This past weekend I watched the movie School Daze, which was directed by filmmaker Spike Lee. I was curious about it because a few years ago, at the Academy Awards, Lil’ Rel Howery picked certain actors to guess film music trivia, and he asked Glenn Close if she recognized a tune from Spike Lee’s movie, School Daze. She knew what tune it was, and the minute “Da Butt” by EU played, she got up there and shook that fine behind of hers and looked like she was having the time of her life. It was really funny and also just really cool that she got up there and danced to “Da Butt.” So, I was curious about the movie. My dad had seen a lot of Spike Lee joints (movies that Spike Lee directed), and we were talking about School Daze. School Daze came out before I was born, so I didn’t get a chance to see it early on, but I finally decided that I want to catch up on all the movies I didn’t see as a kid.
One part of the film I really love is the scenes with step dancing. The film takes place at a historically Black college between different Greek fraternities and sororities. I remember seeing a step team perform at my high school one time, and the dancers on the team were on FIRE. It was so epic to watch, and each time they stepped and hollered, I really wanted to get up and dance. There is also an episode on the web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae where J and CeCe attend a Halloween party at the office they work at, and instead they find that the new boss (and J’s nemesis) Nina is planning to hold them hostage, and Nina leads a team of Black female step dancers called Gamma Ray. I didn’t know if it was supposed to be funny at first, but I saw the scenes in School Daze where the fraternities are dancing and chanting “Gamma” over and over again, and so I figured there was a connection between Awkward Black Girl and this scene in the movie, and sure enough, the Halloween episode of ABG was adapted from the movie School Daze.
The movie also addresses the issue of colorism. Colorism is a huge issue in African American communities, and I didn’t know much about it until I started taking African American Studies classes in college. Colorism is “discrimination based on skin color within the same racial or ethnic group” and it dates back to slavery, where lighter-skinned Black people were treated differently than darker-skinned Black people were. There is a belief that lighter skin enables people to gain greater access than darker skin. I don’t really know how I fit into the colorism debate, because I am Black, but people have also told me I look like different ethnicities. In the movie, the female sororities are divided by skin color, and in a musical number they argue over whether lighter skinned Black girls’ hair is more socially acceptable than darker-skinned Black girls’ hair. I remember watching this documentary by the actor Chris Rock several years ago called Good Hair, and in the movie, Rock explores the significance of hairstyles in the Black community and what is considered to be socially acceptable or attractive hair both within the Black community and outside the Black community. There have been many instances where Black people have had to cut off their dreadlocks or have faced discrimination in the workplace due to their natural hairstyles. I remember growing up and sometimes my teachers (most of them white) would ask if they could touch my hair, which I would either keep in an Afro or style in braids. I understand they were curious, but after learning more about racial discrimination and microaggressions in college, I don’t look back on those moments with much fondness. It’s interesting, though, because some of the other Black girls in my school would comment “You should straighten your hair.” In sixth grade, another Black girl in my gym class looked at my braids, which often got fuzzy, and said, “Hmmm…you should straighten your hair.” Another young Black girl in my sophomore year of high school told me, “I think if you straighten your hair, it will look pretty.” I’m not against straightening my hair, but to be honest, I like my curls.
The film was directed in the 1980s and attitudes towards women, especially Black women, were more outdated (not saying sexism doesn’t exist anymore, because it totally does.) There is one scene where the fraternity members make fun of Spike Lee’s character, Half Pint, for being a virgin, and the leader of the fraternity tells Half Pint that he needs to lose his virginity to a girl in order to be accepted into the fraternity. Even though he doesn’t want to, Half Pint goes along with it because he would become an outcast if he said no, and he really wants to pledge with this fraternity. The frat brothers end up hooking him up with one of the popular girls, and she doesn’t want to have sex with Half Pint, but the men coerce her into doing it. (At this point, I wasn’t sure if it was right to even call this scene consensual sex because the girl didn’t want to have sex, and she felt humiliated afterwards.) We have more discussions about date rape and consent, I think because we have more communication channels through which people can share this information about these very important topics. I didn’t understand the difference between sex and rape until I got on Facebook in 2017 during the #MeToo movement on social media, and I saw a post that said that “Rape is not sex. It’s rape.” I at times would conflate the two, not understanding that rape isn’t consensual. But after reading this post, I decided to educate myself and become more aware.
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