A diagram of a slave ship marks the opening shot of Spike Lee’s picture about fraternity, revolution, and institution — School Daze (1988). Characteristic of Lee’s style, the context and setting of the film are thoroughly textured, as the montage of black and white photos continues through the opening credits. Set at the historically Black “Mission College,” the film places campus conflict front and center with an early scene of student-apartheid protestors squaring off against Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity in the street. This student conflict parallels another: the struggle for the school’s survival against the belief that an “integrated society” has no need for a Black college. Most interestingly, Lee often explores these conflicts in surreal scenes and musical numbers.
The campus dichotomy couldn’t be spelled out more explicitly in the film’s first musical number, a full-on song and dance sequences marked by lyrics like, “Talking bout good and bad hair / Whether you're dark or you're fair / So you can go on and swear / See if I care, good and bad hair...” From this first sequence, School Daze gains a kind of afro-surrealism: a Black school of thought that explores the surreal nature of the capitalist controlled white world. These sequences continue throughout the film, until the closing scene — arguably the most surreal in the film — explicitly calls for the audience to “WAKE UP.”