Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened in theaters on June 30, 1989, and as he told the Associated Press recently about the film’s controversial climax, “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the [trash] can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
It didn’t have to be O.J., who wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of black pride. And it wasn’t that every black person in America thought he was innocent. But, as Boyd noted on ESPN.com two years ago when discussing Barry Bonds’s home-run record, “acquittal in a court of law was trumped by conviction in the court of public opinion” in the following decade. Now Simpson is behind bars, for armed robbery and kidnapping — the verdict in that 2007 case was handed down exactly 13 years after he was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and it’d be difficult to believe that the jury wasn’t influenced by the general perception that Simpson had gotten off scot-free in the ’90s.
The black community had a similar, though more muted, reaction when Michael Jackson was found innocent of child molestation in 2005: “the powers that be” had failed to bring down another rich and famous black man who had risen to the top of his profession. (R&B star R. Kelly, who wrote Jackson’s 1995 hit “You Are Not Alone,” was acquitted of 14 counts of child pornography last year. So far, his career hasn’t been affected the way Jackson’s was.) But the biggest musical star of his generation wasn’t a symbol of black pride, either, at least not on the outside: since the mid-’80s his skin color had become lighter and lighter, his hair straighter and straighter, and his nose smaller and smaller due to an overabundance of plastic surgery. In 2002, when he accused his record label, Sony Music, of not supporting its black artists, the standard joke was “Who is this white woman and why is she calling Tommy Mottola a racist?”
Miracle at St. Anna opens with a crime: A black postal worker pulls out a German Lugar pistol and kills an Italian man waiting in line to buy stamps. Why did he do it? That’s what reporter Tim Boyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wants to find out as he accompanies detectives to the killer’s apartment. There, they find the head of an Italian statue that is worth millions. The mystery deepens and Boyle worms his way into getting an interview with the worker, whose name is Hector Negron. Negron (played by actor Laz Alonso in old age makeup) begins to tell the story of his tour of duty in World War II as a part of the 92nd Infantry Division, a.k.a the Buffalo Soldiers Division, a segregated platoon of all black soldiers.
From there the film flashes back to Italy, World War II, and proceeds to get worse by the minute. We are thrust into a brutally bloody battle sequence reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, except not nearly as effective. Four soldiers are separated from the platoon and must fend for themselves when their racist commanding officer nearly blows them up. These four soldiers are Sergeant Bishop (Michael Ealy), a womanizing cynic, Sgt. Stamps (Derek Luke), the level headed, by the book soldier, Private Train (Omar Benson Miller), a gentle giant who carries around the severed head of an Italian statue for good luck (but seeing as he’s not in possession of it in the present day, you have an idea of what’s going to happen to him) and finally, Corporal Negron (Alonso, gain, free of the latex). The four soldiers come upon an orphaned Italian boy that Train refuses to leave on his own, especially after the cute kid is injured in a bomb blast. They carry the boy (Matteo Sciabordi) to a nearby Italian village to get help.
Last Sunday I said I would find time to write about Al Jarreau in the coming week, but a few days ago Jeff Giles told me to put my ode to the seven-time Grammy winner on hold for now. That’s because he has something special in the works that will involve several of Popdose’s writers.
Unfortunately for Jeff, I have a problem with authority, so I now present my exclusive interview with Al Jarreau in its entirety:
ME: So were you, like, a huge Moonlighting fan back in the ’80s? I know I was!
AL: I’m embarrassed to say this, but I think I only saw it once. I kept forgetting when it was on. Was it Thursdays?
ME: This interview is over.
Full disclosure: the preceding interview took place in my imagination. But did you see how I totally stormed out of the imaginary hotel suite where I was interviewing Mr. Jarreau? He never knew what hit him.
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
