The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (61 page)

This Saturday night Sal keeps the store open late to accommodate a group of neighborhood kids. That is when Radio Raheem (boom box in tow and pumping loud) and Buggin’ Out shout a final request to place photos of blacks on the wall. After Radio Raheem refuses to lower the volume of his box, Sal, driven to an understandable frenzy, crushes the radio with his baseball bat. Radio Raheem also behaves understandably. He grabs Sal, pulls him over the counter, and the two men struggle from the store into the street. The police arrive and attempt to restrain Radio Raheem using the infamous New York Police “chokehold,” a potentially lethal technique, especially when applied to black male necks. The police let Radio Raheem drop dead to the ground, kick him, and drag him into a police car. Meanwhile, they have handcuffed Buggin’ Out and carted him away. The crowd is horror-stricken. Mookie, until now the mediator of disputes between Sal and the community, takes sides with his neighbors and throws a trash can through Sal’s window, catalyzing the riot. The crowd destroys the pizzeria, overturning tables
and equipment and taking money from the cash register. But it is stuttering Smiley who starts the fire. In African-American religious tradition, the Holy Spirit appears before believers in the form of fire. Smiley’s torch is the articulation of his religious passion.

Lee’s portrayal of police brutality, which has claimed the lives of too many black people, is disturbingly honest. The encounter between Radio Raheem and Sal is poignant and instructive. It shows that a black person’s death may be provoked by incidents of racial antagonism gone amok, and that it is easy for precious young black life to be sacrificed in the gritty interstices between anger and abandonment. Thus, we can understand the neighborhood’s consuming desire to destroy property—avenging the murder of a son whose punishment does not fit his crime.

It is also understandable that the crowd destroys Sal’s place, the pizzeria being the nearest representative of destructive white presence, a white presence that has just denied Radio Raheem his future. But Sal certainly doesn’t represent the “powers” that Public Enemy rapped about so fearlessly on Radio Raheem’s box. As Lee knows, the character of racism has changed profoundly in the last few decades, and even though there are still too many ugly reassertions of overt racism, it is often the more subtle variety that needs to be identified and fought.

For instance, after viewing Lee’s film many people may leave the theater smugly self-confident that they are not racists because they are not petit bourgeois Italian businessmen, because they don’t call people “niggers,” and because they are not policemen who chokehold black men to death. But contemporary racism is often the teacher who cannot take a black student seriously, who subtly dismisses her remarks in class because they are “not really central,” or because he has presumed, often unconsciously, a limit to her abstract reasoning. (The double whammy of race and gender operates here.) Contemporary racism is often middle-class black managers hitting a career ceiling that is ostensibly due to their lack of high-level management skills, which, of course, are missing not because of lack of intelligence but because they have not acquired the right
kinds
of experience. Contemporary racism is not about being kept out of a clothes store, but rather about not being taken seriously because the store clerk presumes you won’t spend your money or that you have none to spend.

To assert that racism is most virulent at Sal’s level misses the complex ways in which everyday racism is structured, produced, and sustained in multifarious social practices, cultural traditions, and intellectual justifications. Sal is as much a victim of his racist worldview as he is its perpetrator. By refusing to probe the shift in the modus operandi of American racism, Lee misses the opportunity to expose what the British cultural critic Stuart Hall calls inferential racism, the “apparently naturalized representation of events and situations relating to race, whether factual or ‘fictional,’ which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions.”

Those who strive to resist the new-style racism must dedicate themselves to pointing out slippery attitudes and ambiguous actions that signal the presence of
racism without appearing to do so. This strategy must include drawing attention to unintended racist statements, actions, and thoughts, which nevertheless do harm. These strategies must be accompanied by sophisticated, high-powered intellectual dialogue about how the nature of particular forms of Western discourse provide the expression, reproduction, and maintenance of racist ideology and practices. People must form interracial, international lines of solidarity and develop analyses of racism in tandem with similar analyses of sexism, classism, antiSemitism, anti-Arabism, homophobia, ecological terrorism, and a host of other progressive concerns.

