Gamma phi gamma school daze

Toni Cade Bambara

“Programming with School Daze

Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara starts her essay with a discussion of the production challenges Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) faced before it was released.

One of the issues the film exposes is color bias in the Black community. Colorism is considered “dirty laundry” as its something that many African Americans do not want to discuss.

School Daze portrays the pageantry of historical Black colleges; its spectacle link to the homecoming celebration. Limited focus on the classroom.

Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara notes that “confrontations between the [four] groups are theatrically stage 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.” (11)

Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara notes that a great deal of the struggle African Americans have had in America is the fight over the “rights to literacy and autonomy and further that the educational institutions we have built are repositories for much of that history.” (11)

She posits that the film links itself to the Fanonian concept that when we internalize the enemy doctrine of supremacy, we jeopardize the liberation project.” (12)

Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara views the four groups in a hierarchy with the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, that “defend tradition at Mission and to perpetuate the prestige of their fraternity.” Da Fella desire to change to transform the campus through their anti-apartheid work. (12)

Toni Cade Bambara

For the women, the Gamma Rays are next in the hierarchy and they derive their power from “their ‘preferred’ looks (light complexions, wave jobs, tined contact lenses) and their position as the sister order of G Phi G.” These women are expected to maintain the frat. “Their labor is indispensable to the maintenance of the frat, they are not.” They are basically groupies of the frat. (12)

Toni Cade Bambara

Da Naturals are the working class, darker complexed Black women at the bottom of the Mission College hierarchy. As Bambara notes we learn the least about them and they seem “unorganized with no discernable agenda.” (12)

Bambara argues that “the film’s agenda to make a wake-up call is undermined by its misogynistic and gay-hating sensibility.” (12)

Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara understands School Daze as a musical but not in the old MGM sense of the word. She notes that “it is not ‘good news’ on campus that Daze is singing and dancing about. More it at stake at Mission than whether Grady (Bill Nunn) makes a touchdown. The college is being held hostage by the ‘old money’ robber barons.’” (13)

Toni Cade Bambara

Lee exposes the challenges faced by many historically Black colleges regarding their finances. During the late 1980s, several students across the U.S. protested their colleges financing the apartheid system and demanded they divest university funds from that country. Notice that at Mission, the threat is the appearance of telling rich people what to do with their money.

Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara views on of Lee’s signature visuals is when people are in one another’s face. She argues Lee creates ‘face” through close-ups and it creates an intimacy between the “filmmaker, film, and spectator.” (14)

Toni Cade Bambara

In spite of the film’s shortcomings, Lee is highly regarded by disparate groups; some are in complete opposition to one another. Bambara believes that what connects these groups is the “hunger for images” and “Lee’s accomplishments.” Moreover his diverse audience “speaks to the power of the films and the brilliance of the filmmaker.” (15)

In this film and others, Lee often cast a mix of veterans, newcomers, and performers known in other media (Ozzie Davis, Darryl Bell, and Branford Marsalis)

Toni Cade Bambara

Though Bambara and others feel that Lee’s success “helped to create a climate of receptivity for Black filmmakers in Hollywood,” it seems that it was only a phase for the industry.

See NYT article, “‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ‘90s Speak Out” - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/movies/black-directors-1990s.html

Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara observes that the portrayals of women is very limited in this film. The Gamma Rays and Da Naturals have several interactions but their “behavior never varies; they sling color-hair insults, but nothing develops.” There is no exploration of how Black have internalized beauty standards that devalue/dismiss blackness.

Toni Cade Bambara

While Bambara’s argument that Half-Pint was seduced and corrupted is compelling, how do you feel about her view of Jane being ambitious?

Bambara exposes “disturbing patters” in Lee’s films. In Lee’s book, Uplift the Race, he wanted the frat members to run a “train on Jane.” This is gang rape and the way Lee writes it seems very nonchalant. This dismissive language is similar to how he constructs Nola’s rape. In Lee’s other films, Bambara cites several instances of sexism and violence against women.

Toni Cade Bambara

As the film winds down with an examination of the associations between sharecropping in the U.S. and the apartheid system in South Africa. We also see the class conflict between Da Fellas and locals at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The film ends with Dap urging his classmates and campus leaders to wake up.

Toni Cade Bambara

School Daze and A Different World (1987 – 1993) most likely contribute to an increase in enrollment in historical Black colleges and universities.