A systematic exclusion of black people from the production, distribution, and exhibition of film exists in Hollywood. This “system” is white America’s continuing subversion of a whole race that has existed since the first slave was dragged from African soil and put to work on an American plantation. In these “politically correct” times the system is not an overt racist activity. Rather, it is more of a hidden political agenda that does not appear to exist when looked for. But the system operates in all aspects of commercial American cinema and, thus, defines how blacks are portrayed on the screen which, in turn, defines how black audiences define themselves. Hollywood has traditionally portrayed the black male negatively, providing inappropriate role models for young black males. Although the influence of independent filmmakers is changing the way commercial films depict black men, real change will only come when audiences demand it. This essay looks at why and how the “system” excludes black people, and examines several films to show how the image of the black male is changing.
American media representations of black men not only serve the interests of the dominant white class and help maintain existing institutions, but they also keep black people from positions of power and stature in American society. Historically, black males have been characterized only in terms of society’s own political agenda and its own economic gain. D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), for example, was a blatantly racist attack on blacks, portraying black men as a sexual threat to the purity of white women and a biological threat to the purity of the white race. Films such as Hallelujah (1929) sentimentalized the plantation myth to keep black people in “their place.” The film capitalized upon the loss of the supportive extended family of the rural Southern communities after black migration to large cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Jones 23).
The Term Paper on Black Student White People Whites
It is very easy to imagine a world that does not involve race. Humans would work together to make advances in medicine, technology, and education. Asides from imagining, hoping, and dreaming the question comes to mind; is it possible From the day that you learn that Columbus discovered a New World a cloud settles in over the rays of hope and imagination. In the educational system you are molded to ...
The scenes of the sharecroppers on Zeke’s farm smiling, laughing, and singing as they pick cotton are blatantly reminiscent of the popularized myth of happy slaves on the plantation. Things were better back then, these scenes suggest; life was good. When Zeke goes into town to sell the year’s crop, he falls prey to the evils of city life–gambling, loose women, and drinking– which results in the death of his brother. The message is clear: black people only get into trouble when they fail to stay in their place.
Using the images of black people to promote a racist political agenda is not a relic of the past, however. It is the legacy handed down to contemporary film and other media. The lives of black Americans are portrayed with off-balance images that totally ignore the complexity of black experience (Johnson 13; Spigner 40).
The images in film and other media only offer extremes of bad and good, of sexually threatening and sterile. Hollywood gives black audiences images of black men positioned at two extremes–criminals and drug dealers at one end or sexually (and thus politically) sterile beings on the other, as many of Sidney Poitier’s characters are (Guerrero, Framing 72).
A recent exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Black Male: Representation of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, drew some negative criticism about how black men were portrayed. Adger Cowars, a Manhattan painter and photographer said, “This is a show about white people’s fears. It’s about sex, violence, and sports. There’s no picture of a black man with a child, his daughter or his son. Think of all the great black men. There are none in this show” (qtd. in Richardson C13).
The Essay on Black Man Standing Media People Males
... images black males have of their own identity? It's hard to measure the vast damage brought on by these unquestioned stereotypes. White people ... they are supposed to act and be. Black men are shown less often in the media, especially on primetime TV, but when ... here is the way that black males are represented. Black men are consistently being portrayed by the media to fit into narrow, stereotypical ...
In the show’s exhibition catalogue, Herman Gray explains how these negative images of black men are used by the dominant white class to shift attention away from the problems inherent in the system and, at the same time, garner support for its institutions:
Discursively located outside of the “normal conceptions,” mainstream moral and class structure, media representations of poor black males (e.g., Rodney King and Willie Horton) served as the symbolic basis for fueling and sustaining panics about crime, the nuclear family, and middle-class security while they displaced attention from the economy, racism, sexism, and homophobia. This figure of black masculinity consistently appears in the popular imagination as the logical and legitimate object of surveillance and policing, containment, and punishment. Discursively this black male body brings together the dominate institutions of (white) masculine power and authority–criminal justice system, the police, and the news media–to protect (white) Americans from harm. (402)
Opposite the black threat extreme are the “shallow implausible characters” with “a neutered or counterfeit sexuality,” as seen in many of the “buddy” movies and the roles of Sidney Poitier (Guerrero, Framing 72).
