Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  Cousin Claude was reading Du Bois as well, who in 1948 had just been bounced for the second time in fifteen years from the NAACR Cousin Claude took to waking us up at night for our opinion of Dr.’s divided-self proposition: should we invest our time, energy, money, and African genius struggling to become first-class citizens in an insanely barbarous country whose majority despises both us and our efforts to humanize the place; or should we gather our genius together and create a society of our own, in this country or someplace else? Not an elder yet, Cousin Claude could be told to get lost and let us rest. But being a Daniels, he never cid.

  III WHITE SIGHT AND THE BEE IN THE HEXAGON

  When I first ran across Dr. Du Bois’s passage as a girl, I had a problem straightaway. It conflicted with what I’d learned early on through sight. Several, to prove their loyalty to America, enlisted and helped kill Japanese and other members of the Axis powers. I can’t say for sure whether he said those volunteers manifested the gravest forms of White sight or not, because we mostly liked to talk about the Japanese-American battalions and African-American units that liberated the German concentration camps and how the State Department was determined to keep the participation of colored people secret. So in the newsreels we only saw White heroism. It was propaganda designed to promote White sight, we instructed each other.

  Frenchy, a neighborhood friend whose bio homework I used to do in exchange for safe passage through the neighborhood, especially through Morningside Park, was a member of the Chapmans and used to refer to a moment in gang rumbling as white sight. Say you’ve been cold-cocked from behind. Your eyeballs commence to roll up in your head like they’re seeking asylum in the mass of neuromelanin surrounding the pineal gland. You definitely need to get to Sydenham or Harlem Hospital. You could have brain damage. You could die.

  According to Dear Diary, I’d been at camp shortly before reading the passage in Souls of Black Folk, and bees were very much on my mind. So while I was reading about the affliction of viewing the self from an outside and unloving vantage point, Dr.’s “veil” began to take on the look of one of those wood-frame screens beekeepers slide down into the apiary so as to collect the honey from the caged-up bees. Dr.’s seventh son sounded like he needed to see a healer, a seer, someone whose calling was to pierce that screen that somebody, who clearly does not wish the seventh son well, shoved down split the self, because they wanted his sweetness. And his eyes.

  By the time I read the passage again, I had experienced enough to know that I needed my eyes, my sweetness, and my stingers. I did not know, though, that I’d already become addicted to the version of the world and my community as promoted by Hollywood movies. I merely noticed that race movies, like race records, were no longer on the scene. But I did not fully appreciate that my celluloid jones made me as up for grabs as a sleeping bee. I interpreted “twoness” as the split-vision struggle I thought I was valiantly waging to stay centered in the community’s core-culture perspective and at the same time excel in the schools and various chump-change workplaces. I got poleaxed. I got sandbagged and sanpakued. I got stuck in the mask. I lost my eyes. I became unmoored.

  But blessed, as many of us are, I never left the gaze of the community; that is, folks did not avert their eyes from me. And so I did not stay caged up long in secondary consciousness (Dr. says second sight) or false consciousness (as opposed to primary consciousness, or what Dr. calls true self-consciousness); at least not chronic not-consciousness-hood. For in the community, then as now, were at least four discernible responses to the way in which we are positioned in the U.S.: accommodation, opportunism, denial/flight, and resistance. Long before I learned to speak of these responses as “tendencies,” I encountered the living examples, neighbors.

  Accommodationists recommended that I read (not to be confused with analyze) White we-are-great books and Negro we-too-are-clean-so-please-White-folks-include-us-in works, and that I speak good English and stay off the streets. Opportunists taught me how to move through the streets and capitalize on the miserable and gullible, ’cause what the hell, the point was to beat Whitey at his own game, which was, don’t you know?, taking off Black folks. The I-have-never-experienced-prejudice-in-the-all-White-school-and-church-I-attend types urged me not to regard as belligerent every racial encounter, for there were good White people if I looked hard enough and overlooked some of their ideas. All of which was helpful for “breaking the ice” at camps, integrating ballet schools, “proving” we were not what Dem said we were. Of course, many of us did not understand then how dangerous a proposition proving could be. James Baldwin put his mighty mouth on it a bit later, though talking to Dem: “If I’m not who you say I am, then you’re not who you say you are. And the battle is on!”

