Jane gives Rachel a long, hard look. She then flips her hair at Rachel and the Gamma Rays follow suit.
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1
New Bourgeoisie, Old Bodies
Performing Post–Civil Rights Black Privilege in Tar Baby and School Daze
“Your first yalla?” [Gideon] asked. “Look out. It’s hard for them not to be white people. Hard, I’m telling you. Most never make it. Some try, but most don’t make it.”
“She’s not a yalla,” said Son. “Just a little light.” He didn’t want any discussion about shades of black folk.
“Don’t fool yourself. You should have seen her two months ago. What you see is tanning from the sun. Yallas don’t come to being black natural-like. They have to choose it and most don’t choose it. Be careful of the stuff they put down.”
—Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
This script takes place at a fictitious, predominantly Black college in the South. The student body is divided into two factions: the Haves and the Have-Nots. This division is based upon class and color. The Haves, the affluent students at Mission, are all with light skin, “good hair,” blue or green eyes, and so forth. While across the tracks are the Have-Nots. They are dark, have kinky nappy hair, and many of them are the first members of their families to ever get a college education; in other words, the black underclass.
—Spike Lee, “A Note” prefacing the script of School Daze
When African American narratives from the 1980s take up the matter of class privilege, they frequently make recourse to the trope of a black body infiltrated by whiteness. Consider Lawrence Otis Graham’s revelatory book about the African American elite, Our Kind of People, in which Graham describes his experience of a college party by outlining the hierarchy of skin color and hair texture that structured the campus’s black social scene:
With long, streaked, straight—or straightened—hair flying behind them, the Sisters of Ethos were running in and around the tall French doors, inspecting college IDs as they approved or turned away male partygoers who either passed or failed the ubiquitous “brown paper bag and ruler test.” . . . As I circled the room, I saw reminders of my childhood. The “dark outer circle” was very much apparent. . . . [It was] where one found the geri-curled [sic] guys and the dark-skinned women with “bad hair” and bad weaves.1
Graham differentiates baldly between the bodies of the light-skinned, straight-haired women at the “creamy center” of this culture of privilege, also literally the gatekeepers at its doors, and those of the group on the periphery.2 This corporeal distinction is one of aesthetics but also one of social class. Those bodies that most visibly display marks of white ancestry seem, by this logic, to have a special claim upon intraracial class privilege. Or, in Graham’s words, “it was a color thing and a class thing. And for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together.”3
Graham attends to a particular history of black American affluence, one tied to intraracial distinctions rooted in slavery and to the rule of hypodescent that has governed definitions of blackness in the United States since the seventeenth century.4 Significantly, most of Graham’s examples have to do with the female body, highlighting that what Harryette Mullen calls the “color capital” of the miscegenated body has particular consequences for women and, indeed, that gender structures the way that such capital is evaluated.5 In the elite black world that Graham describes, the materiality of the body has always been central; its shades and textures matter, in specific and historically predictable ways. Indeed, the corporeality of class status, for Graham, has to do with not simply aesthetic manipulations of the body, such as hair styling and straightening, but the raw text, so to speak, of the body itself: skin and eye color, the hair’s “natural” kink or wave.6 Of course, these two concepts are related; the perceived success of aesthetic manipulation often depends on how accurately it mimics the “natural” appearance of miscegenation. Graham emphasizes this even in his description of the Sisters of Ethos, with use of the word “straightened”—this term implies heating or chemically processing curly hair to achieve a flat texture that some possess by birth. Even the mention of “bad weaves” implicates the Sisters. Presumably, some of them sport “good” weaves, undetectable precisely because they approximate the “long, streaked, straight” hair of the most privileged.
But while the figure of the privileged black subject as a corporeally whitened one draws upon historical realities with contemporary consequences, it also reflects a problematic assumption about which bodies are classed and, indeed, about what material privilege signifies for African Americans. It should go without saying that bodily marks of miscegenation are not reliable indicators of black class privilege, even as they have taken on figurative meaning as classed signs. While a “mulatto elite” with roots in the U.S. domestic slave system may be the foundation for the black elite that Graham describes, Karyn Lacy reminds us that this elite saw their standing, which was based on “ancestry,” diminish significantly in the early twentieth century as they were supplanted by “black professionals and small business owners, the parvenu.”7 Lacy goes on to note that “educational attainment” set this “emerging black middle class apart from the mulatto elite,” an effect that became even more pronounced in the years between the world wars, when far greater numbers of blacks began to attend historically black colleges and universities.8 Rather than completely erase the “mulatto elite,” however, these demographic shifts had the effect of merging the two groups, as educated and successful “monoracial black men” married “women from the mulatto elite,” solidifying their middle-class status.9
Thus the representation of the black bourgeois body as a “whitened” body has had, at least since the early twentieth century, a complex relationship to the actual, lived experience of the African American middle class, with many individuals who identify as such conforming imperfectly, if at all, to the miscegenated bodily model. This explains, perhaps, why some of the Sisters of Ethos in Graham’s anecdote wear “straightened” rather than “straight” hair—and why their application of the “ubiquitous” brown paper bag and ruler tests of skin color and hair texture involves, rather counter-intuitively, “inspecting college IDs.” Indeed, this attention to university pedigree as a form of elite inclusion, signaled by the “ID” as a physical and documentary totem of membership, actually points to higher education’s role as a site of class formation in the United States, something social scientists have long acknowledged.10 Historically, education has functioned as both a “vehicle for upward mobility,” enabling a “transition from working class to upper middle class status,” and, for those who are already materially privileged before attending college, as “a means of further distinguishing [oneself] from the [lower] classes based on the quality and reputation of the institution attended.”11 As Tressie McMillan Cottom points out, “At heart, higher education is a means both of redressing socioeconomic inequality and of perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities in new guises.”12 For the Sisters of Ethos, then, the inspection of college IDs likely serves as a far clearer and more predictable means of policing class-based boundaries than any examination of ambiguous, and as I have noted, frequently manipulated, bodily markers would.