Ed Guerrero, Rockefeller Fellow in the Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of black film and literature at the University of Delaware, calls these representations, “sterile paragons of virtue completely devoid of mature characterization or of any political or social reality . . . condemned on the screen to reassure white people of their innocence and superiority” (Framing 72-73).
Guerrero explains what is missing between the two extremes:
Sadly, and dangerously for us all as a diverse, multiracial society, we have constructed in our films and in our media in general . . . a vast, empty space in representation. What is missing from Hollywood’s flat, binary construction of black manhood is the intellectual, cultural, and political depth and humanity of black men, as well as their very significant contribution to the culture and progress of this nation. (“Black” 397)
The Essay on Blacks In Film African American
... 70 s films believed the movies pandered to the lowest of black so called 'ghetto' images, while borrowing heavily from mainstream Hollywood genres no ... the United States has focused on Representation. That is: how people are imagined, portrayed, and often stereotyped by the mass ... family and projecting it into the living rooms of blacks and whites throughout the United States and the world. But just ...
It is not just white people’s perceptions of blacks, however, that is affected by negative images of the black male. Black community and the black family suffer from how black men grow up perceiving who they are (Greene 29).
Young, impressionable black males construct their own reality from the images they see in American media. Gray tells of the dual effects of these negative images:
These very same images of black manhood as threat and dread not only work to disturb dominant white representations of black manhood, they also stand in a conflicted relationship with definitions and images of masculinity within blackness. (403)
The effect of these negative images is devastating to the structure of the black family and society: only about 40% of black children born in the U.S. are born to married parents; far fewer have a father consistently at home during the first 16 years of their lives (Novack).
Murder of blacks by other blacks is the leading cause of death among young blacks (“Reagonite”).
Many black communities suffer from poverty. Independent filmmaker Charles Burnett describes the poverty he saw while shooting a film in a North Philadelphia black neighborhood:
It’s amazing how this country can let people live like that. How can America have a community completely blinded? There’s graffiti everywhere, and people don’t even see them, they’re so immune to it. Crack and poverty have destroyed a lot of young people, taken away their motivation and their will to compete with the “regular” society. And it seems planned! One of the kids we interviewed said, “We’re going the way of the American Indians. They killed our spirit, our self esteem.” (qtd. in Reynaud 330)
All that many young black men have to model themselves after is the media’s definitions of who they are, and a cycle of destruction of the black family is allowed to propagate. JoNina Abron writes in The Black Scholar, “In most cases, the media’s portrayal of life in the so-called black ‘underclass’ focuses on mores, living habits and social patterns, such as promiscuity, drug addiction and crime. Thus, the stereotypes that far too many whites have of blacks continue to be perpetrated” (50).
The Essay on Theme Development in the Film 12 Angry Men
In the movie 12 Angry Men a verdict of not guilty was given to the boy after the fact that apparently all the jurors except one thought that the boy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the key evidence presented in the court was rejected by the jury, which led the jurors to have a reasonable doubt about the boy's guiltiness. I will present this evidence in chronological order and support ...
Regardless of whether Hollywood portrays black men as murderous drug dealers or ineffective celibates, the result is not good for black society. “Blacks complain that mainstream films present a negative impression of Black people and have a detrimental effect on their lives,” says Jacqueline Bobo, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Study of Women/Department of English, UCLA, “[I]f Black producers were given the freedom and support to produce films about Black people, they would project a different image” (428).
Dictating how images in American film are portrayed is the business side of Hollywood. independent film producer Dennis Greene says Hollywood is not merely concerned with profit, but also with the status and marketability of individual executives in the movie industry (28).
Blacks have found themselves excluded from the upper echelon, and that leaves white executives in charge. Joy Horowitz, writing in American Visions, calls the lack of black executives “Hollywood’s dirty little secret” because it is “not overt racism but a subtler prejudice” (16).
