The Civil Rights Distraction

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ONE DAY IN FALL 2002, I opened my newspaper to read that the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were upset over some dialogue in the new hit movie Barbershop. The nation's most prominent civil rights activists had threatened to call for a boycott of the ensemble comedy unless the filmmakers agreed to issue a public apology and delete the offending material from future DVD versions. I looked up from the paper and chuckled to myself. Perhaps there was something that could better recommend a film to me than Jackson and Sharpton not wanting me to see it, but nothing came to mind immediately. Not then and not now. I grabbed a jacket, headed to the theater, and caught the next showing. I laughed from beginning to end and left the multiplex with a renewed appreciation of the diminishing relevance of a civil rights old guard personified by the likes of Jackson and Sharpton.

The controversy turned out to be excellent publicity for a relatively low-budget film aimed primarily at black audiences. Barbershop was the top money-maker at the box office the weekend it was released. Written, produced, and directed by blacks, it's set on Chicago's crime-ridden South Side and features a nearly all-black cast. The story centers around Calvin, an exasperated young husband whose wife is expecting their first child and who dreams of opening his own music studio but is stuck running a barbershop he inherited from his father. The plot is predictable for the most part — Calvin, who's played by rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube, eventually comes to appreciate his inheritance — but nobody hails Barbershop because of the storyline. Rather, the film's main appeal is the dialogue: free-wheeling verbal exchanges that Calvin's esoteric crew of barbers — including old-timer Eddie and ex-con Ricky — have with one another and their customers. Topics cover not only sports and music and women, which you'd expect, but also topics like race relations and dating and urban crime. The sharp, edgy comedic riffs are often insightful and sometimes shock you with their bluntness.

The movie isn't overtly political but its social conservatism is unmistakable. Characters celebrate self-help and personal responsibility while refusing to be condescended to or pitied. The overriding ethos is that blacks can and should be advancing by dint of hard work, not white guilt, and it's largely their own fault if they aren't. "Black people in this country are some of the richest negroes on the planet," says Ricky to a young black man who blames his inability to find a job on racism. "Everywhere you look, there's opportunity." After one customer, a dim-witted small-time crook, announces that ancestral slavery has "ruined my whole life," and another suggests that blacks demand reparations from the government to improve their lot, Eddie interjects that blacks already receive government compensation for slavery in the form of welfare payments and affirmative action. Ricky takes the antireparations argument even further and insists that today's black ghetto culture is the more significant impediment to group success. "We don't need reparations. We need restraint," he explains. "Don't go out and buy a Range Rover when you livin' with your momma. And pay your momma some rent." Ricky isn't finished. "Can we please, please try to teach our kids something other than [rap music] ... and please, black people, be on time for something other than free [admission] before 11 at the club."

In the film, Ricky's listeners nod in approval and applaud. So too, I noticed, did several other black people sitting nearby in my Brooklyn theater. I was stunned by the exchange. It wasn't the sentiments expressed — those are commonplace among everyday blacks, if not among their self-appointed spokespeople. The surprise was to hear them being voiced by black protagonists in a mainstream Hollywood film, which was much less common. Here was a work of fiction that required no suspension of my disbelief. I readily recognized this place. My father took me to this barbershop on Buffalo's struggling east side as a boy. It's the clip shop I frequented — when I still had hair — on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn after moving to New York City in my twenties. It's where black people from all backgrounds — the college grad and the high-school dropout, the businessman and the bus driver — gather and make observations that are as raw and heartfelt as they are politically incorrect. Two minutes of film dialogue had produced a more honest conversation about race than ten-thousand-word magazine essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson or a dozen panel discussions on CNN, where talking heads dance around uncomfortable truths, and expressing Ricky and Eddie's views about the black underclass might get you escorted from the premises by building security. In this sense, the entire movie's message is an affront to black leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as well as the liberal intellectuals who trade on the notion that black America is all but helpless in the face of an oppressive white society. The can-do attitudes on display undermine the agenda of a black political elite that benefits from portraying underprivileged minorities as perpetual victims in need of more government remedies.

The scenes that set off the reverends — and which, thankfully, remained in the DVD version — are surprisingly innocuous given all the fuss they generated. The cantankerous Eddie, who's played by comedian Cedric the Entertainer, pokes fun at Martin Luther King Jr.'s philandering and downplays Rosa Parks's famous act of disobedience in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 by pointing out that she was far from the first black person to refuse to give up a seat on the bus. In the same scene, Eddie also insists that O. J. Simpson "did it" and that black motorist Rodney King had it coming for resisting arrest. When an appalled customer warns Eddie that Jesse Jackson better not hear him talking like that, Eddie responds, "Fuck Jesse Jackson!" Eddie's irreverence produces some of the movie's biggest laughs.

The veracity of Eddie's remarks isn't really the issue. There's not much doubt that King strayed, according to his contemporaries and biographers. And what really distinguished Parks, as Eddie explains, were her ties to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), not her willingness to ignore a racist law. At least three other blacks in Montgomery alone had been arrested earlier in 1955 for defiant behavior similar to Parks's. It's also worth noting that in neither scene do Eddie's rants go over well with onlookers, who either challenge him or howl in disapproval of his outlandishly disrespectful tone. Nevertheless, Sharpton compared the film to the FBI's efforts to discredit Dr. King in the 1960s and even took offense at the Rodney King crack. Jackson insisted that he was unbothered by the attacks on himself and was...