  While others saw in me an icebreaker, a lawbreaker, or a potential credit to the race, neighborhood combatants saw something else and spent a great deal of time, energy, and imagination encouraging and equipping me to practice freedom in preparation for collective self-governance (the very thing Hoover and the Red Squads called a danger to the national security—Black folks thinking they had the capacity to rule themselves). I became acquainted with Black books that challenged, rather than mimicked, White or Negro versions of reality. I became acquainted with folks who demonstrated that their real work was creating value in the neighborhoods—bookstores, communal gardens, think tanks, arts-and-crafts programs, community-organizer training, photography workshops. Many of them had what I call second sight—the ability to make reasoned calls to the community to create protective spaces wherein people could theorize and practice toward future sovereignty, while at the same time watching out for the sharks, the next wave of repression, or the next smear campaign, and preparing for it.

  Insubordinates, dissidents, iconoclasts, oppositionists, change agents, radicals, and revolutionaries appealed to my temperament and my earliest training at home. They studied, they argued, they investigated. They had fire, they had analyses, they had standards. They had respect for children, the elders, and traditions of struggle. They imparted language for rendering the confusing intelligible, for naming the things that warped us, and for clarifying the complex and often contradictory nature of resistance.

  Through involvement in tenants’ actions, consumer groups, and other community-based activism, I began to learn how and why an enterprise prompted by an emancipatory impulse might proceed in the early stages as a trans-form-as-we-move intervention but soon take on an assimilationist character. The original goal might be to oust the slum landlord and turn the building into a co-op. But soon rank-and-file men are complaining about the authority exercised by the women officers. Founding members are opting for historical privilege, arguing that their votes and opinions are weightier than newcomers’. More solvent members begin objecting to the equal-shares policy of the association and start calling the less than solvent chiselers and freeloaders. Finally, everybody’s got it in for the elected chairperson. And nobody trusts the treasurer. Then there’s a purge, a splintering, or the hardening of factions. And each falls back on the surrogate lingo: “Same o, same o, niggers just can’t get it together.”

  The situation, in some respects, is worse in these days of Dallas and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Bigger-is-better and grassroots-ain’t-shit drive many a budding organization to grab any ole funding in order to enlarge. Say a community organization comes together in response to a crisis government agencies ignore. For a while folks operate in the style of the neighborhood culture. But soon they begin to duplicate the very inequities and pathologies that gave rise to the original crisis: setting up hierarchal structures that cut less aggressive members out of the decision-making process. Underdeveloping the staff in favor of the stars. Deferring to “experts” whether they live on the turf, share the hardships, and understand the conditions or not. Devaluing the opinion of the experienced because they are less articulate than others. Smoothing over difference and silencing dissent in the name of unity.

  Sometimes
the virus in the machine is the funding, or a clique with a hidden agenda, or the presence of agents provocateurs, or media seduction. Most often the replication is the result of the failure to build a critical mechanism within the organization, the failure to recognize that close, critical monitoring of process is necessary in order to overcome the powerful pull domination and demonizing exert in this society. That is to say, we often underestimate the degree to which exploitative behavior has been normalized and the degree to which we’ve internalized these norms. It takes, then, a commitment to an acutely self-conscious practice to be able to think and behave better than we’ve been taught by the commercial media, which we, addicted, look to for the way we dress, speak, dance, shop, cook, eat, celebrate, couple, rear, think, solve problems, and bury each other.

