Ode to LaKeith Stanfield
by Delane Young
Junior, Philosophy Major
Just so everyone knows who I am discussing, I will start with a quasi-wikipedia on the 30 year old, California-born actor. To rattle off some of his film work: The Purge: Anarchy, Selma, Straight Outta Compton, Snowden, Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, Uncut Gems, Knives Out, Judas and the Black Messiah. He is one of the many unsung actors and actresses in Hollywood that you hear their name, you don’t know them, then you are shown a picture and say “oh shit, that’s their name?” So:
This is LaKeith
This is LaKeith
THIS IS LaKEITH
I will mainly be focusing on his character Darius in the FX show Atlanta, which is directed and starred in by the multi-talented Donald Glover. However, I would like to praise him for other reasons for a second.
His Vanity Fair Interview serves multiple purposes. Within the first minutes he breaks down the struggle of having a more unique name, which is something that I also go through. Much like LaKeith, I spent a lot of my life trying to manipulate and adapting my name and nicknames to make it easier on other people. Extending empathy to others for THEIR struggle to comprehend my name, and in some light, my identity.
Throughout the video, he breaks down his fashion throughout his years of fame and success. His specific fashion is hard to define because of the bold and challenging fashion statements that appear to come naturally to him. To say that, he is not TRYING to push limits and boundaries but it is just a part of how he expresses himself. The comfort in his own skin and a range of clothes serves as a starck contrast to the current state of male insecurities. Mags and Abs, by Hatoum and Belle take the growing body insecurities among college age (mostly white) men and express it with science. Their methodology and results are more centered toward body image and not fashion, with men expressing body insecurities surrounding: weight, arms, abs.
Stanfield offers a seemingless cool response that challenges all male insecurities that are presented in Hatoum and Belle’s study, “What other people think of you is in their minds, not yours.” LaKeith Stanfield, not Keith, delivers his opinion so calmly and confidently that most people could overlook the comment. A parallel is drawn between that line and LaKeith’s role in Atlanta as Darius.
For all of you who currently reside under a rock and have not seen Donald Glover’s Atlanta, I will grossly over simplify it for you. The show follows a Princeton dropout (Earn) and his struggle to provide for his on again/ off again girlfriend and daughter. Capitalizing on his cousin’s (Paper Boi) early success in the gritty underground trap scene, he finds a sense of financial stability while encountering seemingly surreal situations.
Nothing the characters experience are necessarily out of the realm of possibility, they play on an extended reality. While some episodes highlight exaggerated conflicts dealing with race to straight up sci-fi. However, because race is such an important part, I would go as far to label it to show “realistic Afrofuturism,” really playing off the “what-if-isms” of day to day life.
Ok, now that everyone is caught up enough. Let's discuss Darius by picking a few favorite quotes and dissecting them:
“Not all great things come from great pain. Sometimes it’s love. Not everything’s a sacrifice” (S2/E6). Darius speaks so calm and beautifully in the face of a crazed man, threatening to kill him. The episode leans on the sci-fi aspect HARD, in which a black man struggles with his racial identity and leads him to lock himself in a house and essentially go crazy. However, Darius remains calm throughout the increasingly weird circumstances to see the good in humans and art.
bell hooks expresses the vital role that men play in women's liberation, “[i]n particular, men have a tremendous contribution to make to feminist struggle in the area of exposing, confronting, opposing, and transforming the sexism of their male peers” (81). Darius must have studied his literature when asked about rap music, specifically “mom rap;” “I don’t know, man, I like Flo Rida. I mean, moms need to enjoy rap too” (S1/E1). Darius does not wish to project a hierarchy, or rather patriarchy, that defines good music to bad music based on the demographic that enjoys the art.
Darius also strives to tear down social stigma around recreational marijuana use. “You want to manage a rapper but you can’t do business high” (S1/E1). As a 25 year old that is an active member of the cannabis community, it is refreshing to see the manner in which the Atlanta characters all interact with the drug while also meeting (if not exceeding) their professional goals. Stigma around the drug has led to a “War on Drugs” that unjustly and disproportionately targets people of minority communities. Trust me, I could go on, but here.
Darius, and on a larger scale, LaKeith Stanfield, have captivated me and instilled a sense of security through his art. Tackling big issues around race, masculinity, fashion, art, with the ease and demeanor of a cucumber. Stanfield has secured the number one spot on my list of “people to do business with” and remains a role model for people everywhere.
