The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  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 Den
nis 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.

  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.