This unspoken conspiracy keeps black people from being hired and promoted from within. Executive Producer Grace Blake explains how blacks are excluded even from film production crews:
The industry is so much of a family-oriented business. Nobody really wants to teach anybody anything. You may find that all of the people in a particular category are blood related, specifically with grips and electricians. That’s one of the ways we, as black people, have always been kept out of this business. (qtd. in Rhines 30)
Nepotism and cronyism keep Hollywood a shop closed to outsiders (Horowitz 18).
White executives, who control the money, are happy to keep making films using the images that they grew up with (Greene 28).
Thus, modern film images are constructed in the same racial paradigm that produced Birth of a Nation. Jane Rhodes, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Indiana University, says, “Racial identity has been–and continues to be–a crucial factor in determining who can produce popular culture, and what messages are created” (185).
The Essay on Report on the Film “Black Cat, White Cat” by Emir Custurica
have chosen to watch and report on the film “Black Cat, White Cat” by Emir Custurica for several reasons. Firstly, Custurica is a globally famous filmmaker, known in the US for his “Arizona Dream”. Secondly, Custurica does pay much attention to matters of culture in his films, so his works are very informative. Thirdly the characters of “Black Cat, White Cat” belong to different peoples and ...
And those in control of the images are free to promote their own politics, clarifies St. Clair Bourne in The Black Scholar :
[M]ost of the current black images emanating from Hollywood are essentially those which have as their primary function to entertain, advocate no change and, more importantly, to suggest the legitimacy of the current social and political order. (15)
Thus, the images offered in American film are a product based in Hollywood’s hereditary political agenda–a white political agenda.
But the system does not merely control the images in American films, it ensures that the public will see them by monopolizing marketing and distribution. According to Jacqueline Bobo, there has been an increase in the number of films produced by black people, but black filmmakers have trouble getting their films in front of an audience:
They receive limited financial support, and their films fall victim to inadequate distribution and marketing campaigns. The result is that Black films are, in effect, unavailable to a large number of Black people and other interested viewers. In addition, Black filmmakers have difficulty getting certain films screened at “showcase” theaters where a large number of people can have access to them. (428-29)
The power of marketing and distribution goes beyond excluding independent filmmakers, however. Marketing and distribution create the audience, that is, the demand for the films it offers (Bourne 19).
Thus, Hollywood and the audience have a sort of symbiotic relationship, each feeding off the other. Until there is a change in either Hollywood or the audience, the audience will continue to consume whatever Hollywood chooses to feed it. “The problem,” says independent filmmaker Spike Lee, “is getting Hollywood to expand the kinds of films it will make, and raising the glass ceiling in terms of money and marketing” (qtd. in Lowery and Sabir 108).
And until there is a change, independent filmmakers will have to continue struggling to get their movies seen.
The Essay on Black Women White Men Social
WHAT'S BEHIND THE ESCALATING TREND? AS we head into the new millennium, marrying mitt dating across cultural lines seem to be increasing at record rates. Almost anywhere you go these days, you will encounter mixed-race couples: at the grocery store, the mall, the theater, at a company function, at: a concert, even at church. And while for years the Black man-White woman couple was more prevalent, ...
Examining a film by an independent filmmaker can show how black men can be depicted positively. Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man (1964) is representative of the relatively few independent films that realistically portray black men and the problems they face. Nothing but a Man is the story of Duff, a black laborer who falls in love with and marries Josie, the minister’s daughter. The film examines Duff as he struggles to define his worth as a man in the context of his family and his job. Duff’s need to define himself as a man is symbolic of the black man’s need to define his identity. Other black males Duff encounters are in themselves symbolic of the compromises that blacks are forced to make by white society. And they do not offer a solution Duff can live with. Josie’s father, for example, has a “solution” for being black– assimilation into the white man’s world. Although he has an ordered and secure life, Josie’s father has sacrificed his black identity for it. Duff is not willing to make that sacrifice, so he tries to define himself through his job at the mill. He knows how to work hard and relies on that ethic for his success. But Duff refuses to play the white man’s “game” and loses his job.
Duff finds himself faced with the reality of being black in America: play the game or pay the price. He is falsely denounced as a labor organizer and a troublemaker, and he is blacklisted from or forces out of the good jobs. The only work Duff can find is the kind of jobs reserved for those of an ex- slave class: picking cotton and emptying ashtrays. Because he is trying to define himself through work, Duff cannot bear to take on such degrading jobs.
