“It was like, ‘Wow, this guy’s really going to go there,’ ” said renowned director Kasi Lemmons, whose first film role was in School Daze. School Daze was about the tensions between light-skinned black folks and dark-skinned black folks.Įverything was right there on a 50-foot screen. Three decades since Lee brought us a story of conflict, of when students pledging fictional Greek fraternities were pitted against those who desired global and local social change. It’s been three decades to the day since theaters were lit up with a historically black campus waking up - this was when Nelson Mandela was still locked up, and students called for divestment from South Africa.
“Wannabe” was also an attitude: Wannabe better than me. For the uninitiated, the idea of a “wannabe” was a caricature of (for the most part) a high-yellow, lighter-skinned woman with long hair whose physical attributes look more European than African.
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As did everyone else who would consume Lee’s epic portrayal of a fictional historically black college in School Daze, a movie that altered how we publicly talked about blackness and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
She had no idea what he was talking about. “You know how you all are,” she remembers Lee saying. You’re going to be a wannabe.” She was confused. “I’m doing another movie, and you’re going to be in it, so send me your headshot. She ran into him again on those New York streets, and this was the time that he added a new word to her lexicon. She’d never seen anything like it before. She saw the movie and was mesmerized by the very contemporary piece that was in black and white and dealt with sex, relationships and intimacy.
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He was talking about 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It, which is now of course a lauded Netflix series of the same name. “I just finished my first movie, you’ve got to see it,” she remembers Lee telling her. Back then, he was telling folks that he planned to go to film school and had aspirations of being a director - although, at the time, Guy wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. She first met him back in 1979, when she was a high school senior and he was a senior at Morehouse College who was directing the coronation at the school where she danced.
She’d just run into director and eventual cultural purveyor Spike Lee. Jasmine Guy was standing on the streets of New York City, fresh out of a dance class at The Ailey School, when she heard a word unfamiliar to her: Wannabe.
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