Though there are no action-packed shoot-outs, no flaming helicopter crashes and no big-name rap stars in title roles, there's a movie showing that every black parent and child in America needs to see.
"Akeelah and the Bee," starring Lawrence Fishburne and Angela Bassett, is one of the most powerful, poignant and, very often, uncomfortable movies to hit the big screen in years.
The story focuses on a junior high school student's entry into the Scripps National Spelling Bee. While this may not sound particularly riveting, it is.
Akeelah, played by actress Keke Palmer, is a brilliant student with a gift for learning the sort of big, hard-to-spell words that give college graduates headaches. But for some reason, Akeelah is afraid to let her classmates know how much she loves literature.
Set in South Central Los Angeles where most of Akeelah's fellow students speak either Spanglish or a jumbled slang of Ebonics and hip-hop, the film is brave enough to dramatize the reluctance among inner-city kids to embrace academics.
That underachieving black students actively accuse their classmates who display a passion for learning of being sell-outs is one of the more disturbing, cockeyed pathologies in all of black America. With minority students falling behind their white counterparts in academic subjects at high schools in Pittsburgh and dozens of cities across the country, a film like this is overdue.
Educators and parent groups are heaping praise on "Akeelah and the Bee" for its uplifting story and brave stance on the anti-schooling crowd, but I have to wonder whether the sorts of families who so desperately need to see this film ever will. If there was a practical means of commandeering buses that could take every one of Pittsburgh's black school students and their families to the theater for forced screenings, I'd help organize the field trip.
Why⢠Well, as the movie displays, public schools in predominantly black communities are filled with kids who get lousy grades and flunk spelling tests not because of a lack of ability, but because a very vocal element in their communities and schools has decided that smarts and blackness are mutually exclusive.
Shine enough light on that horrible misconception and chances are it will shrivel up and die. Hopefully, movies like "Akeelah and the Bee" are the first signs that someday it may come to pass.