Graham, however, seems to take the evidently murky link between “color and class” as fairly literal, assuming a correlative relationship between “darker, less affluent, less popular, and less attractive.”13 His uncritical reliance on the penetrated-by-whiteness metaphor for black privilege highlights the unreliability of his narrative and indeed points to the larger unreliability of autobiographical writing; as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have noted, autobiography, rather than offering verifiable history, “incorporate[s] usable facts into subjective ‘truth.’”14 So I open with Graham’s narrative because it offers readers a parallel insight—parallel, that is, to those of avowedly fictional black narratives—into how class has been imagined in post-soul African American expressive culture.
As a kind of constructed storytelling about race, gender, and class, Graham’s narrative becomes even more intriguing when we consider, as I noted early on, that his anecdote takes place in the early 1980s, a moment when the contours of the black middle and upper classes were changing yet again—when, indeed, these classes were expanding dramatically in the wake of Civil Rights advances.15 Because the gains of the previous two decades granted ever larger numbers of blacks access to education and white-collar employment, the 1980s emerge as an unprecedented period of transformation for the black bourgeoisie. The historical association of bourgeois status with a particular kind of miscegenated black body thus becomes, in these years, an even more unlikely indicator of class privilege.16 Yet fictional representations of the black middle classes in the 1980s continued a long tradition of associating class privilege with a “whitened” black body, even as that connection was frequently drawn in much more ambivalent ways than in years past. These representations challenged the notion that an increasingly complex and nuanced social body, the expanding black bourgeoisie, might be reduced to simplistic, and literally corporeal, narratives of light-skinned privilege and dark-skinned exclusion; they continued, however, to tie class privilege to the trope of a black body penetrated by whiteness, even if only symbolically.
Symbolic penetration: here we arrive at the larger stakes of this class metaphor.17 If it is hardly remarkable that black class privilege historically has been associated with a particular kind of body—after all, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, following Bakhtin, have pointed out that both the (white) bourgeois body and its working-class complement have specific roles to occupy in the social order—neither is it trivial, particularly given the contradiction that such a (black, and bourgeois) body raises.18 This perpetual state of contradiction is what I call the black and bourgeois dilemma, an inherent tension between the visibility and vulnerability of the black body and the covering protection of privilege. After all, the “black” body is typically understood to exceed and be excluded from the bourgeois—indeed, in its excess of embodiment, what Nicole Fleetwood has called “excess flesh,” to personify the subordinated and abject Other.19 By contrast, the (white) bourgeois body—Stallybrass and White’s “classical body”—is invulnerable, constructed as “high, inside and central by virtue of its very exclusions.”20 This presents a problem for the representation of the black bourgeois, a category of identity that, given its internal contradictions, seems constantly in danger of erasing itself. This may explain the ubiquity of the penetrated-by-whiteness trope in early post-soul representations of black class privilege; the fantasy of white corporeal incursion allows putatively “black” bodies to visually approximate the classical standard. Yet if taken to its logical conclusion, this trope also raises the problematic question of just where such “penetrated” bodies’ loyalties lie—with an Othered blackness, or with the material privilege that would erase that Other’s traces?
In this chapter I juxtapose two very different cultural texts from the 1980s—Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel, Tar Baby, and Spike Lee’s 1988 feature film, School Daze—in order to theorize the shifting relationship between class and embodiment for black subjects in the post–Civil Rights era, and ultimately to illumine how both novel and film explore the sometimes contradictory relationships between race, gender, and class for black bourgeois subjects. As I noted in the introduction to this volume, my use of the terms “middle class,” “class privilege,” “black bourgeois,” and the like, while informed by sociological understandings of class as primarily economic, also relies on the notion of class as culture—the sense that for African Americans, social class historically has been shaped by less “objective” markers, such as aspiration and, in William Muraskin’s words, “social perception.”21 Further, my interest in reading class as bodily performance shapes my analysis of these texts. As andré carrington has recently noted, “the presentation and reception of distinguishing features makes the body meaningful in racial terms,” such that “qualities typically described in terms of ‘ethnicity’ might be reconsidered as performance.”22 Diana Taylor’s suggestion that performance is a kind of epistemology, that indeed “embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing,” also informs my assertions here, as does the black feminist concept of intersectionality, deliberately attentive to what Valerie Smith has described as “the contingencies, differences, and discontinuities upon which identities and consensus depend.”23
Throughout this chapter I am interested in how Tar Baby and School Daze unpack such contingencies, differences, and discontinuities, particularly as they surface in the arenas of class, race, and gender. In distinct but often overlapping ways, Morrison’s and Lee’s works appear to delimit the sprawling problematic of post–Civil Rights intraracial class conflict by containing it within the body of a light-skinned black woman (and her darker-skinned antagonists). In this, both texts draw upon the same figurative association between class privilege and the whitened black body that we saw in Graham’s reductive autobiographical narrative. Yet Morrison’s and Lee’s texts also contain moments that productively undercut this oversimplification, using darker-skinned (and sometimes male) characters to point us toward another way of thinking about the relationship between black class status and corporeality—namely, how and why bourgeois subjects, particularly in a post–Civil Rights moment, might wield the particular “blackness” of the body against the homogenizing effects of privilege.