  Fortunately a noncommercial media exists. Independent-minded students, teachers, parents, fund-raisers, spectators, readers, theoreticians, programmers, curators, and practitioners are increasingly drawn to the independent media movement—the films and video, in particular, produced outside of the industry structure. The Independent Black Cinema Movement and now the Independent Multicultural Media Movement are generally made up of progressive-minded POCs who wage a battle against White sight, disconnectedness, indoctrination, assimilation.

  POCs, for example, who have challenged White privilege over language have been producing in the last fifteen years books, films, videos, radio formats, poetry, performance art, sculpture, paintings, audio programs, criticism, theory, dramas, at a rate not previously recorded. It is more than a “heritage of insult,” as Dr. often phrased it, that draws POCs together to organize neighborhoods, devise curricula, convene conferences, compare notes, collaborate on projects, or form coalitions. Frequently the moves are motivated by acknowledgment of multiple cultural heritage or biraciality. Sometimes they are compelled by a hunch that the answers to questions of identity lie in another’s culture. Sometimes alliances are sparked by a determination to understand what is going on in this country that doesn’t reach the nightly news or the campuses. As David Mura, Amero-Japanese writer in Minnesota, has frequently said, POCs find in the cultural work of other POCs what they can’t find in the Saul Bellows and Updikes, or in Descartes and Plato.

  Unfortunately it is not always easy to locate independent film programs mentioned in the quarterly Black Film Review, the Asian Cinevision newsletter, Independent Film & Video journal, or the publications put out by the Latino Film Collaborative and the Native American Broadcasting Consortium, or the National Black Programming Consortium’s Take One. It’s no simple task to locate the periodicals themselves, Independent being the only one that is found with any regularity in well-stocked book and magazine stores.

  What’s particular about this new crop of films and videos? For one, they don’t flatten out cultural specificity in favor of “crossover.” What is observable about them of late is the awareness that POCs are part of the authenticating audience. What might that mean in the future should artists of, say, the Chicano/Chicana community direct their work with Native American readers or spectators in mind? For one, it would probably mean the end of victim portraiture, the kind of characterization the down-pressed frequently engage in when addressing “the wider audience,” as is said, based on the shaky premise that if only Dem knew the situation they would lighten up. Victim portraits are an insult to those struggles. Victim portraits send a dispiriting message to one’s own constituency. What might happen if, say, Amero-Africans pitched our work toward Pacific Islander readers and spectators? We’d have to drop the Two-Race delusion, for one. What is and can be the effect of this swap meet, now that one out of every four persons in the U.S. is a POC? A reconceptualization of “America” and a shift in the power configuration of the USA.

  SCHOOL DAZE

  We heard four things about School Daze during the spring of 1987 when Forty Acres and a Mule Film-works was still on location in Atlanta: that it was a musical, that it was tackling the subject of color caste in the Black community, that it had an antiapartheid theme, and that it was in trouble. The description was interesting: the bad news, of serious concern. In cases of studio-backed independent projects in trouble, Hollywood executives usually make the panicky decision to cut the elements that originally made the work compelling. Examples of films gutted of social relevance, formal innovations, or both are legion. That School Daze is not one of them is fortunate. Alert to the film’s potential for countering the positive-images school’s assertions that color bias played out decades ago and that “dirty laundry” is best kept in a lidded hamper anyway, community workers who use film in our practice were relieved by the late summer communiqué that School Daze was out of the woods. Programmers of independent film and video began planning how to use the new film to facilitate analyses of intracommunity dynamics.

  One of the many valuable things shared in the multiple-voiced casebook Uplift the Race: The Construction of School Daze by Spike Lee, with Lisa Jones, is how to hang tough when beset by problems—the loss of critical location sites, the persistence of badmouthing rumors, severe plunges in morale, and competition with a production paying better rates for student extras. A Columbia Pictures executive dropped in for a mere minute, then went home satisfied. And the production team brought the film in for a February 12, 1988, release. To the screen came a good-looking, ambitiously mounted, imaginatively designed production characterized by a bold mix of both dance and musical idioms and performatory and acting styles.

