Spike calls for a "rebirth of cool"
Spike urges a smarter kind of coolEducated blacks should be icons, filmmaker tells MTSU audience
By KATE HOWARD
Staff Writer
Published: Thursday, 11/03/05
When controversial filmmaker Spike Lee was growing up in Brooklyn, he said last night, he aspired to be like the educated black men he saw reading books and going to college.
Today the images in society glorified by gangsta rap — pimping and violence — are overtaking the role education should play, Lee said during a lecture at Middle Tennessee State University's Alumni Memorial Gym.
"Young black kids didn't grow up wanting to be a pimp or a stripper like they do now," Lee said of his own youth. "You might think I'm making generalizations, but I don't think I am. That's how serious this stuff is."
Speaking as part of MTSU's second biennial International Conference on Cultural Diversity, Lee had a message that basically was this: College-age students need to take the initiative not only to learn but to make it cool again to be intelligent. His appearance drew two standing ovations from the packed crowd.
"When I was young, cats going to college got as much (love) as the ones who could rap or play ball," Lee said. "Back then, we were not called sellouts for using our brains. And being intelligent was not frowned upon."
The whole world sees the culture that America exports, Lee said, and it's not this country's nuclear weapons that influence the world.
"We are dominant in the world because of our culture," Lee said. "We can control the way people think and talk and dance, and that is how I define power."
Many of hip-hop's heroes amount to minstrel performers in Lee's opinion. The pimping and gangsta personas are what sells right now, Lee said, and rappers may not be wearing blackface, but they are presenting an image of what it means to be black like minstrel shows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Reggie Google, a recent MTSU graduate who was in the audience, agrees with Lee that this image is far from the truth.
"If the record industry puts money behind it and we allow the media to run with it, we end up presenting the image that this is what it is to be black in America," Google said.
Michelle Carter, a senior psychology major at Fisk University, said she agrees with Lee's message that hip-hop is dominating the vision of who black people are.
"You can't look at rap and hip-hop and say, 'That's how black people are,' " Carter said. "Not all of us are like that."
Lee said that his body of work, from his debut film She's Gotta Have It to Malcolm X to the documentary he's working on about Hurricane Katrina, intend to show just the opposite: the breadth of diversity of the black experience.
"We do not all think and talk alike, and I've been struggling to get that message through Hollywood," Lee said. "And I will continue to bring that message." •
Published: Thursday, 11/03/05