Perhaps nothing does more to symbolize the shadowed brilliance of Lee’s project, the troubled symbiosis of his black neonationalist vision and his desire to represent black humanity, than a scene in which Mookie is completing an argument with Jade. After they depart, the camera fixes on the graffiti on the wall: “Tawana told the truth!” It is understandable, given Lee’s perspective, that he chooses to retrieve this fresh and tortured signifier from the iconographical reservoir of black neonationalists, some of whom believe Tawana transcends her infamous circumstances and embodies the reality of racial violence in our times. Racial violence on every level is vicious now, but Tawana is not its best or most powerful symbol. Lee’s invocation of Tawana captures the way in which many positive aspects of neonationalist thought are damaged by close association with ideas and symbols that hurt more than help. Yes, it is important to urge racial self-esteem, a vision for racial progress, the honoring of historical figures, and the creation of powerful culture, but not if the result is a new kind of bigotry. For this reason we must criticize Lee’s proximity to Louis Farrakhan’s ideological stances. Real transformation of our condition will come only as we explore the resources of progressive thought, social action, and cultural expression that were provided by figures like King, X, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Pauli Murray, and Ida B. Wells. But we can’t wallow in unimaginative mimesis. These people’s crucial insights, cultural expressions, and transformative activities must inspire us to think critically and imaginatively about our condition and help us generate profound and sophisticated responses to our own crises. Only then will we be able to do the right thing.

BY NOW THE DRAMATIC DECLINE IN BLACK male life has become an unmistakable feature of our cultural landscape, although of course the causes behind the desperate condition of black men date much further back than its recent popular discovery. Every few months, new reports and conferences attempt to explain the poverty, disease, despair, and death that shove black men toward social apocalypse.

If these words appear too severe or hyperbolic, the statistics testify to the trauma. For black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, suicide is the leading cause of death. Between 1980 and 1985, the life expectancy for white males increased from 63 to 74.6 years, but only from 59 to 65 years for black males. Between 1973 and 1986, the real earnings of black males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine fell 31 percent, as the percentage of young black males in the workforce plummeted 20 percent. The number of black men who dropped out of the workforce altogether doubled from 13 percent to 25 percent.

By 1989, almost 32 percent of black men between sixteen and nineteen were unemployed, compared with 16 percent of white men. And while blacks constitute only 12 percent of the nation’s population, they make up 48 percent of the prison population, with men accounting for 89 percent of the black prison population. Only 14 percent of the white males who live in large metropolitan areas have been arrested, but the percentage for black males is 51 percent. And while 3 percent of white men have served time in prison, 18 percent of black men have been behind bars.
¹

Most chilling, black-on-black homicide is the leading cause of death for black males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. Or, to put it another way, “One out of every twenty-one black American males will be murdered in their lifetime. Most will die at the hands of another black male.” These words appear in stark white print on the dark screen that opens John Singleton’s masterful new film,
Boyz N the Hood.
These words are both summary and opening salvo in Singleton’s battle to reinterpret and redeem the black male experience. With
Boyz N the Hood
we have the most brilliantly executed and fully realized portrait of the coming-of-age odyssey that black boys must undertake in the suffocating conditions of urban decay and civic chaos.

Singleton adds color and depth to Michael Schultz’s groundbreaking
Cooley
High,
extends the narrative scope of the Hudlin Brothers’ important and humorous
House Party,
and creates a stunning complement to Gordon Parks’s pioneering
Learning Tree,
which traced the painful pilgrimage to maturity of a rural black male. Singleton’s treatment of the various elements of contemporary black urban experience—gang violence, drug addiction, black male–female relationships, domestic joys and pains, friendships—is subtle and complex. He layers narrative textures over gritty and compelling visual slices of black culture that show us what it means to come to maturity, or die trying, as a black male.

