It seems as if many movie critics around the country, including Todd Ritter from The Daily Collegian, are giving my brother and his new movie, Higher Learning, bad reviews. Once again, Americans do not understand just what the black man and woman in America, and in the world, are up against. To say that, "... the film's message, if there is one at all, is muddled," as Mr. Ritter stated in his Jan. 13 article, proves to me that he (along with the other critics who seek to belittle this creation) is in need of some serious "higher learning."

The major message of the movie is something that black people, who have been truly educated, have always known: Racism is not just personal views and values, prejudices and stereotypes that some individuals hold within them, and that some seek to act upon; racism is a system that has been institutionalized within the very fabric of American social, economical, educational, and governmental institutions, and has always sought to dehumanize, devalue and even destroy the black man and woman. Martin Luther King, once realizing the true nature of the system after 1966, said, "... the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws --racism, poverty, militarism ... it reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."

It is this system, which has consistently sought the destruction of black people (as well as other people of color) in this country and in the world, that is dealt with in John Singleton's Higher Learning. Throughout the movie, Singleton deals with events and occurences that can happen on any college campus in this country. All of the experiences that happen to the character Kristin (a white female in the movie) though numerous and relevant to issues that face college students, really have no relevance to the major message of the film. Her experiences are only a backdrop to that message.

But, the film really seeks to depict how a young African-American (Malik), who has been mis-educated by the system, comes into his consciousness and really learns what it means to be black in this system. By the end of the film, he must learn how to deal with the frustration that goes along with the responsibility of being black, and must learn how to use his head to combat the system intellectually.

The character Remi is also important because he is an example of how the system will use the naive individual as a buffer zone in the war for white supremacy. According to Dr. Charshee McIntyre, America is the only society where Europeans and Africans live together under a two-tiered racial stratification system. Everywhere else in the world, a three-tiered system was put in place. In the three-tiered system, since the whites were the minority, they needed other people that were near the class stratification of the African to be used as a buffer zone against the African population. Those who were to be used in that role were biracial populations who were cast as "colored" people. In this country, which has a very large white majority, biracial populations were deemed as a threat because they blurred a system that only sought to enslave Africans. Because of this, mixed populations were considered black too. The system of this country then used poor whites, who were closer to the economic classes of Africans, as the buffer zone. So, while those whites who had economic and institutional power fought the war against African-Americans from an institutional level, the poor whites enforced the system as policemen and through local hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, etc.

These hate groups, who often use brute force to enforce the system, had to be portrayed in the film to show how this system works. The character of Remi, the naive farm boy from Boise, Idaho who seemed not to fit anywhere at the campus (nor really know what his identity was in this society) was easily brought into the circle of neo-Nazis on campus; just as poor Europeans were often led astray and used for the benefit of upper-class leaders throughout European history.

Malik's girlfriend in the movie (Deja) represents an innocent and ambivalent character. Even though she recognizes that she is black, she, too, has been mis-eduacted by the system and doesn't really know what being black truly means in relation to the system. Throughout the movie, she questions Malik's views of the world, and even when she is gunned down at the end by Remi (her blood spilling at the feet of a statue of Christopher Columbus) her last word of "why?" shows that she really did not know what it means to be black within the system, and why she had to die.

That scene, with Deja dying at the feet of Columbus, sums up the major message of the movie: that it is the system that has and will seek the destruction of black people, and that black people who are ignorant of the system will be the victims of that system. The Native Americans, who originally did not look upon themselves as "Native Americans," welcomed Europeans into their territories and, unaware of the system, soon became victims of the system. Africans, who did not originally look upon themselves as "black" soon became victims of the system because they did not fight their aggressors with the knowledge of how the system worked. It has always been the innocent and the unaware that have been the victims of the system, ever since it was installed in America when Christopher Columbus came to this hemisphere. With her death, and her blood stained at the foot of the original enslaver and colonizer of the Americas, the neo-Nazis in the movie shouted, "white power," revealing to the audience the true symbolism of her blood spilled at Columbus' feet.

In conclusion, in order to fully understand where brother Singleton is coming from, one must know what the system is, and how it works. Mr. Ritter states that the movie does not provide any solutions. He is wrong again. Conscious-raising education is the solution to the system. As the saying goes, "he who controls the diameter of your learning, always controls the circumferences of your activity." So, African-Americans must unlearn what the system has programmed them to learn, ond once they become conscious, they then can decide, intelligently, the needed solutions for the liberation, education and salvation of the black nation.