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Review
Akeelah and the Bee
By Marvin X
Keke Palmer as
Akeelah
Anderson
Lawrence Fishburne as Dr. Joshua Larabee
from Beyond Religion, Toward
Spirituality, essays on consciousness by Marvin X,
Black Bird Press, 270 pages, November, 2006, $19.95.
Black Bird Press: 11132 Nelson Bar Road, Cherokee CA
95965
This is a most wonderful
movie, especially for a wordsmith like myself, although
I am the world's worse speller, but I did win a spelling
bee in elementary school. What a movie and what a pity
it only earned 14 million dollars in three weeks. Yet,
something positive for a change, reflecting the very
best of African American culture and the human spirit.
It is a film about coming to
recognize the divine within one's self, an important
step in human development. For some of us it takes a
lifetime, for others only a few years on the planet,
such as the eleven years Akeelah (Keke Palmer) had been
around. But what is even more interesting is how the
film revealed that it is equally important for others to
recognize the divinity of a person—and yes, it took a
village to support Akeelah Anderson on her way to the
national spelling bee.
Even the boyz in the hood and
girls, supported her; also the community intellectual
who became her coach, Dr. Joshua Larabee (Lawrence
Fishburne, who performed admirably), although Larabee
was in pain and suffering along with the rest of the
characters—there was communal pain that was too obvious
to ignore. Larabee was mourning over a niece, but began
to heal as he transferred his love onto Akeelah. He was
actually a UCLA English professor but was too
traumatized to teach until working with Akeelahhealed
him and he returned to the classroom. Akeelah had lost
her father to street violence and her mother grieved
over the lost of her husband.
The mother was in pain from
her loss, she also suffered from that great monster of
life called fear—scared to finish college, settling for
a wage slave job at a hospital, forcing her to work long
hours to survive and care for her children: one in the
Air Force, another a wannabe thug and a daughter with a
baby. Akeelah was the bright spot in their lives. The
mother was especially concerned about the wannabe thug,
fearing he was bound to die on the streets of LA like so
many of his peers. We could see how easy it would have
been for the movie to focus on him, but the world knows
his story, it is in the crime section of the daily
papers and nightly news. But even the thug eventually
embraced Akeelah's mission, especially after
instructions from his thug elders. But this is not about
hugging a thug, rather supporting a genius on the move.
The film is a model of how
the community can and must support its children with
talent, especially its impoverished children who work
with nothing but the talent God gave them. They often
receive little or no parental support and even friends
can be haters. Akeelah’s poverty was in sharp contrast
with the affluence of her spelling bee comrades from the
other side of town who had full if not overbearing
parental support, as we saw with the Asian speller whose
father nearly crippled the boy emotionally by pressuring
him to win.
Akeelah’s mother had no time
to see her on the path to the national championship—she
had no time or energy to be a spelling bee mom. This was
painful for Akeelah, although her mother eventually came
around after seeing the determination of her daughter
and those assisting her. Children who have parental
support are the lucky ones. I know my mother had no time
to come see me play basketball—she was busy raising
eleven children by herself, so I got over my desire for
her to see me at every game. I was happy the few times
she came.
Finally, the film was about
discipline and focus, a most valuable lesson of life.
And again, the film stressed community support, from
intellectuals to the boyz and girls in the hood. The
entire village helped Akeelah learn the necessary words
to become national champion, thus her victory was a
community victory.
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Responses I read the
Akeela and The Bee review.
It's good. I took some children from church to see the
movie when it first came out – Yvonne
Rudy, I don't have
Marvin X's e-mail address, but I want him to know how
much I enjoyed and appreciate his review of the film
Akeelah and the Bee. This was a wonderful film that
emphasized the humanity of Black people and the
importance of family and community in supporting the
intellectual and creative gifts of our children. I
loved the film and recommended it to everyone I knew,
especially my own children. It pains me that we take
our kids to all these tasteless, heartless animated
films like Flush Away. There are so few really
fine and inspiring films like "Akeelah," and we must
support them. Miriam
posted 16 November 2006* * *
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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update 4 March 2012
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