  Set at a southern Black college during homecoming weekend, School Daze takes a seriocomic look at caste, class, and gender contradictions among four rival groups of students: Da Naturals, the Gamma Rays, Da Fellas, and the frat members and pledgees of Gamma Phi Gamma. “West Side Story with an apartheid twist,” quipped a student DJ on WCLK radio in Atlanta. Whether the remark was facetiously or reverentially intended, School Daze is a house-divided pageant. It is a pageant in the sense that the spectacle inherent in traditional ceremonies and rites of homecoming (parades, floats, coronation balls, inductions into secret orders) provides the rationale for the overall style of the film.

  It is a pageant too in the sense that confrontations between the groups are theatrically staged moments rather than realistic debates about the issues. The disturbances are broken up, either by an intervening character or by a scene shift, leaving the parties unreconciled and the contradictions unresolved. The function of the four groups of students is to enact the divisive behaviors that impede unification of the Black community. The film’s agenda is to make a series of wake-up calls that the punnish title suggests is necessary for African folk asleep in the West.

  The film begins as the Columbia Pictures logo is still on-screen. On the sound track is the Middle Passage: the wheeze and creak of the ship plowing through water, the dip of the oars, the sounding of the ship’s bell. As the prologue’s first visual appears, the familiar black-and-white graphic of the slave ship, the old spiritual “I’m Building Me a Home” begins. Using archival materials, Lee presents a chronicle of a diasporized people’s effort to make a home in the “new world.” Several things are accomplished during the historical unfolding. A faux history is created for Mission College, the fictitious setting that functions as a microcosm. The viewer is reminded that much of our struggle in this land has been about the rights to literacy and autonomy and further that the educational institutions we have built are repositories for much of that history. The film also claims a position for itself in that history. Mission College becomes one of the “homes” alluded to in the spiritual “I’m Building Me a Home.” The emancipatory enterprise, the Black nationalist quest for a collective “home,” is presented from the time of Frederick Douglass to the era of the Black Panther Party. The prologue then segues to an antiapartheid rally, the movie’s opening scene, in which a “Free Mandela” banner waves. As School Daze unfolds, its depiction of contemporary tribal rites is informed by the Fanonian observation that when we internalize the enemy doctrin
e of supremacy we jeopardize the liberation project.

  Colorist, elitist, sexist, and heterosexist behaviors are presented—sometimes with a degree of hyperbole to signal satiric intent—through the four groups that constitute a hierarchy. The Gamma Phi Gamma forces command the most prestige and the most space on campus; also, they receive the most attention in the production (wardrobe, props, variety of settings, musical themes, spacious framing). Their agenda is to defend tradition at Mission and to perpetuate the prestige of their fraternity.

  Committed to some degree to transforming tradition are members of the antiapartheid forces, Da Fellas. Their homes on campus are the shantytown construction, a dorm room, and a second-hand car. Members of this group open and close the film and are the subjects of the longest sequence in the film.

  The prestige of the Gamma Rays is derived from two sources, their “preferred” looks (light complexions, weave jobs, tinted contact lenses) and their position as the sister order of G Phi G. Their agenda is the maintenance of the frat: the Rays clean the frat house, assist the pledgees in their initiation tasks, throw parties for the brothers, and make themselves available for sex. Although their labor is indispensable to the maintenance of the frat, they are not; they are replaceable by other female recruits. For the most part, the Rays speak an odd form of ventriloquy and are treated by the film as well as by the frat as groupies.

  Called Da Naturals in the casebook, Jigaboos on screen, and “Rachel and them” in spectator parlance is the group we come to know the least. Unorganized and with no discernible agenda, these brown-skinned, working-class sisters frequently utter non sequiturs and a variation of the ventriloquy scripted for the Rays. Their “home” is the dorm. Their members loll on a bed, saying, “All men are dogs”; they shout from dorm windows, saying, “All men are dogs.”