The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (62 page)

Unquestionably, the 1991 urban rebellions in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict have given new poignancy to Singleton’s depiction of the various personal, social, and economic forces which shape the lives of the residents of South Central L.A. His film was an incandescent and prescient portrait of the simmering stew of social angers—aimed at police brutality, steeply declining property values, poverty, and virile racism—which aggravate an already aggrieved community and which force hard social choices on neighborhoods (do we riot in our own backyards; do we maliciously target Korean businesses, especially since the case of Latasha Harlins, a black teenager murdered by a Korean grocer, who was simply given five years probation; and do we destroy community businesses and bring the charge of senseless destruction of resources in our own community when in reality, before the riots, we were already desperate, poor, and invisible,
and largely unaided by the legitimate neighborhood business economy?) amounting to little more than communal triage. Singleton’s film proves, in retrospect, a powerful meditation upon the blight of gang violence, hopelessness, familial deterioration, and economic desperation which conspire to undermine and slowly but surely destroy the morale and structure of many urban communities, particularly those in South Central L.A.

Boyz N the Hood
is a painful and powerful look at the lives of black people, mostly male, who live in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. It is a story of relationships—of kin, friendship, community, love, rejection, contempt, and fear. At the story’s heart are three important relationships: a triangular relationship between three boys, whose lives we track to mature adolescence; the relationship between one of the boys and his father; and the relationship between the other two boys and their mother.

Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is a young boy whose mother Reva Devereaux (Angela Bassett), in an effort to impose discipline upon him, sends him to live with his father across town. Tre has run afoul of his elementary school teacher for challenging both her authority and her Eurocentric curriculum. And Tre’s life in his mother’s neighborhood makes it clear why he is not accommodating well to school discipline. By the age of ten, he has already witnessed the yellow police tapes that mark the scenes of crimes and has viewed the blood of a murder victim. Fortunately for Tre, his mother and father love him more than they couldn’t love each other.

Doughboy (former N.W.A. rapper Ice Cube, in a brilliant cinematic debut) and Ricky (Morris Chestnut) are half-brothers who live with their mother Brenda (Tyra Ferell) across the street from Tre and his father. Brenda, as a single black mother, belongs to a much maligned group, whose members, depending on the amateurish social theory that wins the day, are vilified with charges of promiscuity, judged to be the source of all that is evil in the lives of black children, or at best stereotyped as helpless beneficiaries of the state. Singleton artfully avoids these caricatures by giving a complex portrait of Brenda, a woman who is plagued by her own set of demons, but who tries to provide the best living she can for her sons.

Even so, Brenda clearly favors Ricky over Doughboy—and this favoritism will bear fatal consequences for both boys. Indeed in Singleton’s cinematic worldview both Ricky and Doughboy seem doomed to violent deaths because—unlike Tre—they have no male role models to guide them. This premise embodies one of the film’s central tensions—and one of its central limitations. For even as he assigns black men a pivotal role of responsibility for the fate of black boys, Singleton also gives rather uncritical precedence to the impact of black men, even in their absence, over the efforts of present and loyal black women who more often prove to be at the head of strong black families.

While this foreshortened view of gender relations within the black community arguably distorts Singleton’s cinematic vision, he is nonetheless remarkably perceptive in examining the subtle dynamics of the black family and neighborhood,
tracking the differing effects that the boys’ siblings, friends, and environment have on them. There is no bland nature-versus-nurture dichotomy here: Singleton is too smart to render life in terms of a Kierkegaardian either/or. His is an Afrocentric world of both/and.

This complex set of interactions—between mother and sons, between father and son, between boys who benefit from paternal wisdom or maternal ambitions, between brothers whose relationship is riven by primordial passions of envy and contempt, between environment and autonomy, between the larger social structure and the smaller but more immediate tensions of domestic life—define the central shape of
Hood.
We see a vision of black life that transcends insular preoccupations with “positive” or “negative” images and instead presents at once the limitations and virtues of black culture.

As a result, Singleton’s film offers a plausible perspective on how people make the choices they do—and on how choice itself is not a property of autonomous moral agents acting in an existential vacuum, but rather something that is created and exercised within the interaction of social, psychic, political, and economic forces of everyday experience. Personal temperament, domestic discipline, parental guidance (or its absence) all help shape our understanding of our past and future, help define how we respond to challenge and crisis, and help mold how we embrace success or seem destined for failure.

Tre’s developing relationship with his father, Furious Styles (Larry Fishburne), is by turns troubled and disciplined, sympathetic and compassionate—finely displaying Singleton’s open-ended evocation of the meaning of social choice as well as his strong sensitivity to cultural detail. Furious Styles’s moniker vibrates with double meaning, a semiotic pairing that allows Singleton to signify in speech what Furious accomplishes in action: a wonderful amalgam of old-school black consciousness, elegance, style, and wit linked to the hip-hop fetish of “dropping science” (spreading knowledge) and staying well informed about social issues.

Only seventeen years Tre’s senior, Furious understands Tre’s painful boyhood growth and identifies with his teen aspirations. But more than that, he possesses a sincere desire to shape Tre’s life according to his own best lights. Furious is the strong presence and wise counselor who will guide Tre through the pitfalls of reaching personal maturity in the chaos of urban childhood, the very sort of presence denied to so many in
Hood,
and in countless black communities throughout the country.

