Blaxploitation or Revolutionary? - F Newsmagazine - Page 2

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Blaxploitation or Revolutionary?

The CIA’s other Black recruits represent a danger to Freeman’s plans because they have become extensions of the white power structure he wishes to dismantle. As Greenlee wrote in his novel, they were “black bourgeoisie to a man, black nepotism personified” — men who were concerned with no cause larger than themselves and whose materialistic …

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The CIA’s other Black recruits represent a danger to Freeman’s plans because they have become extensions of the white power structure he wishes to dismantle. As Greenlee wrote in his novel, they were “black bourgeoisie to a man, black nepotism personified” — men who were concerned with no cause larger than themselves and whose materialistic lives could be compartmentalized into games of “who-do-you-know and who-have-you-screwed.”

Freeman also faces scrutiny from racist CIA agents who are suspicious of his quiet manner. However, the powerful racism of both the white agents and African American recruits allows for the real Freeman to pass unnoticed beneath a mask created by false perceptions. Disguises and the process of manufacturing identity are major themes throughout the narrative. Freeman’s survival depends on his ability to play on what others deem acceptable from an African American male raised in the ghetto. Such social performance is still a necessity for members of disenfranchised communities.

In the film and novel, Freeman earns a position within the Agency and is assigned no real work, but is rather put on display as the token minority hire. Freeman is consistently dismissed and overlooked, all the while noting the Agency’s tactics, training exercises and weapons information, and intending to disseminate the same instruction to the black community. After several quiet years with the CIA, Freeman quits the Agency and returns home to the South Side of Chicago to carry out the first phase of his plan. He rejoins his former place of employment, a social work agency, where he begins to reach out to a local gang called the COBRAS. Freeman then sheds his unobtrusive and obsequious CIA persona in favor of the affects of an empty-headed bourgeois playboy. Freeman’s false concern with status and material goods allows him to be ignored by white co-workers at the social work firm and to pass undiscovered among the black bourgeoisie.

Despite this continued subterfuge and masking, we glimpse the real Freeman in the friendship he forms with the COBRAS. Freeman’s brand of outreach does not simply consist of mentoring and life lessons. Freeman is prepping the COBRAS for an impending battle. Under Freeman’s tutelage, the COBRAS gain the tactical knowledge to successfully carry out a series of heists, which give them access to funds and weapons. As the COBRAS become bolder, their maneuvers attract the attention of the police, CIA and National Guard. When the police kill a South Side African American youth, the already heightened tensions escalate. A riot erupts and confusion reigns, allowing Freeman and the COBRAS to successfully target weak factions of the National Guard. Yet as Freeman’s successes mount, his plans for revolution are discovered in a climactic fight scene. As the film ends, he is finally able to openly devote himself to the cause, which affords him a modicum of peace at long last.

The film, as relevant as ever, is radical condemnation of a corrupt and deadly system, which subjugates large swathes of its own people. While Greenlee wrote “Spook” at the pinnacle of the African American civil rights movement, the vision of the persecuted “learning the lessons of the oppressed throughout history in striking back at their oppressors,” transcends ethnicity. “Spook’s” ability to rebel “against a fixed historical placement and a rigid social significance to one time period over another,” in the words of author Samantha N. Sheppard, allows for the story to remain a dynamic element of our nation’s deeply cut contradictions. The value of “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” is not felt as a tidy document of times past. Instead, the film remains is a living, breathing entity — a tale that deepens and widens with meaning as the past and the present continue to engage and intertwine.

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