To me that really seems like some military style paperwork, making things a bit more believable. Malveaux is an economist, author and dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.When you load a saved game, you can read the mission log that Mei Ling records as your game progress. He will be mourned and missed, and his legacy lives on! Melvin Van Peebles left his footprint on Black cinema.
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Van Peebles made full use of his creative gift, and we are all so much better because he did. He was prolific both in English and in French and published several books in France. He was a cable car operator in San Francisco and wrote about those experiences in a novel. The multitalented man spent time as an options trader and wrote a book about personal finance. And we must appreciate the director Ava DuVernay for the well-rounded and positive Black men in “Queen Sugar.” While these men are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, they are family and values-driven men, role models. Even as we tackle issues of anti Blackness, we must also confront the sexism that we see in the Black community, especially in Black film. Too frequently, that’s the case with male director/producers, even Black ones. Much as I loved Sweet Sweetback, I cringed at his cavalier use of women and his disdain for us. To be sure, there is way too much sexism in Black media. While all of these roles are complicated, and some overflow with stereotypes, they allowed the world to look at us differently as a people. So there was John (“bad mother- shut your mouth”) Shaft, there was Sam Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and “Django Unchained.” Denzel Washington in “Training Day.” So many more. None quite bold enough to kill a police officer, go on the run, and win, but self-assured enough to portray their truth.
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Thanks to Van Peebles, though, we began to see a series of them. We never saw a man quite like Sweet Sweetback. And if we go back to Paul Robeson, we saw masterful, but nonthreatening, Black men.
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Sweetback was, if nothing else, a paradigm shift.īefore Sweetback, we saw docile, humble, polite Black men, like Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” or “Lilies of the Valley.” We saw exotic Black men like Harry Belafonte. In 1971, few Black folks were willing or able to give so-called law enforcement officers any pushback, especially on-screen (the Black Panther Party had been pushing back since its inception). In Sweetback, you saw a community sticking together, cheering their anti-hero who used everything he had, including his body and his sexual prowess, to elude the oppressor.
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Sweetback, to me, was about portraying a different power dynamic than one we were used to in 1971. Some credit Van Peebles with the Blaxploitation genre, but he was so much more than that.
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He also had an unusual sense of humor and was so deliberately provocative in his film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” that the New York Times described the movie as “an outrage.” But I remember seeing the film, rooting for Sweet Sweetback, on the run after he killed white police officers who were beating a Black man and standing, like the other audience members did, to applaud when the film was over. He was a man who loved Black people and was determined to present us through Black eyes, not white ones. 21, a giant and a multitalented man who acted, directed, wrote, starred, produced, composed and played music and more. We lost a giant when we lost Van Peebles on Sept.
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MALVEAUX: Melvin Van Peebles, Creative Genius - The Washington Informer Close