Spike Lee's defense against racism

I don't think a member of one marginalized group gets the free pass to depict members of another marginalized group in such a way. Too bad he couldn't understand that Jewish people, like black people, face ridicule and persecution for their ethnic background. It's not the same as a bunch of white people being upset at him because he is making fun of what he thinks qualify as white people.

Man, 1990.

Okay, so a little context before I start eating Spike and Hollywood's lunch.

I've been a huge fan of Spike Lee ever since I was a child. You have to understand that, for the most part, he was THE black director.

And no. He wasn't the only black director. And he wasn't the first successful black director working at the same time as he was in films (see: Robert Townsend, Reginald Hudlin). But he was making black dramas with black characters with black issues in White Hollywood and no one was really sure what to make of him because he had no intention of playing games.

Now, what Spike Lee did was create lazy personas based off of bullshit stereotypes in order to convey a sense of a particular music industry dynamic critiqued in his film.

In short, bad, racist filmmaking. What's even more egregious is that he admits that they're not even on screen more than ten minutes...which means they were literally designed to be ciphers, not people.

Was it different than anything Hollywood had always done with black faces who weren't in black movies? No. It's exactly what Hollywood did/does with black people.

And that's the problem.

Now, Spike Lee is most likely right that the focus on his film is because he was THE black director and a lot of people were looking for something to hate from somebody who was making movies about the complexities of the relationships between people who were otherwise treated as secondary characters, and caricatures at that, in their own neighborhoods and lives.

But he made the same damn mistake that Hollywood has done with minority characters in perpetuity.

That said, no one even bothers mentioning the anti-Hispanic narratives in Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive or the oppressively anti-semitic tone of that film (literally, all of the Jews in the movie are greedy, revenge-minded Shylock archetypes and it was only mentioned in the most esoteric of discussions) -- because it stars a very clean-cut white kid and it was directed by a stylish foreign director and the obnoxious stereotypes are actually people with goals and motivations (sorry, casting Jewish people to play Jews is not the bare minimum of decency)...

...

Okay, fuck Drive. A breathtakingly beautiful pile of racist shit.

(Deep breath.)

But Spike Lee's movies rarely star clean-cut white kids (and they never did back then), and he wasn't a foreigner, he was one of the angry oppressed class, so naturally there was an entirely different dynamic in place when he did what American directors always do -- use racial stereotypes instead of actual characters. And that's pretty much unconscionable for someone in his rare position.

Him being black and making racially charged films certainly added a level of scrutiny to his output, but the media wasn't just picking on him cause he's black. They were picking on him because he "went after" jews. There are a lot more Jewish people in powerful positions in Film and Media than black people, and also Jews are (mostly) white and therefore easier to relate to for the majority of the american population (especially back in 1990, which was a really long time ago if you think about it). People felt attacked and reacted by lashing out at him, and unlike black americans they actually wielded the cultural clout to really mess his shit up for a while.

Overall, while I don't think he gets a "free pass" because he's black, he has a very good point that filmmakers have been doing the exact same thing to black folks as long as there have been films, yet nobody's ever had to write an editorial in the New York Times after making a film full of "jive talking drug dealing black dudes."

tl;dr of my opinion:

I love Spike's movies, but he's been doing and saying ignorant shit since the beginning

I think Spike is right that he's subject to more scrutiny because he makes the establishment uncomfortable - there's definitely more of an uproar based around perceived antisemitism than around caricatured portrayals of people of color (I mean, we live in a world where Outsourced ran for an entire season).

Having said that, his critics are right, those were some really uncomfortably stereotypical portrayals. He doesn't get a free pass to perpetuate negative images of Jewish people just because he tries to dismantle negative images of black folks.

Plus, there's plenty of talk about how black people can't be racist- which I agree with, as long as it's against white people.

Wait, what? Racism is racism. Eternally harmful, no matter the circumstances. (Now, it might be more or less harmful dependent on those circumstances, but harm is still harm).

I have a lot of mixed feelings on this article. While Spike does make a good point in the last paragraph that this could be more of an inference on part of the critics because Jewish people were portrayed as a villain (I haven't seen the movie), this does not account for horizontal oppression. Again, I did not see the movie, I don't know how much the stereotype that they say happened actually holds any water so I'm kinda going off his word more than anything.

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