Tragic Mulatta Reconsidered
The trope of the “tragic mulatta” in the African American literary tradition can be traced back to William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), and as Eva Raimon points out, in its earliest incarnations this figure “provides a central literary site for black and white antislavery writers to work through questions raised by the highly charged subject position of mixed-race persons in antebellum society.”24 Particularly in the antebellum moment, the mulatta is, as the word’s feminine ending indicates, gendered female; womanhood and its associated “sexual vulnerability” do important rhetorical work, instantiating the mulatta’s particular tragedy.25 Yet as we consider a modern or postmodern update of this figure—even as the racial detritus of the antebellum moment continues to circulate within and, to some extent, shape our present one—the mulatta’s privilege, a privilege tied specifically to her light skin and other bodily markers of “amalgamation,” becomes a central part of how she is understood.26 The “tragedy” of the post–Civil Rights era tragic mulatta—and as may be obvious, here I assert a rough metaphoric equivalence between “light-skinned black woman” and “tragic mulatta,” in spite of the fact that not all light-skinned women are of mixed parentage and vice versa—is a tragedy well tempered by a host of apparent advantages.27
Thus one way that we might reconsider the trope of the “tragic mulatta,” in the post-soul moment, is as a figure caught between not two racial identities but between two very different experiences of her skin color—the pain of exclusion and the pleasure of privilege. Toi Derricotte articulates this contradiction in her poignant memoir, The Black Notebooks, confessing that she has felt “superior to other blacks” because of her appearance but noting also that “just as there is an internalized picture of a hated and feared dark person, there is also a picture of a hated and feared light woman, and she looks like me.”28 This archetypical light-skinned black woman has historically been “hated and feared”—as well as admired and envied—because of a perceived association with the politics and unearned privileges of whiteness.
Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby, which until recently had not received its due in critical attention, evidences what at first appears to be a similar kind of logic vis-à-vis social class.29 Jadine, the book’s female protagonist, is light-skinned and, seemingly by extension, an internationally known fashion model with a degree in art history from the Sorbonne and a certain disdain for black culture (she “lik[es] ‘Ave Maria’ better than gospel music,” and Charles Mingus “puts [her] to sleep”).30 At one point in the text, Jadine’s fair complexion is likened to the color of “a natural sponge” (131).31 While few of Tar Baby’s critics have commented directly on Jadine’s skin color, many have responded to the embrace of European culture that seems to accompany it. In much criticism of the novel, Jadine has been read as an overwhelmingly negative character, a textual representative of a destructive Eurocentricism, intraracial self-hatred, and estrangement from black authenticity.32 This reception of Jadine is certainly gendered; as Trudier Harris notes, “Our negative reaction to Jadine . . . is predicated on [our] inability . . . to applaud the traits she has when they appear in feminine guise.”33
Not all critics of the novel have read Jadine as quite such an obvious villain; some interpret her in far more neutral terms, describing Jadine as “cosmopolitan,” “post-essentialist,” “post-enlightenment,” and “transnational,” merely one of an equivalent “plurality of perspectives.”34 These interpretations in part reflect critics’ increasing attention to the postmodern black subject and their accompanying recognition of intraracial differences, including those of class, that complicate “black” identity. These concerns seem paramount to Morrison herself; indeed, it is no coincidence that Tar Baby is the only one of Morrison’s earlier novels set in its own present moment—other volumes in Morrison’s twentieth-century oeuvre take varying levels of historical distance from the periods in which they are written—suggesting that the issues Morrison tackles in Tar Baby have contemporaneous relevance. And as Judylyn Ryan notes, in a novel purportedly “about” social “‘contentions’ between Black women and Black men,” these contentions “fall largely outside the parameters of gender(ed) relationships or heterosexual romance, and within the domain of class antagonisms,” signaling the text’s broader interest in “connections between the ‘conflict of genders,’ ‘cultural illness’ and class conflicts.”35 Through Jadine, Morrison signifies on precisely the changing contours of black community in the post–Civil Rights era and the related expansion of the black middle class to which I alluded at the start of this chapter. Yet my interest lies less in the specifics of Jadine as postmodern (female) subject and more in Morrison’s deployment of the corporal proximity/political complicity relationship implied in the trope of the tragic mulatta—a trope to which Jadine’s character clearly alludes.
Morrison’s text emphasizes that Jadine is very light-skinned, so light that after two months of tanning she is only the pale gold color of a sea sponge; in addition, Jadine does not “have to straighten [her] hair” (48). These corporeal characteristics seem meant to imply that Jadine has significant European ancestry, perhaps even a white parent. Indeed, Morrison’s depiction of Jadine’s appearance so convincingly suggests racial admixture that more than one scholar has described Jadine as “mulatto.”36 Yet Tar Baby also gives every indication that Jadine is not actually of mixed parentage, that her parents are both black Americans. Sydney and Ondine—servants to the retired candy heir, Valerian Street, and his much younger wife, Margaret—are Jadine’s uncle and aunt, who raised her after her parents’ deaths (118). Jadine is Sydney’s “brother’s baby girl” (283), and Sydney, Jadine’s closest living relative, is the reddish-brown color of “mahogany” (35). Jadine’s mother is never directly described, and certainly could be the source of Jadine’s fair skin and straight hair, but it is clear in the text that she is not a white woman, given her appearance in one of the narrative’s central images of black womanhood: the cadre of “night women” who haunt Jadine when she visits Son’s southern birthplace, the all-black town of Eloe (258).37
Instead, Tar Baby’s Jadine seems to be noticeably light-skinned for no reason that can be linked to her immediate ancestry. Unlike Clare Kendry or Janie Crawford before her, for Jadine there is no obvious white man in the woodpile.38 Not literally, at least. But of course, Jadine does have a white “parent” of sorts. Valerian Street, who is Jadine’s patron, functions in the text as a kind of surrogate father, though their relationship recalls the way that white men have, historically, produced but not actually fathered black children.39 This connection is particularly fitting given the ways that Valerian’s actual heir, Michael, is paralleled with Jadine in the text. Michael is perpetually absent from the Street family table, fleeing his mother’s clinging devotion and her prior abuse (209), rejecting his father’s wealth by embracing socialism, while Jadine willingly occupies his place and supplants him in the daily routine and affections of Valerian and Margaret—she “sat next to [Valerian] more alive and responsive and attentive than even his own wife was” (204). Jadine accommodates Valerian in this way in spite of the fact that to do so she must be, literally, served by her own family.
