On Feb. 12, 1988, Spike Lee released his second feature film. The acclaimed director from Brooklyn had become one of the most buzzed-about new filmmakers of the ’80s after his 1986 debut, She’s Gotta Have It, and he was following that indie hit with an ambitious musical depicting life on a historically black college campus.

School Daze was, like She’s Gotta Have It, a uniquely black perspective on the nuances of the black experience. In this case, Lee examined the varying degrees of classism and colorism in the world of middle-class black social circles and academia. One of the more memorable elements of School Daze is a rivalry between two female factions on campus: the light-skinned sorority girls The Gamma Rays, aka the “Wannabes,” who are dismissive and derogatory to the darker-skinned non-sorority-affiliated women, who they call the “Jiggaboos.”

Lee’s film was controversial—it was famously skewered by activist/scholar Amiri Baraka as depicting HBCUs as “brown-skinned Animal House”—but it was one of the first mainstream films to directly address colorism within the black community and how it shapes our perceptions of ourselves, how it determines who and what we value. Colorism was once again a topic of conversation this week after an excerpt from a Mathew Knowles interview with Ebony magazine hit the web.

“When I was growing up, my mother used to say, ‘Don’t ever bring no nappy-head black girl to my house,’” Knowles explains. “In the Deep South in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the shade of your blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message.

“I have a chapter in the book that talks about eroticized rage. I talk about going to therapy and sharing—one day I had a breakthrough—that I used to date mainly white women or very high-complexion black women that looked white. I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was white. Later I found out that she wasn’t, and she was actually very much in-tune with her blackness.

“I had been conditioned from childhood. With eroticized rage, there was actual rage in me as a black man, and I saw the white female as a way, subconsciously, of getting even or getting back. There are a lot of black men of my era that are not aware of this thing.”