Are Lee’s Joints About Racism?
So on Tuesday we discussed what Lee’s films were actually about. Professor Parham indicated to us how a lot of people assume that Lee’s films are about race, but we arrived at the conclusion that this is not the case because while Lee’s films are (mostly) filmed with entirely black casts, they do not themselves focus on the problems of race interactions, but rather the power differentials between people. We were then promptly unable to argue that Lee’s films are about racism. I’d like to take a shot at it.
I proposed in class that Lee focused more on power plays than anything else, and for a lot of his films, such as School Daze, Mo’ Better Blues, and Red Hook Summer, this is true. The film does not actively focus on a problem that arises specifically because of race. They do make appearances, but they are not central to the film. The one film we did not pay much attention to, and that I neglected in my evaluation, was Do the Right Thing, wherein power is quite explicitly derived from cultural status.
I have heard it said that racism originally arose as a means to justify the horrors of slavery. If this statement is true, then racism and power are inherently linked as one entity, and thus we must view Lee’s films as implicitly about power and race simultaneously. The statement above indicates that racial separation was originally created as a means of enforcing a power differential, and thus addressing the power plays addresses the history of those relations.
2 comments on “Are Lee’s Joints About Racism?”
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passing blog 2
- Thomas Sutpen and James Gatz
- “They have a better service attitude than humans”
- Equilibrium! (knowing = being)
- Virtuality + Performance = Human Check
- “Passing” by Langston Hughes
- “Mourning and Melancholia”
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- “Refiguring Bodies” and the Limitations of Language
- Foucault and the Panopticon
- Black Like Me
160.472 
You’re absolutely right. Racism is just another means for someone to exercise power over another person who they’ve arbitrarily claimed is different, let alone ‘lesser,’ than they are. However, I think this power dynamic actually appears in a lot of the interactions between black and white people throughout Lee’s films, not just “Do the Right Thing,” i.e. the white board members and black administration in “School Daze” or Delacroix and Dunwitty’s relationship in “Bamboozled.”
Building upon this argument, which is historically true (racial separation as a construct to justify power structures of enslavement), Summer of Sam becomes a movie explicitly about race in its absence of Black figures. I haven’t seen the movie, thus I don’t know if whatever narrative the characters are engaged in gives a sense of a greater power structure that inherently excludes Black/Latin@ people and thus the movie becomes even more so about race in that way, but one doesn’t have to even go as far as thinking about the construction of racial identities (as I was arguing in class) to see how a movie solely containing white people is about Black people. Simply the fact that a Black director made a movie containing only white characters speaks to the absence of Black characters and why those absences exist. Spike Lee being the creator is important, though, as the Hollywood standard would allow for an all-white cast or at best a mostly white cast and the movie wouldn’t be read as being about race.