Jadine, then, is light-skinned not so much because her body has been infiltrated by whiteness but because her mind has been. Morrison represents Jadine’s racial alienation symbolically, via her skin color, using a familiar trope of black class privilege to signify Jadine’s material advantages through her corporeal proximity to whiteness. In her portrayal of Jadine, Morrison anticipates and addresses issues of intraracial difference, particularly around class, that have continued to surface in other post-soul black fiction, including work by Danzy Senna, Reginald McKnight, and Michael Thomas, among others—all of whom tackle the problem of the black bourgeois subject through the vehicle of the body. Earlier than any of these texts, Tar Baby literalizes Jadine’s cultural and social proximity to whiteness in her body; Jadine’s body must be penetrated by whiteness for Morrison to adequately signify the character’s class aspirations and her racial indifference.40 By using light skin as a purely symbolic marker of Jadine’s racial alienation, Morrison’s post–Civil Rights era text updates the historical notion that privilege infiltrates and “denaturalizes” blackness—or, as Gideon, also known as Yardman, claims in this chapter’s first epigraph, “Yallas don’t come to being black natural-like” (155).
Morrison’s Jadine might seem to be the author’s comment on the newness of the post–Civil Rights black subject, but Jadine’s relationship to this new, postmodern black subjectivity is wedded to a much older link between physical whiteness and socioeconomic advancement. Indeed, Tar Baby suggests that Jadine’s privileged status has as much to do with the plantation system that empowered the earliest versions of the black elite as it does with the educational and occupational opportunities that were created by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.41 After all, Jadine owes her success almost entirely to Valerian’s willingness to finance her expensive private education, not to, for instance, the free public institutions that she later urges Son to attend (267). It is hardly coincidental that Son describes Jadine’s departure from the Street household as an “escape from the plantation” (219). Ironically, Jadine in turn sees Son as a kind of racial relic, noting when she first encounters him that “she had not seen a black like him in ten years. Not since Morgan Street [in Baltimore]” (126). “After that,” for Jadine, is boarding school, college, and then travel to Europe, graduate study at the Sorbonne, and in each place “the black people she knew wanted what she wanted. . . . [W]hatever their scam, ‘making it’ was on their minds and they played the game with house cards, each deck issued and dealt by the house” (127). The repetition of “house” here, with its racialized connotation of “house Negroes,” brings us back to the plantation and the question of how whiteness historically has intersected the privileged black subject—marked here not by economic standing but by aspiration, diverse dreams of “making it.”
What if, however, we reconsider Son as a “new” black subject? His character is typically read as the embodiment of modern (read: traditional) black identity.42 This reading of Son as a kind of textual representative of black authenticity is tied closely to his positioning as an itinerant, working-class figure, a country boy (158) whose only ambition in life is to recover his “original dime” (169). Morrison gives us clues, however, to how we might read Son’s class position as well as his racial subjectivity in more complex ways. Not only does Tar Baby point to the racialized and gendered resistance behind Son’s ambivalent relationship to white-collar employment and middle-class conformity—he “had two semesters of Florida A and M” (262) but considers anything but hard physical labor “teenager’s work” (262) or the work of black men “turn[ed] . . . into white men” by ambitious black women (270)—but through Son’s character the text highlights, as well, the limits of romanticizing both black labor and black poverty.
Son’s involvement with Jadine complicates his nostalgia for what he remembers as an uncorrupted black Eden (Eloe), existing outside Western hierarchies of value: “She had given him back his original dime, the pretty one, the shiny one, the romantic ten-cent piece, and made him see it the way it was, the way it really was, not just a dazzling coin, but a piece of currency with a history rooted in gold and cloisonné and humiliation and death” (299). Son had wanted “some other way of being in the world” (166), a path of fugitivity that would sidestep this history, and which he finds as a literal fugitive from the law after killing his first wife, during “eight homeless years” as part of “that great underclass of undocumented men” (166). Yet Son’s return to so-called civilization and his love affair with Jadine, a “heavy, grown-up love” that makes him feel especially vulnerable—“fresh-born, unprecedented, surrounded by an extended present loaded with harm” (218)—precipitates a moral and existential crisis for him, as he recognizes his own newly drawn implication, however unwitting and contingent, in the social structures he has sought to escape. I argue, then, that Son might best be understood as a postmodern rather than modern subject, one whose desire for and pleasures in blackness war with his provisional but persistent infiltration by privilege. Indeed, in raising the possibility of this other kind of “new” black subject, Tar Baby also anticipates the class and color politics of Spike Lee’s feature film School Daze, released some seven years later—which similarly begins with, and then undercuts, a black (female) body penetrated by whiteness as the cultural representative of black class privilege.