Furious, in other words, embodies the promise of a different conception of black manhood. As a father he is disciplining but loving, firm but humorous, demanding but sympathetic. In him, the black male voice speaks with an authority so confidently possessed and equitably wielded that one might think it is strongly supported and valued in American culture, but of course that is not so. The black male voice is rarely heard without the inflections of race and class domination that distort its power in the home and community, mute its call for basic
respect and common dignity, or amplify its ironic denial of the very principles of democracy and equality that it has publicly championed in pulpits and political organizations.

Among the most impressive achievements of Singleton’s film is its portrayal of the neighborhood as a “community.” In this vein Singleton implicitly sides with the communitarian critique of liberal moral autonomy and atomistic individualism.
⁴
In
Hood
people love and worry over one another, even if they express such sentiments roughly. For instance, when the older Tre crosses the street and sees a baby in the path of an oncoming car, he swoops her up and takes her to her crackaddicted mother. Tre gruffly reproves her for neglecting her child and insists that she change the baby’s diapers before the baby smells as bad as her mother. And when Tre goes to a barbecue for Doughboy, who is fresh from a jail sentence, Brenda beseeches him to talk to Doughboy, hoping that Tre’s intangible magic will “rub off on him.”

But Singleton understands that communities embody resistance to the anonymity of liberal society as conceived in Aristotle via MacIntyre. His film portrays communities as more heterogeneous, complex, and diverse, however, than the ideal of consensus that grounds MacIntyre’s conception of communities, which is at least partially mediated through a common moral vocabulary. Singleton’s neighborhood is a community precisely because it turns on the particularity of racial identity, and the contradictions of class location, that are usually muted or eradicated in mainstream accounts of moral community. Such accounts tend to eliminate racial, sexual, gender, and class difference in positing the conditions that make community possible, and in specifying the norms, values, and mores which regulate moral discourse and that structure communal behavior. Singleton’s film community is an implicit argument for the increased visibility of a politics of difference within American culture, a solemn rebuke to the Capraesque representation of a socially and economically homogeneous community.
⁵

The quest for community represented in Singleton’s film is related to the quest for intellectual community facilitated by certain modes of African-American cultural criticism. By taking black folk seriously, by taking just measure of their intellectual reflections, artistic perceptions, social practices, and cultural creations, the black cultural critic is seeking both to develop fair but forceful examination of black life, and to establish a community of interlocutors, ranging from high-brow intellectuals to everyday folk, whites and people of color alike, who are interested in preserving black culture’s best features, ameliorating its weakest parts, and eradicating its worst traits.

Of course, specific moments of black cultural criticism also help shed light on aspects of black artistic production that may be overlooked or underestimated in much of mainstream criticism. A crucial role for African-American cultural criticism is to reveal historical connections and thematic continuities and departures between black films and issues debated over time and space in African-American society. By doing so, the black cultural critic illumines the material interests of
black filmmakers, while drawing attention to the cultural situation of black film practice. Singleton’s depiction of community provides a colorful lens on problems which have long plagued black neighborhoods.

Singleton understands that communities, besides embodying the virtuous ends of their morally prudent citizens, also reflect the despotic will of their fringe citizens who threaten the civic pieties by which communities are sustained.
Hood
’s community is fraught with mortal danger, its cords of love and friendship under the siege of gang violence, and by what sociologist Mike Davis calls the political economy of crack.
⁶
Many inner-city communities live under what may be called a “ juvenocracy”: the economic rule and illegal tyranny exercised by young black men over significant territory in the black urban center. In the social geography of South Central L.A., neighborhoods are reconceived as spheres of expansion where urban space is carved up according to implicit agreements, explicit arrangements, or lethal conflicts between warring factions.

Thus, in addition to being isolated from the recognition and rewards of the dominant culture, inner-city communities are cut off from sources of moral authority and legitimate work, as underground political economies reward consenting children and teens with quick cash, faster cars, and sometimes, still more rapid death.
⁷
Along with the reterritorialization of black communal space through gentrification, the hegemony of the suburban mall over the inner-city and downtown shopping complex, and white flight and black track to the suburbs and exurbs, the inner city is continually devastated.

Such conditions rob the neighborhood of one of its basic social functions and defining characteristics: the cultivation of a self-determined privacy in which residents can establish and preserve their identities. Police helicopters constantly zoom overhead in
Hood
’s community, a mobile metaphor of the ominous surveillance and scrutiny to which so much of poor black life is increasingly subjected. The helicopter also signals another tragedy, which
Hood
alludes to throughout its narrative: ghetto residents must often flip a coin to distinguish Los Angeles’ police from its criminals. After all, this is Darryl Gates’s L.A.P.D., and the recent Rodney King incident only underscores a long tradition of extreme measures that police have used to control crime and patrol neighborhoods.
⁸
As Singleton wrote after the rebellion:

Furious’s efforts to raise his son in these conditions of closely surveilled social anarchy reveal the galaxy of ambivalence that surrounds a conscientious, communityminded brother who wants the best for his family, but who also understands the social realities that shape the lives of black men. Furious’s urban cosmology is three-tiered: at the immediate level, the brute problems of survival are refracted through the lens of black manhood; at the abstract level, large social forces such as gentrification and the military’s recruitment of black male talent undermine the black man’s role in the community; at the intermediate level, police brutality contends with the ongoing terror of gang violence.