Message of Black Diversity Is Riggs’ Legacy

Marlon Riggs’ “Tongues Untied” arrived on PBS in 1991 amid a firestorm of wrath and controversy, outraging wee-minded bigots who saw pornographic evil in his celebration of black men loving black men.

Times have changed. Almost five years later, his latest film is about to air without attracting even a raised brow. And Riggs himself is now dead, succumbing to complications of AIDS in 1994 at age 37, requiring others (co-producer Nicole Atkinson and co-director/editor Christiane Badgley) to complete the pointedly eloquent film that he had begun. His vision and ideas, their punctuation.

*

The Riggs mantra, Vive la difference, thoroughly permeates “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t,” befitting a filmmaker who directed his considerable passion and creativity toward broadening and varying black America’s definition of itself.

In “Tongues Untied,” that meant expressing his anguish and rage over black homophobia. The equally eclectic “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t” extends that mission, but is all the more powerful for also encompassing a multiplex of additional “isms” that constrict the often contradictory notions of blackness that African Americans impose on each other.

Because Riggs’ point is that blacks are their own rainbow, he makes gumbo, a soup of many ingredients, his metaphor for them. As always, he ingeniously employs poetry, dance and music in his cause, in addition to drawing commentary from a cross-section of African Americans, ranging from intellectuals to gang members on the streets of Los Angeles.

Litmus tests for blacks “being black”--from hair to speech to neighborhood to lifestyle--are figments derived from prejudice and decadence, Riggs believed. Hence, the African Americans he displays straddle a variety of skin shades and beliefs, and, of course, different sexual orientations.

He indicts black sexism not with invective but by letting its disciples impale themselves. Included here is footage from Barbara Koppel’s documentary about Mike Tyson for NBC, a devastating section on Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan that attracted too little notice when it first aired in 1993. It shows Farrakhan addressing black women at a rally for Tyson about the time the former heavyweight champ was to enter prison for raping Desiree Washington.

“How many times, sisters, have you said no and mean yes all the time?” Farrakhan asked with a broad grin before lashing out: “These damn deceitful games that you play!”

*

Riggs haunts his film literally and figuratively, speaking in anecdotal set pieces and on his back in the hospital, where the AIDS virus has weakened him, dictating his wishes about assembling the film he won’t survive to finish. The sequences are poignant yet free of maudlin self-pity, for despite being sick, Riggs has his eyes only on the prize. “I don’t know if I want to record more narration,” he says.

Two years after his death, the message that Riggs did record resonates stereophonically as he preaches the gospel of black diversity from the bed and from the grave.

* “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.