Saying You’re Black Doesn’t Make it So!

January 2, 2013 |Posted by: George Davis

President Clinton is but Quentin Tarantino isn’t? The Hollywood feud between Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino is more than skin deep.

Originally posted in Psychology Today.

In a post last year about white folk who claim to be blacker than black folk, I mentioned that disgraced and now imprisoned Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich said in Esquire Magazine: “I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes…”

I also mentioned that there must have been some images in Quentin Tarantino’s mind that prompted him to say that he is blacker than Spike Lee. No doubt those images boiled to the surface in Tarantino’s new feature film, “Django Unchained,” in which Tarantino dramatizes his vision of black (and white) people during slavery.

“Pulp Fiction” is the only work by Tarantino that I’ve seen from beginning to end. .” So this is not a film review of “Django Unchained”, but rather a commentary on the image of blackness in the minds of Americans like Blagojevich, Tarantino, and who knows how many others.

Spike Lee said: “I’m not gonna see it (“Django Unchained”). All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors, to see that film. That’s the only thing I’m gonna say. I can’t disrespect my ancestors. I can’t do it.” I can’t see a film on slavery either by the same mind that created “Pulp Fiction”.

At both the conscious and subconscious level there is in all of Lee’s work a vision of redemption for both blacks and whites. Shining through all his films is the possibility that the spirit can rise above whatever is happening on earth.  Tarantino’s work seems to take a perverse delight in depicting how people are totally degenerated by what happens to them.

The Wikipedia plot synopsis of “Django Unchained”, Tarantino’s “epic film about slavery,” speaks of “male slaves trained to fight to the death for sport and female slaves forced into prostitution.” These things certainly happened in slavery but I certainly did not want to see Tarantino vision of how these atrocities played out in the lives of a race of people he does not have the spiritual depth to understand.

Quentin Tarantino is not blacker than Spike Lee. Rod Blagojevich is not black because he was once a shoe shine boy; and the dark-skinned people that Tarantino put in “Django Unchained,” would not have any clue about a spiritual way of seeing reality, as blacks in slavery did.

When a black character in “Pulp Fiction” got sodomized,” I asked: “why did the black character get humiliated that way on screen?  In this film Tarantino’s vision of white people is not exalted either; but would he have scripted such humiliation for Bruce Willis, a white star in the film, playing a white character?

We know that slaves were subjected to extremes of physical violence and humiliation.  Humiliation happens in the world all the time; and for some there is a perverse fascination watching it. Police psychologists say that an extreme example of this fascination is at the heart of rape fantasiesand rapes.

via Race-Talk | A Kirwan Institute Project.