Confusion in a dream deferred: Context and culture in teaching A Raisin in the Sun

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 1998 by Kodat, Catherine Gunther

If A Raisin in the Sun problematically frames racial questions in terms of class, Jerry Maguire appeals to class membership in an attempt to completely bypass race. Indeed, one could argue that Jerry Maguire represents an effort to proclaim the triumph of the class agenda buried within Hansberry's play, as the movie seeks everywhere to claim that, in 1990s America, race isn't an issuethanks, precisely, to the middle class and its guarantee that all value (merit) will be recognized and rewarded. The now-famous telephone exchange between Rod Tidwell and Jerry Maguire opens with Tidwell's corrective "I hear that you hear what I'm saying but do you really hear what I'm saying?" What Tidwell wants to say, it turns out, is "I am a valuable commodity," an assertion that Jerry Maguire doesn't dispute, since, in the world of this film, the impartial judgement of the market recognizes value wherever it may appear and guarantees that black labor will be treated no differently than white labor.'6 In Jerry Maguire, however, being a valuable commodity means more than being for sale, as the rest of that phone call makes clear:

Rod: This is what you're gonna do for me. It's a very personal, very important, thing. Hell, it's a family motto. Are you ready, Jerry? Want to make sure you're ready, brother. Here it is: Show me the money. Jerry, doesn't it make you feel good to say that, Jerry?

Jerry: Show me the money.

Rod: I need to feel you, Jerry. Jerry, you better yell.

Jerry (yelling): Show me the money!

Rod: Do you love the black man?

Jerry (yelling): I love the black man! Show me the money!

Rod: I love black people.

Jerry (yelling): I love black people!

Rod: Who's your motherfucker, Jerry?

Jerry (yelling): You're my motherfucker!

Rod: What're you going to do, Jerry?

Jerry (still yelling): Show me the money!

Rod: Congratulations. You're still my agent.

Appreciating the overall humor of the scene (a humor deriving in no small part from Gooding's antic performance) shouldn't prevent us from recognizing how this conversation spells out the very terms of the "color blind" society: what makes America a non-racist land of integrity is precisely its citizens' common pursuit of the good life (what Rod Tidwell calls "kwan"in the film, which he says means "everything": the money, the family, the house, the job, the works). Once we recognize our shared purpose, it becomes easy to "love black people"; we become one, with a single "family motto."As Rod's wife Marcee says to him, "Baby, this is us, you and me. We determine our worth."

Of course, making race disappear is something of a tall order even for a Hollywood film, and Jerry Maguire is punctuated by scenes that complicate this effort to forget the importance of race in American society, scenes ranging from Jerry's response to Dorothy's reminder, after he drunkenly fondles her breasts, that she's his employee (Jerry says, "Now I feel like Clarence Thomas") to Chad the nanny's speech aboutjazz ("This is Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Stockholm 1963. Two masters of freedom playing at a time before their art was corrupted by zillions of cocktail act performers who destroyed the legacy of the early American art form, jazz."). In fact, race must appear in Jerry Maguire precisely so that its dismissal as an analytic category has sufficient weight. In a scene that graphically enacts this logic, a naked Cuba Gooding, Jr., calls after Jerry Maguire, "See, that's the difference between us. You think we're fighting and I think we're finally talking." As the camera lingers over Gooding's brown flesh, the visual register of the film brings racial difference to the fore; yet Tidwell's lines insist that the "difference between us" isn't one of race or class, but simply one of communication. Getting rid of "race" as an analytic category may at first seem like "fighting," but, Jerry Maguire argues, it's the only way Americans can finally talk. The film plays out the necessity of denial in another (more explicitly economic) register through Jerry's perpetual disavowal of the crisis of conscience that got him fired from his agency and led him, all unwilling, into living out his recommendation to create an "honest" business involving "fewer clients, less money": "It was just a mission statement." The film thereby assures us that our deepest desires can only be fulfilled by walking away from them. The success of Jerry Maguire thus lies in its ability to rearticulate the dream of racial justice within the neoconservative ethos of a "color blind" society and the free marketplace. Racial justice will come when we forget about race. Show me the money, and all the rest will follow.