Sex sells

Oh no! My friends would tell you “Don’t get her started on ‘School Daze’ because she can talk forever”. I loved it!! I loved every aspect of it. Only Malcolm X exceeds it as my favorite Spike Lee film. I hunted the CD soundtrack down for a couple of years. The Morehouse Glee Club’s “I’m Building Me a Home”, Phylis Hyman’s “Be One”… let me just stop! I cannot say enough about this film and its music. (Although I will agree that the beauty shop scene was a little long as is the song on the soundtrack.)

Although I graduated from a private (90% white) college in the early 90’s, I attended an all black elementary, junior and senior high school and started college at Jackson State University in Jackson, MS (a historically black college). “School Daze” was a representation of my life at the time it came out. I knew people just like every character in the film. Some of the scenes in the film were so real! Like when the girls were hanging out of the dorm windows when Dap was downstairs trying to apologize to his girlfriend… OMG, me and my friends did the same thing from our dorm at JSU over the quad. We used to watch the couples make out, watch them fight, and we would yell out our opinions about what they were doing ~ yeah, I know its wrong now… but back then it was so much fun :o)

I loved Spike for bringing the color hue issue to the mainstream. It’s something that most African-Americans deal with at one time or another, but we act like we don’t want anybody else to know about it. I especially liked the big contrast he made between the Gammites and the dark-skinned sistas. I am a dark skinned woman who is a member of a black Greek sorority that people usually refer to as pretentious. I have been told that I don’t look like I belong to my sorority because I’m not light-skinned. That has always been so funny to me because I came from a multi-hued family. My mother is dark like me, but her sister (18 months younger) is light-skinned. That was because my grandmother was dark like me but my grandfather was light. Her mother (my great-grandmother) was exactly the opposite ~ she was light and her husband was dark. In my family, there was no favoritism showed (as portrayed in the film) because of skin tone.

Okay, sorry, I got off the subject. I don’t know that there really was a main character in the film. I think it was a compilation of intricately woven stories about different college and life experiences of Dap, Half-pint and their friends. Of course only Spike knows what he intended from this film, but what I always got from it was that we as a race need to stop looking at differences in our color. We need to stop defining people as having ‘good’ hair and saying that they are better than others because of it. We need to stop defining those that are members of black Greek fraternities and sororities as better than others because of their ‘secret society’ membership. We need to “WAKE UP” to what is important to black people here in America and all over the world (at the time of the film, divesting from South African businesses was of great importance to bring emphasis to the problems of that region and to the then wrongful imprisonment of Nelson Mandela).

And to the question about “ji__a boos”, that is a derogatory term used in the past by some whites to refer to black people. Yes, it is along the same line as them calling us the n-word. IMO, both words are even more heinous when WE use them to refer to ourselves or each other.

One other thing SIL, did you know that when Spike filmed "School Daze" he seperated the two groups of women who played the wannabes and the jig-a-boos? I remember learning about this in an interview Jasmine Guy did once, and I also saw the following on the movie's IMDB page:

** "Spike Lee had the actors stay in separate hotels during filming. The actors playing the "wannabes" had better accommodation than the ones playing the *beep* which contributed to the on-camera animosity between the two camps."