyer Lodge, after Jean-Pierre Boyer of Haiti. 

4. The policy of Haitian states pushing for African-American immigrants goes all the way back to Dessalines. Dessalines offered American ship captains forty dollars per immigrant. Such a policy is understandable given a desire to repopulate the island after perhaps a quarter or more died in the Haitian Revolution. Petion and Christophe also saw African-Americans as a potential source of manpower, repopulation, special skills, and manning naval ships. Paul Cuffee, Jr., also traveled to Haiti in 1812 to participate in the Haitian market, another instance of prominent free blacks engaging in trade as well as serving upon Haitian ships. 

5. Christophe had Prince Saunders, a prominent free black educator and son-in-law for a while to Paul Cuffee, actively working to bring African-Americans to Christophe's kingdom. Petion, on the other hand, tried to entire African-American immigrants through his constitution, which granted citizenship to any descendant of Africans or Indians after residing for one year. Under Boyer, the Haitian state made the most progress in attracting African-Americans, through Haytian Emigration Societies and propaganda in the person of Jonathas Granville, speaking to black audiences while promising land, agricultural tools, wages, freedom of religion, and paying for the passage of emigrants. As many as 13,000 African-Americans would come to Haiti in the 1820s due to Boyer's government's propaganda and the high place of Haiti in free black communities' thoughts. In fact, several prominent African-Americans supported the plan, such as Richard Allen, Peter Williams, and James Forten. Prince Saunders would stay in Haiti and serve under Boyer, too. Allen's son migrated to Haiti for a while, but returned when economic conditions were less favorable for the manufacturing industry. 

Boyer's acceptance of an absurd debt to pay France for recognition, the enactment of the Code Rural, high prices of food, cultural differences, lack of government support and land distribution as well as the collapse of coffee exports in the 1820s led to many African-Americans deciding to return home. In addition, Fanning's thesis claims that perhaps as many as 4000 African-Americans concentrated in and around Port-au-Prince rather than being more evenly distributed throughout the island. Such an overconcentration given the lack of appropriate resources and government aid, as well as anger directed at Americans for a smallpox epidemic, would have made things tense for African-Americans. If only Boyer had renegotiated the treaty with France, supported education, established a shipyard in Samana (where the only recognizable community of African-American descendants survives, in today's Dominican Republic), and given more support for immigrants' control of their own mobility, then perhaps many if not most of these African-Americans with needed skills would have stayed. They could have manned Haiti's naval ships, helped establish some manufacturing and textile industries, brought Haiti into closer ties through trade with free blacks in the United States, and, presuming Boyer also did not cut off trade with neighboring Caribbean islands, aided Haitian economic expansion and trade in the Caribbean and beyond. Oh well, what I want to know at this point is the influence of African-Americans from the 1820s who stayed in Haiti and lived through Boyer's wrong-headed rule. 

The Genius of Spike Lee: Remembering School Daze

Spike Lee's School Daze is a classic in black film. Like most of Spike's 1980s output, I highly recommend this film to anyone interested in true black film (not Tyler Perry). This film is focused on a HBCU college in the South during the 1980s, at the height of anti-apartheid movements on college campuses and the struggle for funding that many HBCUs find themselves engaged in. Moreover, the film looks at colorism, class, and internal racial conflicts amongst African-American college students. In addition, Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel Jackson, the light-skinned black woman from Martin, Jasmine Guy, and Laurence Fishburne star in this film, alongside Spike Lee playing a nerdy character entering a fraternity. The film also explores particular African-American cultural traditions such as stepping, music, and the conflict between college-educated blacks and those unable to attend.

This particular clip features dark-skinned, natural hair black women competing with light-skinned sistas who straighten their hair. The beautiful jazz song was composed by Lee's father, Bill Lee, a jazz bassist who has also played with folk legends such as Bob Dylan and Odetta. The choreography is also well done and these women are dancing their hearts out. The true genius of this song, whose lyrics were composed by Spike, is the strong black nationalist sentiment woven into the entire film. Lee satirizes light-skinned black women who try to forget their blackness and look down on darker-skinned blacks, using offensive epithets such as "jiggaboo" and invoking the image of the mammy to ridicule black sisters. There is no doubt that Spike Lee sympathizes with us darker-complected Negroes and calls for unity among all blacks while simultaneously arguing against a monolithic blackness.

In Spike's mind, the black student body and administration must wake up, remain united by transcending the petty differences between us, and remain committed to a politicized blackness that maintains the collective racial uplift ideology embedded in the history of HBCUs. Lee's black nationalist ideology demands black self-respect, a dedicated desire to uplift blacks culturally, socio-economically, and doing so on the international level (hence the desire by Fishburne's character's desire for divestment from apartheid South Africa). Lee also wishes to demonstrate the persistence of racial uplift, a prevalent belief and practice among the black Talented Tenth to not forget their roots or the majority of African Americans still struggling.

Now, I have not seen this movie in two years and am now must watch it again. Rediscovering the hilarious "Good & Bad Hair" clip has rekindled my passion for Spike Lee's early work. Indeed, almost all of his early films are great, including She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Mo' Better Blues, etc. It's also nice to see Laurence Fishburne in a black film as well as Giancarlo Esposito's continued relationship with Spike. However, from a New York Times article recently in the paper, Esposito, who is half-Italian, divulged his disagreement with Spike's black nationalist vision and aesthetic. I'm curious to how Fishburne and Samuel Jackson perceive Spike's black nationalist aesthetic and ideology as well, since those are two actors I rarely see in black films. However, I must say that the black nationalist/Afrocentric assumption that all blacks who straighten their hair out of some desire to attain whiteness or distance themselves from their African heritage, though often grounded in truth, are unfair since many African-Americans simply like the style and different hair textures. Thus, it is problematic to call those black women "wannabe" although many of them probably do straighten their hair out of a conscious desire to avoid the pejorative connotations of nappy hair.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/theater/giancarlo-esposito-an-actor-known-for-divergent-roles.html?_r=1

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/spike-lee-project?before=1340985263
This review raises some important problems regarding the patriarchal black nationalist discourse that dominates Spike Lee's film. Though I agree that women in the film are portrayed in such a way that suggests they lack a political consciousness or awareness, whereas the men are involved in things beyond sexuality that include 'real issues' like fighting racism, apartheid, or poverty. I disagree with this writer's statement that the women are not politicized since the Afrocentric and Afro-headed women clearly have political motives for wearing their hair in a certain style or not. Nevertheless, there is legitimacy to the rather patriarchal world Lee always portrays without really criticizing on its sexism.

Other great scenes in School Daze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zv7Js0HK7s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg8Oq_Sd3Bw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJOsjlXXfVo&feature=related

"Wake up!"