Singleton’s noteworthy attempt to present a richly hued, skillfully nuanced portrait of black male life is rare in the history of American film. Along with the seminal work of Spike Lee, and the recently expanded body of black film created by Charles Burnett, Robert Townsend, Keenan Wayans, Euzhan Palcy, Matty Rich, Mario Van Peebles, Ernest Dickerson, Bill Duke, Charles Lane, Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, Doug McHenry, George Jackson, and Julie Dash, Singleton symbolizes a new generation of black filmmakers whose artistic visions of African-American and American life may influence understandings of black worldviews, shape crucial perceptions of the sheer diversity of black communities, and address substantive racial, social, and political issues.

A major task, therefore, of African-American film criticism is to understand black film production in its historical, political, socioeconomic, ideological, and cultural contexts. Such critical analysis has the benefit of generating plausible explanations of how black film developed; what obstacles it has faced in becoming established as a viable and legitimate means of representing artistic, cultural, and racial perspectives on a range of personal and social issues; the ideological and
social conditions which stunted its growth, shaped its emergence, and enabled its relatively recent success; and the economic and political forces which limited the material and career options of black filmmakers and constrained the opportunities for black artists to flourish and develop in a social environment hostile to black artistic production.

Another task of African-American film criticism is to provide rigorous tools of analysis, categories of judgment, and modes of evaluation that view the artistic achievements of black filmmakers in light of literary criticism, moral philosophy, feminist theory, intellectual history, cultural studies, and poststructuralist theory. African-American film criticism is not a hermetically sealed intellectual discourse that generates insight by limiting its range of intellectual reference to film theory, or to African American culture, in interpreting the themes, ideas, and currents of African-American film. Rather, African-American film criticism draws from the seminal insights of a variety of intellectual traditions in understanding and explaining the genealogy, scope, and evolution of black artistic expression. In short, black film criticism does not posit or constitute a rigidly defined sphere of academic analysis or knowledge production, but calls into question regimented conceptions of disciplinary boundaries while promoting the overlapping and interpenetration of diverse areas of intellectual inquiry.

Finally, African-American film criticism is related to the larger task of sustaining a just, enabling, but rigorous African-American cultural criticism that revels in black culture’s virtues, takes pleasure in its achievements, laments its failed opportunities, and interrogates its weaknesses. African-American cultural criticism is intellectually situated to disrupt, subvert, and challenge narrow criticisms or romantic celebrations of black culture. A healthy African-American cultural criticism views black folk not as mere victims in and of history, but as its resourceful co-creators and subversive regenerators. It understands black people as agents of their own jubilation and pain. It sees them, in varying degrees and in limited manner, as crafters of their own destinies, active participants in the construction of worlds of meaning through art, thought, and sport that fend off threatening enclosure by the ever enlarging kingdom of absurdity. In this light, African-American film criticism pays attention to, and carefully evaluates, the treatment of crucial aspects of black culture in black films. Singleton’s film addresses one of the most urgent and complex problems facing African-American communities: the plight of black men.

We have just begun to understand the pitfalls that attend the path of the black male. Social theory has only recently fixed its gaze on the specific predicament of black men in relation to the crisis of American capital, positing how their lives are shaped by structural changes in the political economy, for instance, rather than viewing them as the latest examples of black cultural pathology.
²
And social psychology has barely explored the deeply ingrained and culturally reinforced selfloathing and chronic lack of self-esteem that characterizes black males across age groups, income brackets, and social locations.

Even less have we understood the crisis of black males as rooted in childhood and adolescent obstacles to socioeconomic stability and moral, psychological, and emotional development. We have just begun to pay attention to specific rites of passage, stages of personality growth, and milestones of psychoemotional evolution that measure personal response to racial injustice, social disintegration, and class oppression.

James P. Comer and Alvin F. Poussaint’s
Black Child Care,
Marian Wright Edelman’s
Families in Peril,
and Darlene and Derek Hopson’s foundational
Different and
Wonderful
are among the exceptions that address the specific needs of black childhood and adolescence. Jewell Taylor-Gibbs’s edited work,
Young, Black and Male in
America: An Endangered Species,
has recently begun to fill a gaping void in socialscientific research on the crisis of the black male.

