I guess black people just thought up slavery and structural inequality for the last hundreds of years. Let me just close my eyes and tell myself that were all the same….wait for it….yeah, I GOT NOTHIN.

Don’t come in here with that “we all just need to pretend that racism doesn’t exist and it’ll go away” stuff. You will not blame black people for being victims of white supremacy. Words have power (especially when they’re backed by years and years of violence and institutional power).

It sounds to me you are reinforcing a difference, that being black somehow makes you different from being white. It doesn’t. There is no “us” based on skin colour, there is just people. Different upbringings, different cultures sure, but I would never say I was different to someone else just because of my skin colour. Prejudices will never fade away as long as people keep this “us” and “them” mentality. That maybe naive but it’s what I truly believe.

With Tarantino, sure his films are two dimensional, and perhaps even exploitative, however all ‘N*****’ is, is a word. By keeping it as an offensive, hallowed word it maintains it’s power. If people used it in as any other word, it’s meaning would evolve and change as language does and it would no longer be this vile thing that it is. That’s the one positive with it being scattered in Tarantino’s films, it takes away it’s power.

But his legacy never has been, and never will be, *representative* of the entire black experience and we need to stop promoting that LIE. Spike Lee does not speak for Malcolm just because he made a movie about him.

Spike Lee’s films are not keeping black people in poverty – and they ain’t lifting us out of it. So I don’t understand why we keep placing his films on par w/ the underground railroad and black race salvation. I don’t get why blackness is threatened when one of our celebrities faces public critique or outright dislike by other black people. When do we get to agree with or disagree with black people because we want to and not because of some mandatory allegiance?

It’s really easy (and quite the convenient defense mechanism) to call us slaves for our disagreement or take our embrace of a film as automatic embrace of QT and everything he ever did wrong. Or to equate it with slander and an attempt at destroying Spike Lee…It’s really easy to accuse people who like the movie of having some kind of diminished or ‘romanticized’ version of slavery and black history. I wonder if there are those who might have a bit of a romanticized version of Spike Lee? I wonder if too many people are superimposing their own love of Spike Lee onto to what it means to be black?

If black folks wanna like the movie because they wanna see a black man save his woman – let them. If black folk wanna see evil white people pay with their lives – let them. No one has the right to take that from them.

life is short.
evolve and move on.

or sit & cry about hollywood bullshit.