New School, Old Guard
In this chapter’s second epigraph, a note included at the start of the script for School Daze, Spike Lee makes clear his interest in telegraphing intraracial class hierarchy through phenotype, and the legendary “Good and Bad Hair” musical number, arriving less than thirty minutes into the film, seems to reinforce this point. Of course, while Lee’s written note is pointedly free of gender references, implying that these on-campus Haves and Have-Nots are both male and female, the “Good and Bad Hair” scene takes place in a stylized, even surrealist beauty salon and stages a lengthy fantasy battle between warring factions of black women. Lee’s film thus seems to imply, in Wahneema Lubiano’s words, that “aesthetics [are] formal matters of physical appearance in which women only participate.”43
In the same essay, Lubiano goes on to assert that “School Daze is incapable of making the connection between what the men do and what they are showing as their aesthetics.”44 Lubiano’s assessment of School Daze is consistent with an overall negative critical response in the film’s contemporary moment. Critics writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Spike Lee’s popularity as a filmmaker had reached a kind of cult status, repeatedly disparaged this particular film, and Lee’s oeuvre in general, as simplistic, essentialist, misogynist and homophobic.45 Though I acknowledge the truth of these critics’ appraisals of the film, in what follows I reclaim Lee’s film as a productive site of intraracial class discourse; despite the film’s flawed sexual politics, it offers an important analysis of black class hierarchies and the complex relationship between privilege and embodiment. As Toni Cade Bambara notes, this analysis is couched in pageantry, which structures not only the film’s plotting and characterization but also shapes its address of the socioeconomic and political discord that the film effects, “in the sense that confrontations between the groups are theatrically staged moments rather than realistic debates about the issues.”46
Viewed from a twenty-first-century vantage point, in which these moments of pageant-like staging might be mined for performative (as well as “performatic”)47 meaning, School Daze offers insightful commentary on the aesthetics of intraracial class politics. Counter to earlier critics, I would argue that this includes ample reference to male aesthetic performance. For instance, the homogenizing, militaristic sameness of the “light-skinned and husky” Gammites (pledges to fictional fraternity Gamma Phi Gamma), as well as their clean-shaven heads, advances a particular aesthetic message.48 In the “pass the pussy” scene on the back steps of the frat house, when the Gammites chant this phrase at Spike Lee’s “Half-Pint” character, their bald heads glowing uniformly yellow in the diffuse glare of the streetlight overhead certainly speak to the ways that male “Wannabees” also conform to skin-color hierarchies. Not coincidentally, given the ways that light-skinned as well as middle-class black men have been associated with effeminacy, this conformity takes place at a moment of sexual policing, indicating the imbrication of racial, sexual, and class identity as expressed on and through the body.49 The ambiguous chant “pass the pussy” emphasizes the Gammites’ performative participation in male heterosexual desire, even as it underscores the roots of that desire in homosociality and communal consumption of the female body.50
Lee’s film offers a number of similar points of entry for analysis of male aesthetics and embodiment. But we need not dismiss the relevance of the women’s aesthetic debate in the film simply because it addresses issues of “beauty” that apply uniquely to women’s bodies. Instead, I would like to reconsider the “Good and Bad Hair” scene in School Daze as a moment of theoretical richness, one that tells us something about not just the “Wannabes” but the “Jigaboos” as well. In particular, I am interested in how we might think about the Jigaboos as privileged bodies, classed precisely in their performance of “naturalness” and their theatrical acceptance of the “nappy.” Before turning to a closer reading of this scene, however, I want to consider a couple of related moments in the film that, perhaps even more so than the light-skinned, straight-haired female “Wannabees,” raise the specter of the old black elite in School Daze. Placing these moments in dialogue with similar exchanges in Tar Baby will allow us to see where Lee’s film reiterates and where it exceeds the “yalla”/“black” dichotomy that Morrison’s novel raises.
Writing about the 1960s, Cornel West suggested in 1984 that “the young black student movement,” which produced the politicized young blacks that would energize the Civil Rights era’s black nationalist stage, “was not simply a rejection of segregation in restaurants . . . [but] was also a revolt against the perceived complacency of the ‘old’ black petite bourgeoisie.”51 This latter group, overwhelmingly reactionary in outlook, finds its fictional counterpart in Tar Baby’s characters Sydney and Ondine and its filmic representatives in School Daze’s “Wannabee” Julian as well as in the college’s administration: President McPherson, played by actor Joe Seneca, and chairman of the board of trustees, Cedar Cloud, played by Art Evans.
Morrison’s character Sydney, who describes himself as a “Phil-a-delphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same name” (163), sees Son, by contrast, as a “stinking ignorant swamp nigger” (100). When Son, post haircut and bath, goes to the Childs’ private servant quarters to apologize for the stir he caused in the household, Sydney deliberately positions himself as Son’s social superior, using the material and educational markers of class to make the point: “My people owned drugstores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one of you from the other” (163). Notably, Sydney uses achievement rather than ancestry to highlight his class superiority, showing himself to be a more recently arrived member of the black bourgeoisie than the “mulatto elite” that Jadine’s character references.52 Yet his oblique reference to African scarification practices suggests that Sydney sees not only Son but all non-U.S. blacks as faceless “primitives,” indistinguishable because they supposedly exist outside of Western systems of value—an attitude borne out, as well, by his and Ondine’s dehumanizing reference to Gideon as “Yardman.” There is obvious overlap, here, with School Daze, and Julian’s dismissal of Dap’s activism on behalf of campus divestment from South Africa as “bullshit,” insisting that “without question we are all black Americans”; he concludes the confrontation with, “I am from Detroit—Motown. So you can Watutsi your monkey-ass back to Africa if you want to.”53 In this scene, Julian emphasizes his own, and Dap’s, Americanness in order to dismiss any perceived connection between Mission students and blacks elsewhere in the world. As Lubiano notes, for Julian “‘Blackness’ originates in and is concerned with United States geopolitical sites only.”54
In Tar Baby, the absurdity of this self-righteous adherence to cross-national, intraracial hierarchy explains Valerian Street’s decision to invite Son to dinner in the first place; the white man thinks to himself that “when he saw . . . Sydney and Ondine looking at the prisoner with faces as black as his but smug, their manner struck him as what Michael meant when he said ‘bourgeois’ in that tone that Valerian always thought meant unexciting, but now he thought meant false, but last night he thought meant Uncle Tom-ish” (144). While the “willfully innocent” (243) Valerian is hardly in a moral position to judge his servants for their bourgeois complacency, his social standing—outside and literally above the black class hierarchy that Sydney and Ondine so value—makes his observation fitting. As Morrison emphasizes, the positioning of everyone in the Street household—Sydney and Ondine in the servants’ quarters, Margaret, Jadine, and later Son “up there” (100) in the main wing—is at Valerian’s behest, solely a function of his whim as white patriarch.
