006: Judas and the Black Messiah
I'm asking this once. Lakeith Stanfield. Do you have a brother, a friend? Please. No pressure but also SEISMIC levels of pressure. And Jen, from Be Jubie, has a very special CBDiscount for you peps!!
I just finished watching this movie and holy Black Jesus. Phenomenal. Truly. I will try my best to not give away spoilers but if you know your history then the ending shouldn’t be a surprise to you.
There are a couple of things that I would love to talk about regarding this movie and the masterful storytelling but I also have a question when it comes to a popular trend in casting that I feel weird about. I want to run that thought by you all, but I’ll do that at the end. BUT FIRST
Deborah.
That actress captured me from her introduction and I think she gave us, the audience, a painfully authentic look into the balancing of love, Black womanhood turned Black motherhood, and a valiant attempt at normalcy all in the heart of a revolution. When I first read about the murder and mission of Fred Hampton, there was very little information about Deborah in the raid. All the info I could gather was that she and Fred were together and that she was pregnant with his child (once again, this isn’t a spoiler if you know your history, people). I wondered what her life must’ve been like and what thoughts raced through her as she prepared to give birth to a prince of the movement. And the scene where she read her poem to Fred gave me a taste of her reality.
My mom always says that it’s just different for birthmothers. That those 9 extra months with your child create a connection that is hard to explain and harder to recreate. Personally, I have no idea, though I have watched an unhealthy amount of documentaries about babies and their development. But I see the way my mom has always feared for my brother and me, especially growing up in predominantly non-Black spaces. I know she has a sixth sense when it comes to us. Once, in middle school, I was getting ready to sneak away from the premises afterschool with kids I shouldn’t have been hanging out with. I knew I was disobeying my mom but dammit I wanted a bagel. Let me tell you how as soon as I set foot off of the David E. Owens’ parking lot, my mom calls me on my razor phone (yea, throwback) and asks, “Are you where you are supposed to be?”
She just felt it in her spirit that her baby was doing something and she was the most right. I turned my whole self around and went back to orchestra, hungry and terrified.
In Deborah’s poem, I hear her reaching for safety, at least, and normalcy, at best, and knowing that Fred cannot provide either without abandoning the mission of the Black Panther Party. The hope of the life that they could have -good, bad or bloody- is living inside her and she does not have the luxury to forget or prioritize other things. She looks down. Baby. Although Fred has a speech in which he foreshadows his own demise (once again, not a spoiler; literally just history), Deborah does the same, in a way, but on a more personal scale. In a way that a mother does, she talks about the legacy of her loves. She, like a young Coretta Scott King, carried on the work of her murdered partner and taught her child the importance of doing the same.
The next thing I want to talk about is the biblical references because OH MY GOD I’m obsessed. Amanda Seales had a IG video that went out recently about this movie where she talks about how we are starting to see Black stories and Black creatives evolve. That this is the time for our stories to be told under a new lens and with a new narrative and I felt that after watching this film.
After watching the trailer a few months ago, I was both excited but also scared. Black trauma porn is something that has been perpetuated through media and news cycles since the photo of ‘Whipped Peter’ went “viral” in the 1860’s. History.com has an article titled “The Shocking Photo of 'Whipped Peter' That Made Slavery's Brutality Impossible to Deny” but this is the same headline that has been circulating weekly ever since. The only thing that changed is that his name isn’t “Whipped Peter” it’s Ahmaud Arbery, it’s Rodney King, it’s Breonna Taylor, it’s Sandra Bland, it’s Emmitt Till and countless others and it’s not “slavery” anymore. The new term is “police brutality” but it’s all the same thing. People, including many Black people, have gotten so used to seeing ourselves killed, beaten and degraded that it’s difficult to feel anything but an ancestral kind of numb. That is what I thought I was walking into with this movie.
I think one of the biggest reasons why this movie felt so different is because of who the executive team was. This Black story about Black history was told by a majority Black creative and executive team. Obviously, each of the individuals are masters in their craft but I do wonder what the final product would have been like if there was at least one Black woman on the team. Would the final product be different? How? Would we see more of other people’s experiences? I don’t know.
ANYWAY, back to the religious part. The Judas-Jesus parallel is eerily straightforward, from the silver to the suicide and everything in between, but what about the other side? I think the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law” are the law enforcement (the FBI, the police, etc.) but they are just the doers of Evil. They were not Evil itself.
OK, follow me on this because the deeply repressed 14-year old Sunday School attendee in me is about to go off. If we are following the biblical format the end of Jesus’ life as an outline for this movie then there are two unseen players who are battling throughout this entirety of the film. Good vs Evil. God vs the Devil. Avatar the Last Airbender vs whatever M. Night Shyamalan did. You get the jist. In Luke 22:3, it is written that Satan enters Judas during the Passover celebration and that was the beginning of the end. So who, or what, is Satan? We can think of these entities as themes. What are the two opposing forces of this movie? What do the opposite sides stand and fight for?
For those who haven’t seen the movie (yet), Fred Hampton is the Jesus character and William O’Neal (aka Bill) is Judas.
My argument is that the liberation of Black people is God and Capitalism is the Devil.
But Shayna, why wouldn’t racism be the Devil, in this case? An excellent question, not-Shayna and it’s because of two scenes. Now, I will say this is a spoiler simply because I didn’t know this part of the history.
The first example is literally the first scene. The need for capital is the thing that forces Bill into a relationship with the FBI. Capitalism says, “for me to have, you must not have,” and this is at play here. Bill tried to steal a car from another Black man and was arrested for impersonating a federal officer. Throughout the movie, Bill thinks that he can beat the system (or out-maneuver the Devil) that he has fallen into but nah. The game doesn’t work like that.
The other scene I was talking about is when the Panthers join forces with the Confederates. At first I thought this was going to be a bloody disaster but then Fred said, “What if the overseer (the poor white population) had banned with the slaves (the Black community) to cut the master’s throat?”
This was not necessarily just a race-thing, although the extremely violent measures taken against Black leaders throughout history prove that race will always be a leading factor. In this moment in history, in this part of Chicago, they all had the same problem: over-policing and a lack of resources. Now, personally, I would have some serious apprehensions about working side by side with people who love themselves a Confederate flag but I am not in a war like they were. I also saw Fred realigning the objective of that white community. I (a Black person) am not your enemy; let us attack the one who attacks us all.
Now I could go on for a little bit more but, I’m not gonna lie, I am real tired. I need to put my feet up, get a snack and to watch some trashy reality TV (turn up for Married at First Sight ayyyy) but I would love to hear your thoughts on this movie! Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have any other movie recommendations for me and this newsletter!
But first, let me introduce you all to Jen! Jen is the creator and founder of Be Jubie, a CBD brand based out of Baltimore. We had such a great conversation about her brand, the historical and legal weight of being a Black woman in the weed industry and so much more that I had to break up the interview into 3 segments! Here is the first one (it’s about 10 minutes long):
If you want to see the others then subscribe to the Heart to Arts Youtube channel! They will be released before next week’s newsletter.
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See you next week!