Sometimes in life you never really know the exact time or place when a transformation is getting ready to happen to you. In my case, this occurred during my sophomore year at the University of Houston. I was like a lot of 20 year olds who portrayed themselves as believing that they had everything figured out, but in actuality I was clueless and at times horrified on the notion of graduating from college and entering the real world. In some respects, I blamed my love of the TV show, A Different World which made me believe that the college experience was bigger than whether you got an A or B in a class.
During this same time, I was starting to be interested in the films that were directed by Spike Lee. The strange irony is that the African American Studies Department was offering a course on Spike Lee’s films as well. Unfortunately, the class was full and I couldn’t get added into it. Luckily, a few of my friends were taking the class and I tagged along with them to see what it was about. There I encountered Dr. Beretta Shomade, who was a visiting professor from The University of Arizona at the time. She allowed me to sit in the class from time to time. The class wasn’t like anything I could have imagined. The course was about critically analyzing the sociological aspects of various movies of Spike Lee. I was a bit taken aback at first, because I honestly never watched a movie to understand the deeper message that it was trying to convey. But as I started re-watching movies, like He Got Game, School Daze, and She’s Gotta Have It, the lightbulb just switched on my brain and I started seeing things completely different. Spike was using his films to critique American society on the issue of race in the present day. He was able to show that the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow in this country didn’t just disappear after the Civil and Voting Rights Acts were passed in the 1960s. The other thing that I didn’t know at the time was the effect Spike Lee’s films would have on my unknown writing career 10 years later. Even though I worked in the accounting field after I graduated college, I always felt like I had a story to tell. I admired Spike’s ability to entertain his audiences while still inserting his own social and political commentary in his movies. That was the same formula that I tried to emulate when I wrote my first book, Blunted on Reality.
Dr. Shomade’s role in helping me went far beyond that class though. I remember when I had fleeting dreams of going to law school, she put me in touch with her husband, who was a lawyer, to get advice from him about what the process would entail. I also would call and email Dr. Shomade from time to time to get her advice or opinion on different things going on in my life. Even though there is no paper record of me ever being enrolled in her class, Dr. Shomade without even knowing it, was helping me to plant the seeds towards my own self-empowerment. I am forever grateful and appreciative for what she did for me.