Similarly, in the case of the fictionalized Mission College, members of the white Snodgrass family, whose wealth founded the institution and continues to support it, are the invisible powers-that-be who, behind the scenes and off-camera, pull the strings of the college’s board of trustees and, by extension, its president. Given the long-standing relationship between white philanthropists and many historically black institutions, we might read President McPherson as another representative of the old-guard black elite whose power and status are “granted” by whites and who are therefore seen as reactionary by the new, more radical black middle-class students that West identifies. In School Daze, Dap is one of these radical students, chastised by the administration for staging public campus protests demanding the institution divest from South Africa.
Both Lee and Morrison represent the bourgeois old guard as darker skinned, perhaps to remind us of the complex history of black class privilege in the United States and thereby to unsettle the retrenched cultural association between embodied whiteness and class status. Yet the metaphoric association of class privilege and the black subject infiltrated by whiteness seems, if anything, at greater stake for these bourgeois figures in Morrison’s and Lee’s narratives. In both Tar Baby and School Daze, the old-guard black bourgeoisie and their analogues—which, as I have already noted, include the supposedly “new” Jadine—are loyal to whiteness, penetrated by its bourgeois investments figuratively if not literally. Hence Sydney and Ondine uncritically protect Valerian’s property as if it were their own, and Jadine appears more devoted to her white patron than she is to her black flesh and blood, more willing to be pet than “daughter” (282).55 In other words, for Morrison and Lee this version of the black bourgeois subject, occasionally dark-skinned, is inhabited by whiteness in subtler and perhaps more insidious ways.
Tar Baby and School Daze differ from a number of other African American texts of the period, however, in that they take seriously the possibility of a black bourgeois subject who resists such co-optation; in both cases, the black body is crucial to this resistance project.56 Thus in the final section of this chapter I want to reconsider a few crucial moments in Tar Baby and School Daze—moments that signal another way of conceptualizing the relationship between the body and bourgeois status for the post–Civil Rights black subject.
Undoing Privilege: The Black Body’s Return
Here, then, I return to the “Good and Bad Hair” musical number, one of the most commented-upon set pieces in Lee’s film. We might note, to start, that both the Wannabees and the Jigaboos as groups of actresses are diverse in terms of skin color.57 The very language of the song that the women sing emphasizes this: “talkin’ ’bout good and bad hair / whether you’re dark or you’re fair.” Hair, a phenotypic marker that can be manipulated far more easily than skin, thus becomes the primary battleground for the two groups—signaling that this conflict is an aesthetic one, based in performance rather than genetic inheritance. In other words, Lee’s commentary on intraracial class hierarchy, when reexamined, allows us to think further about how “blackness” and “privilege” intersect beyond the body’s literal penetration by whiteness.
The dialogue preceding the song and dance illuminates this more clearly. After encountering one another in the dormitory corridor, lead Gamma Ray, Jane, and Rachel, the lead “Jigaboo” and Dap’s girlfriend, have the following confrontation, surrounded by their fellow “Jigaboos” and “Wannabees.” I reproduce the stage directions and dialogue from the original script, because in this instance, with one exception, they do not deviate from the recorded version:
Doris: It’s not real.
Dina: Say what?
Lizzie: You heard.
. . .
Rachel: It ain’t even real.
Jane: You wish you had hair like this.
Doris: Girl, y’know you weren’t born with green eyes.
Lizzie: Green contact lenses.58
In the filmed version of this scene, “blue” eyes and contact lenses replace “green,” likely an ad lib by the cast member playing Doris (Alva Rogers) but possibly also a pointed shift away from reference to the miscegenated black body. As Derricotte notes, green eyes, not blue, are a “hybrid characteristic—sign of the islands.”59 The switch to blue, whether deliberate or not, thus reinforces the possible falseness of the eyes’ appearance. As such, by questioning whether the “Jane” character’s light eyes and long, sandy blonde hair are “even real,” the conflict emphasizes that the Wannabes make a choice to style themselves as “whiter” looking. Unlike Morrison’s Jadine, whose material privilege is literalized and naturalized within her body, the Wannabees construct their privilege by manipulating the external appearance of their bodies in pointedly unnatural ways—similarly, perhaps, to those Sisters of Ethos who wear “straightened” rather than “straight” hair.
