We never see the fancy schools with the blazers and ties in films about Africa! But, in fact, we too have class and elitism.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.
Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa.
Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.
They don't have the news media set up in Africa that we do in the United States, where televisions are so accessible and newspapers and magazines are able to educate people.
We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.
In the U.K., there is a sort of obsession with class.
It's fashionable with the Sarah Palin set to attack Harvard and treat its graduates as elitists. But if you spend any time on campus, you see students drawn from all over the world - an astonishing number these days with roots in Asia - whose chief assets are brainpower and hard work.
I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's 'Blue Velvet.'
During the days of segregation, there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.
When you go to Africa, and you see children, they're usually barefoot, dirty and in rags, and they'd love to go to school.