In the last decade alternative presses have vigorously probed the crisis of the black male. Like their black independent filmmaker peers, authors of volumes published by black independent presses often rely on lower budgets for advertising, marketing, and distribution. Nevertheless, word-of-mouth discussion of several books has sparked intense debate. Nathan and Julia Hare’s
Bringing the Black
Boy to Manhood: The Passage,
Jawanza Kunjufu’s trilogy,
The Conspiracy to Destroy
Black Boys,
Amos N. Wilson’s
The Developmental Psychology of the Black Child,
Baba Zak A. Kondo’s
For Homeboys Only: Arming and Strengthening Young Brothers for Black
Manhood,
and Haki Madhubuti’s
Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?
have had an important impact on significant subsections of literate black culture, most of whom share an Afrocentric perspective.

Such works remind us that we have too infrequently understood the black male crisis through coming-of-age narratives and a set of shared social values that ritualize the process of the black adolescent’s passage into adulthood. Such narratives and rites serve a dual function: they lend meaning to childhood experience, and they preserve and transmit black cultural values across the generations. Yet such narratives evoke a state of maturity—rooted in a vital community—that young black men are finding elusive or, all too often, impossible to reach. The conditions of extreme social neglect that besiege urban black communities—in every realm from health care to education to poverty and joblessness—make the black male’s passage into adulthood treacherous at best.

One of the most tragic symptoms of the young black man’s troubled path to maturity is the skewed and strained state of gender relations within the black community. With alarming frequency, black men turn to black women as scapegoats for their oppression, lashing out, often with physical violence, at those closest to them. It is the singular achievement of Singleton’s film to redeem the power of the coming-of-age narrative while also adapting it to probe many of the very tensions that evade the foundations of the coming-of-age experience in the black community.

While mainstream American culture has only barely begun to register awareness of the true proportions of the crisis, young black males have responded in the
last decade primarily in a rapidly flourishing independent popular culture, dominated by two genres: rap music and black film. The rap music of Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, Kool Moe Dee, N.W.A., Ice Cube, and Ice-T, and the films of Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, and now Matty Rich and Mario Van Peebles have afforded young black males a medium in which to visualize and verbalize their perspectives on a range of social, personal, and cultural issues, to tell their stories about themselves and each other while the rest of America consumes and eavesdrops.

John Singleton’s new film makes a powerful contribution to this enterprise. Singleton filters his brilliant insights, critical comments, and compelling portraits of young black male culture through a film that reflects the sensibilities, styles, and attitudes of rap culture.
³
Singleton’s shrewd casting of rapper Ice Cube as a central character allows him to seize symbolic capital from a real-life rap icon, while tailoring the violent excesses of Ice Cube’s rap persona into a jarring visual reminder of the cost paid by black males for survival in American society. Singleton skillfully integrates the suggestive fragments of critical reflections on the black male predicament in several media and presents a stunning vision of black male pain and possibility in a catastrophic environment: South Central Los Angeles.

Of course, South Central Los Angeles is an already storied geography in the American social imagination. It has been given cursory—though melodramatic—treatment by news anchor Tom Brokaw’s glimpse of gangs in a highly publicized 1988 TV special, and has been mythologized in Dennis Hopper’s film about gang warfare,
Colors.
Hopper, who perceptively and provocatively helped probe the rough edges of anomie and rebellion for a whole generation of outsiders in 1969’s
Easy Rider,
less successfully traces the genealogy of social despair, postmodern urban absurdity, and yearning for belonging that provides the context for understanding gang violence. Singleton’s task in part, therefore, is a filmic demythologization of the reigning tropes, images, and metaphors that have expressed the experience of life in South Central Los Angeles. While gangs are a central part of the urban landscape, they are not its exclusive reality. And although gang warfare occupies a looming periphery in Singleton’s film, it is not the defining center.