More important for my purposes, however, this exchange reminds us that the Jigaboos, too, have choices and exercise a particular kind of class prerogative in embracing their “naps.” The Jigaboo’s choice to wear her hair “nappy” is a narrative instance of what I might call the black bodily return—an assertion or insertion of the “natural” body within the context of class privilege that is meant precisely to rearticulate black identity, a black identity in danger of being eclipsed by its own middle-class investments. Morrison’s description of Son’s dreadlocked hair gets us closer to understanding this move:
Here, alone in her bedroom where there were no shadows, only glimmering unrelieved sunlight, his hair looked overpowering—physically overpowering, like bundles of long whips or lashes that could grab her and beat her to jelly. And would. Wild, aggressive, vicious hair that needed to be put in jail. Uncivilized, reform-school hair. Mau-Mau, Attica, chain-gang hair. (113)
Jadine looks at Son’s nappy hair and sees an “uncivilized,” “wild” blackness, a blackness that “needed to be put in jail.” Morrison’s inclusion of “Mau-Mau,” a reference to Kikuyu rebels against the British colonial government in Kenya in the 1950s, reinforces that this “aggressive” hair must be understood racially, as the embodiment of a black subjectivity that refuses the “civilizing” imprisonment of bourgeois complacency. What does it mean for a middle-class black subject—particularly a female subject—to adopt this kind of bodily racial marker?
Perhaps a brief clarification is in order. The opening note that Lee attaches to the School Daze script insists that Jigaboos are the campus “Have-Nots,” indeed, that they should be understood as “the black underclass” (185). In truth, however, the Jigaboos, too, are middle class, if sometimes newly so. The (not always) darker-skinned, kinky-haired “Jigaboo” is nonetheless also a student at Mission, distinguished from the working-class local black population by her situation within and not outside the college’s gates. This becomes clear in the scene at a neighborhood Kentucky Fried Chicken, where the Fellas, led by Dap, are confronted by a group of local black men who express resentment at their relative privilege: “How come you college motherfuckers think y’all run everything? . . . We was born here, gone be here, gone die here, and can’t find jobs ’cause of you.” Later, after the confrontation escalates, the lead local, Leeds, adds, “Naw, I bet y’all do think y’all white. College don’t mean shit. Y’all niggas, and you gone be niggas forever. Just like us. Niggas.” Dap responds emphatically, “You’re not niggers.”60
Given that, as Imani Perry points out, the word “nigga” must be understood as both “an extension of the idea of the black everyman” and a “racial category combined with white supremacy, poverty, and social marginalization,” it is clear that in this scene, Leeds posits that Dap and his friends—no matter how “white” their privilege makes them—can never escape the most oppressive and dehumanizing effects of blackness.61 Dap’s retort evidently refuses this interpellation, but as Margaret Thomas has pointed out, his abrupt shift to standard English (e.g., “you’re not” rather than “y’all ain’t”) is an instance of code-switching that itself marks his class position.62 Ironically, Dap’s classed attempt to divorce both himself and his working-class interlocutors from the pejorative meanings associated with the word “nigger” also has the effect of distancing him from the fraternity of the black masses offered by the linguistic variation “nigga”; in both cases, his class privilege marks the site of a racial exclusion.
This literal face-off between the two groups of men is marked for us aesthetically; Dap, while not as dramatically styled as the female Jigaboos, nonetheless signals his allegiance to pan-African community via his kente cloth scarf and leather tam, adorned with cowrie shells—a relatively ironic symbol of African allegiance, given these shells’ link to the slave trade—while the leader of the locals, a then unknown Samuel L. Jackson, wears his hair chemically processed.63 The willing embrace of nappy hair is explicitly not a poor or working-class aesthetic prerogative in School Daze—nor in Tar Baby. Lubiano points out that in Lee’s film, “the townies, who are working-class and, therefore, under some rubrics ‘Blacker’ than the middle-class college kids, are also the ones with the ‘jeri curls’ (generally recognized as evidence of aesthetic disaffection with ‘Blackness’) protected by shower caps.”64
The “jeri-curled” locals in School Daze have their textual counterpoint in Alma Estee and her red wig in Tar Baby. To Son, Alma Estee’s choice to cover her own dark, kinky hair and “midnight skin” with “a wig the color of dried blood” (299) constitutes a contrast as ridiculous as “an avocado with earrings” (299).65 And, instead of allowing Son to remove the wig, she “jump[s] back, howl[s] and resecure[s] it on her head with clenched fingers” (299), indicating the intensity of her commitment to this “synthetic” (299) alteration of her appearance. Thus Alma Estee in Tar Baby and the “Local Yokels” in School Daze both represent a kind of working-class aesthetic that is neither an acceptable facsimile of or stand-in for whiteness, like Jadine and the Wannabees, nor a deliberate embrace of African phenotype and rejection of the racist standards of class privilege, like the Jigaboos. Indeed, the reason that the Fellas are so uncomfortable on the ride home from KFC is that they are forced to come to grips with their own privilege, as members of a middle-class group that has material advantages over local blacks precisely because they are Mission College students.
Similarly, Son’s American citizenship affords him a kind of privilege on Isle des Chevaliers that persists in spite of Son’s efforts to befriend the island’s residents and is reflected in his own attitudes toward them. Witness, again, his attempt to remove the wig from Alma Estee’s head, a gesture that he views as a mark of racial “fraternity” (299) but which is revealed as paternalistic precisely in Son’s vocalization: “Oh, baby baby baby baby” he croons to Alma Estee as he reaches for the wig, indicating all too clearly the infantilizing posture of privilege he has assumed. Ironically, the character in Morrison’s novel that many critics have read as the textual representative of black working-class authenticity is himself complicit—simply via his presence as invited guest in Valerian Street’s house—with global hierarchies of human value that privilege him as a (black) American over Alma Estee, Gideon, and Therese. (I will return to questions of geography and transnational black/American privilege in chapter 3.)
