New Bourgeoisie, Old Bodies: Performing Post-Civil Rights Black Privilege in Tar Baby and School Daze

Candice M. Jenkins

Alicia Keys - Teenage Love Affair (2008)

Intro

• Black class privilege and the black body infiltrated by whiteness
• Hierarchy of skin color and hair texture
• Light-skinned, straight hair vs dark skin and “bad hair”
• Aesthetic distinction as well as social class
• Caucasian ancestry seem to have a special claim upon intraracial class privilege

Lawrence Otis Graham: “[I]t was a color thing and a class thing. And for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together” (621)

Conan The Destroyer (Fleischer, 1984) & Monster’s Ball (Forster, 2001)

Whitened Black Bodies

• Materiality of the body
• The “raw text” without manipulations
• Brown paper bag test & Ruler test…
• “...the perceived success of aesthetic manipulation depends on how accurately it mimics the ‘natural’ appearance of miscegenation” (622)
• “‘Monoracial black men’ married ‘women from the mulatto elite,’ solidifying their middle-class status” (622)

80s Class Expansion

• How class has been imagined in African American expressive culture
• Classes expanding dramatically in the 80s
• Post-civil rights advances
• 80s as unprecedented era of the black bourgeoisie
• Changed the light/dark skin dynamics, yet still remain symbolically…

“Yet this trope taken to its logical conclusion 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?” (624)

“In this essay, 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 broader post-civil rights era and ultimately to illumine how both novel and film explore the sometimes contradictory relationship between race, gender, and class for black bourgeois subjects” (624)

More on the Essay’s Purpose

• For African Americans, terms like middle class, class privilege, black bourgeois, etc. are defined by more than just economic factors
• Less objective markers like “aspiration” and “social perception”
• The essay offers a critical reconsideration and reinvigoration of social class as analytic framework for the study of the African American narrative

Performance and Intersectionality

• Judith Butler: Bodily performance constitutes racial, gender, and sexual identity
• Jenkins would add class identity to that list
• Black feminist concept of Intersectionality
• Describes how race, gender, sexuality, class, et al. “intersect” with each other to create a person’s social and political identities
• Different modes of discrimination and privilege…

“In distinct but often overlapping ways, both 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)” (625)

Morrison and Lee Push Back

• Both texts productively undercut the reductive whitened black body narrative
• “...using darker-skinned (and sometimes male) characters to point us toward another way of thinking about the relationship between black class status and corporeality” (625)
• How and why bourgeois subjects might wield blackness against homogenizing effects of privilege

“Tragic Mulatta” Character

• Female with mixed-raced parentage originating in the antebellum south
• Modern or postmodern update of this figure still privileges light skin and other bodily markers of amalgamation
• Central to how she’s understood
• “The tragedy of the post-Civil Rights era tragic mulatta … is a tragedy well-tempered by a host of apparent advantages” (626)
• “Passing”

Imitation of Life (Stahl, 1934) & Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959)

“Thus one way that we might reconsider the trope of the tragic mulatta, in the present moment, is as a figure caught between not two racial identities, but two very different experiences of her skin color - the pain of exclusion and the pleasure of privilege” (626)

New School, Old Guard

• School Daze is divided into the “Haves and Have-Nots”
• Based upon class and color
• Intraracial class hierarchy
• “Good and Bad Hair” musical number
• Fantasy battle between black women in “surreal” beauty salon
• Lee’s film implies “aesthetics [are] formal matters of physical appearance in which women only participate” (630)

Negative Reviews

• The film received overall critical reviews in its contemporary moment
• “Simplistic, essentialist, misogynist, and homophobic”
• Jenkins reclaims the film “as a productive site of intraracial class discourse” (630)
• “...offers important analysis of black class hierarchies and the complex relationship between privilege and embodiment” (630)

Pageantry

• Film is staged in pageantry
• “...confrontations between the groups are theatrically staged moments rather than realistic debates about the issues” (630)
• These pageant-like moments may be mined for performative meaning
• Insightful commentary on the aesthetics of intraracial class politics
• Includes male aesthetic performance as well

Gammites

• Homogenizing, militarizing sameness of the “light-skinned and husky” Gammites advance a particular aesthetic message
• Conformity during “pass the pussy” scene
• Speaks to the way male “wannabees” conform to skin-color hierarchies
• Light-skin and middle class black men often associated with effeminacy
• Ambiguous chant emphasizes performative participation in male heterosexual desire

School Daze (Lee, 1988)

Privileged Bodies

• “Good and Bad Hair” sequence provides theoretical richness
• “Natural” bodies as privileged bodies
• “...classed precisely in their performance of naturalness and their theatrical acceptance of the nappy” (631)
• For Julian, “‘Blackness’ originates in and is concerned with US geopolitical sites only” (632)

Old-Guard Black Elite

• White Snodgrass family are the invisible powers that be
• Pull the strings behind the scenes
• President McPherson might be read as “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 [Cornell] West identifies” (633)
• dark-skinned , loyal to whiteness

Hair as Phenotype Marker

• Hair as phenotype marker
• Manipulated far more easily than skin
• Aesthetic conflict based in performance rather than genetic inheritance
• Lee’s intraracial commentary “allows us to think further about how blackness and privilege intersect beyond the body’s literal penetration by whiteness” (634)
• Shift from script’s “green” eyes to film’s “blue” eyes reinforces possible falseness of the eyes

“...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” (635)

“Unlike Morrison’s Jadine, whose material privilege is literalized and naturalized within her body, the Wannabes 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” (635)

The rival group’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 tha ti meant precisely to rearticulate black identity - a black identity in danger of being eclipsed by its own middle-class investments” (635)

School Daze (Lee, 1988)

• The school’s “Have-Nots” are still middle-class (newly so)...
• Code switching from “Y’all ain’t” to “You’re not”

School Daze (Lee, 1988)

• All are understood as new black bourgeois subjects

“School Daze, in particular, offerus us a way to rethink embodiment as a tool of resistance (rather than acquiescence) from within intraracial class hierarchy” (639)

“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” (639)