Life is full of the ever-looming idea of “controversy.” We love to hear it, love to talk about it. We, as a society, just love it to death. With that in mind, there is a big controversy brewing in Hollywood over the film “Barbershop,” starring Ice Cube and Cedric “The Entertainer.”

The big controversy involving the film is a scene in which Cedric’s character makes some critical yet comical statements about Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He said that the only thing Rosa Parks did was “sit down” and that “Martin Luther King was a ho.” The whole thing has spawned a protest from certain civil rights leaders who have demanded the scene be deleted and an apology be made to the Parks and King families.

I feel the whole scene in the movie is being blown out of proportion, but the media and leaders continue to make charges towards it. The movie was set to portray an African-American barbershop and the different things the guys talk about with in it. I personally go to a barbershop like that back in good ole St. Louis, Mo. The controversy of how the movie was portrayed made me think of my own experiences.

The barbershop frequently go to while at home is called RJ’s. Now at RJ’s there are about six barbers (all male but one.) My barber is named Rufus but he calls himself “The Great Rufino,” ’cause he thinks he knows everything and feels he does magnificent things. All different kinds of people come in and out of this barbershop. While in RJ’s, the patrons sit and debate with “The Great Rufino” and the other barbers about everything a man loves to talk about nowadays: sports, sex, cars and why the government can’t get things right. The thing is, many more outlandish things are said within a “real” barbershop than just the statement Cedric “The Entertainer” said.

The movie was set to portray what does go on within a barbershop and in a barbershop, particularly an African-American barbershop, and many controversial things are said. I have heard things like “Langston Hughes is asexual,” “George Bush used to sniff Coke” (which may be true), “Jordan still can win a championship when he is 50 just cause he is Jordan,” or “Don’t you like when a girl (fill in the blank).”

I know people are offended but I see no one getting mad or ranting and raving when someone’s head is blown off in a movie or they are butt-naked doing God-knows-what in a scene. I am not saying I don’t like these things in movies-because I do. I am just saying let’s set our agenda on more pressing issues than a few simple lines in a movie.

The thing about the statements, although silly, still were very true to an extent. Rosa Parks was not the very first woman to refuse to sit in the back of the bus – she just received the most credit for it. And Martin Luther King was supposedly cheating on his wife during a part of their marriage.

There are some leaders whose outside actions have tainted or are contradictory to what they have done. Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, for example, fought for freedom but owned plantations and slaves. They believed in freedom for any man but didn’t consider a slave a man with the intent and same wishes of freedom that they wanted and fought the British for.

I see no idea why the leaders feel that these ideas can take away from anything that these figures have accomplished unless the tainting of prominent figures takes them out of the realm of being “god-like” and “mythical” beings, which they aren’t. They are human just like you and me with the same flaws and the same shortcomings.

Darryl

Frierson

is a senior in journalism

and mass communication and history from St. Louis, Mo.