Son’s unwilling conscription into these and related intranational hierarchies—his contingent privilege—becomes clear even earlier in the narrative, however, when Jadine and Son return to the United States and Son, who has been away for eight years, is alarmed by how much racial circumstances have changed. African Americans whom Son expects to demonstrate unquestioning loyalty to black community are instead intersected by and invested in whiteness in multiple ways, causing him to question the meaning of his own allegiances. He eventually asks himself, “How long had he been gone, anyway? If those were the black folks he was carrying around in his heart all those years, who on earth was he?” (216–17). At first, the text suggests, he believes that his love for Jadine has “derailed his judgment,” but he thinks better of that, concluding: “It was less an error in judgment than it was being confronted with a whole new race of people he was once familiar with” (217, emphasis added). Yet perhaps it is both. The people are new—many of them newly middle class, some newly assimilated to white American culture—but his love for Jadine does matter, precisely because, as the text makes clear, his association with her provisionally re-creates him as one of the “new” people in question.
Morrison highlights this fact in a scene during which Son is nearly brought to tears watching “Yardman”/Gideon working beneath him in the garden, as he stands in the window “clean, clean from the roots of his hair to the crevices between his toes” (140). Ironically, his thoughts turn to a familiar image of privilege, a privilege marked for him, until now, as white:
He knew well the area into which his heart was careening—an area as familiar as the knuckle of his thumb. Not the street of yellow houses with white doors [Eloe], but the wide lawn places where little boys in Easter white shorts played tennis under their very own sun. A sun whose sole purpose was to light their way, golden their hair and reflect the perfection of their Easter white shorts. (139)
Standing in Jadine’s room after using her shower, her shampoo, even her “natural sponge” (131), wrapped from “waist-to-thigh in an Easter white towel” (140), he is acutely aware of his own metaphoric distance from Gideon, his positioning literally above the older man, as well as his temporary incorporation by and participation in the privilege that he has, for much of his life, watched and desired from the outside.
This shift from excluded to included, however contingent, affects Son to such a degree that “he was as near to crying as he’d been since he’d fled from home. You would have thought something was leaving him and all he could see was its back” (140). Son recognizes himself as having gained, however inadvertently, access to the kind of advantages he has always envied white, “golden-haired” little boys; this includes his literal envelopment in “Easter white” cotton. In the new world of privilege that Son has entered, “Easter-white” cloth is associated not with the formality of the sacred—the annual Easter holiday, when the poor might acquire a new “Sunday best”—but with the informality of leisure (tennis shorts) and daily bathing (towels). Perhaps, then, what is leaving Son is his conviction about the black-and-white certainties of the world and his place in them. How to resist a newly achieved level of comfort and privilege so disorienting it can induce tears of loss, regret, and (survivor’s) guilt?
For Lee’s Jigaboos, taking defensive pleasure in their “nappy” hair is one way of performing, vocally and publicly, their resistance to the disciplinary hierarchies of privilege. In the words of the song, “I don’t mind being BLACK.”66 This is more than, in the words of one of Lee’s critics, a matter of being “politically correct”; it is a politicized and corporealized means of challenging the “sublimated public body” of (white and black) bourgeois culture.67 Ironic, then, that in Tar Baby, Son eventually cuts the hair that “spread like layer upon layer of wings from his head” (132), dons a borrowed suit, and uses a much more conventional aesthetic to woo Jadine and to charm Ondine and Sydney. Before this transformation, still untouched, Son’s hair literally “paralyzes” Jadine (132), renders her speechless (113). Morrison’s prose represents, more coherently than Lee’s images, the power of the “wild” black body to mute or literally to overpower the linguistic structures of bourgeois discipline. But Lee’s Jigaboos, and his film overall, ultimately make the point more sharply—particularly given Tar Baby’s conclusion, which we might read as an indication of Morrison’s pessimism about the possibilities for this new, post–Civil Rights black subject. At the novel’s end, a despondent Son runs headlong into what Letitia Moffitt calls “the ambiguity of myth,” lost on the darkened far shore of Isle des Chevaliers precisely because he feels trapped by his desire for Jadine into chasing her disaffected version of black privilege.68 By contrast, at the end of School Daze the Jigaboos and their pro-black bourgeois politics have the final word, as the camera pans across the bewildered and humbled faces of Julian, Jane, and other central characters of the film while Dap shouts, “Wake up!”
Jadine and Son, as well as both the Wannabees and the Jigaboos, all are best understood as “new” black subjects, intersected and implicated in varying ways by material privilege—colliding products of the changing landscape of the 1980s and the post–Civil Rights era more broadly. In unpacking the trope of the “black” body penetrated by whiteness, both Lee’s School Daze and Morrison’s Tar Baby raise the question of why embodiment remains conceptually relevant in post-soul discourses of black bourgeois subjectivity. School Daze, in particular, offers us a way to rethink embodiment as a tool of resistance (rather than acquiescence) from within intraracial class hierarchy. In the next chapter I turn from texts tackling figurative questions around “whitened” black bodies to texts that represent such bodies in much more literal ways, attending to the embodied links between race, gender, and class privilege for the mixed-race and the “passing” subject. In School Daze, performing the “natural” body becomes a way of accepting the pleasures of privilege while simultaneously acknowledging and continuing to invest in the pleasures of blackness; the texts in chapter 2, however, are far more interested in ways that the “mulatto” body, often inadvertently, subverts and denaturalizes blackness, precisely via its privileged investments.