Luther Campbell, aka Uncle Luke, is surely best known for writing songs like “Me So Horny” and “Pop That Coochie” with 2 Live Crew, but he has warranted mention on this site a few times before, like when he starred in a Sundance short where he has sex with some naked zombies. Basically, it’s not like he’s been sitting around his townhouse waiting for a comeback on Omelets with the Stars or something. Today he’s back in the news, having written an editorial for the Miami New Times referring to Spike Lee as “Hollywood’s resident house negro.” Uncle Luke has apparently been writing this New Times column for quite some time, but hardly any of us noticed until he started sh*tting on Spike Lee because we’re terrible.
Screw Spike Lee. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is a brilliant flick that more accurately depicts the African American experience than any of the 15 movies about black culture Lee’s directed in his lifetime.
[...]
Lee needs to get over himself. He’s upset because Tarantino makes better movies. The man who put Malcolm X on the big screen is Hollywood’s resident house negro; a bougie activist who wants to tell his fellow white auteurs how they can and can’t depict African Americans.
He complains that Tarantino uses “n*gger” too much (100 times) in Django Unchained, but show me a white man in the 1800s who wasn’t dropping n-bombs left and right.
Tarantino is one of Tinseltown’s most clever directors. Some of the most brutal scenes in Django Unchained are metaphors for the unfair racial inequality African-Americans still experience today. For instance, Leonardo DiCaprio’s plantation owner character Calvin Candie trains some of his male slaves to fight to the death in a sport called “Mandingo Fighting.”
When one of the slaves refuses to fight, Candie threatens to feed him to his wild dogs. That scene is analogous to professional boxing where white promoters control black fighters through fear and intimidation.
In another scene, a bunch of slaves are shocked to see Django riding a horse since blacks were never allowed to have one. That’s like the cops who stare at and then pull over the dude who is driving a Bentley on South Beach.
While on the horse, Django tells the slaves that he’ll treat them worse than any white man ever will. That’s the truth about blacks in positions of authority in today’s corporate America. They will treat blacks worse than any white boss every could.
Lee could never pull off a movie like this. When he’s not being an ass from his court side seats during New York Knicks games, he’s making bull crap films that most African Americans cannot relate to. [MiamiNewTimes/Luke's Gospel]
Obviously, I liked Django Unchained quite a bit, and I’m almost positive I didn’t come away from it with a rosier view of slavery or more desensitized to violence. I generally like Tarantino and think Spike Lee is generally the black version of Oliver Stone, a guy who claims many causes but none more than self-aggrandizement. In short, kind of a twat. That said, between this and Armond White calling Sam Jackson an Uncle Tom (I disagree with his analysis, but he made the occasional valid point), I’m a little uncomfortable with how quickly arguments over this film seem to devolve into vicious personal attacks. Which is to say, I can think of at least one more Mandingo Fighting parallel that should make us all a bit queasy about cheering too hard for this feud. Can’t we agree to disagree? I mean you didn’t hear white people calling each other race traitors because they didn’t like Crash. And it would’ve been just as valid because that movie was an embarrassment. Or The King’s Speech. In fact, if ever there was a white version of an Uncle Tom, it’s Colin Firth, that repressed motherf*cker.