While this is happening, Duff and Josie have started a family. She is pregnant and he finds himself unable to support her, much less a child. And she wants his son to move in with them, too. Duff’s frustration manifests itself in anger and violence. But Duff and Josie’s marriage seemed doomed from the start. The broken house they move into foreshadows a broken home; the broken neighbor slumped on the porch virtually offers Duff his only role model of a father and husband. Duff had a biological father, but he is a man who has never been a part of his life. When his father dies, and Duff cannot tell the undertaker how old his father is or where his father was born or what his father did for a living, he sees that he is carrying on a tradition that is passed from father to son- -a father who runs from his responsibilities and blames all but himself– and that this pattern repeats itself from generation to generation. So Duff changes–he accepts the responsibility of being a father and husband and learns what it is to be a man. His decision to return to Josie with his son offers some hope to his situation. Symbolically, Duff’s decision conveys the importance of being there for his family–being a man.
The image that Roemer imparts in Duff is not one about race, but about manhood and adult responsibility. This is the kind of positive character– one that grows–that audiences need to see. Charles Burnett, who has made such acclaimed films as Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), describes what kind of films young black audiences need:
Self esteem has to be rebuilt. And very few films contain things that could inspire their audiences–such as real heroes–everyday people who accomplish something and make sacrifices, real people you can applaud and not basketball players. Commercial movies are escapist. Not everybody has fantasies about judo-chopping someone to death. We need stories dealing with emotions, with real problems like growing up and coming to grips with who you are; movies that give you a sense of direction, an example. (qtd. in Reynaud 331)
Film reviewer Shelia Rule says Nothing but a Man “avoid[s] the conventional pitfalls of sentimentality, preachiness and demeaning stereotypes and instead present[s] its characters with the full range of human qualities” (C16).
Characters like Duff are the kind of images that Hollywood needs to portray in American films.
Hollywood does not, however, totally ignore independent filmmakers. Rather, it takes the techniques and innovations and ideas developed by the independents and co-opts them for its own economic and political gain (Bourne 15).
Although black creativity commonly sets American entertainment standards, black artists rarely benefit from their own work (Edmond and Hayes 122-23).
Thus, blacks do not get a voice in the media they help define. “We almost never get the opportunity to be creatively involved in telling our own stories,” says Stanley Robertson, an independent film producer, “We get culturally raped by other people. It’s the denial–the exclusion–that bothers me” (qtd. in Horowitz 17).
One of the best examples of Hollywood profiting from independent film is the Blaxploitation films of the 1970’s. Black audiences were demanding to see black actors cast in positive roles, and Hollywood responded with what is now called Blaxploitation. The Blaxploitation formula replaces the traditional white male hero, “substituting a highly sexualized black male hero who exercises power over white villains as an attempt to recode the Hollywood image of black men” (Lott 226).
Hollywood took Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and used it to create a formula for films featuring black action heroes who stand up to and ultimately triumph over the “man”–white America’s political machine. Gordon Parks Jr.’s Superfly (1972) follows the Blaxploitation formula and casts a black man in the role of a hero. But the film fails to provide a positive role model for young blacks because it applauds the exploits of a drug dealer who effectively commits an act of genocide against his own race for profit.
Superfly has all the appearances of empowering its black characters–many of the traditional black film stereotypes are reversed. The film’s hero, Priest, is not sexually sterile as many of Hollywood’s depictions of black men have been. The long love scene in the bubble bath gives Priest a sexually human dimension that is commonly lacking in black film characters. Priest also has a sexual relationship with a white woman, but he ultimately rejects her. Unlike the typical Hollywood interpretation of black-male-with-white-female sexuality, Priest is not a sexual threat to the white woman and the purity of the white race, as Gus in Birth of a Nation is, rather he has racially reversed the roles of the plantation owner and female slave. She is one of his dealers and Priest is merely claiming his right to sex as her master. And the white-oriented standards of looks, too, are juxtaposed, which seems to empower Priest’s character. When the brother at the craps game calls him “white-looking,” Priest punches him out. Looking white is bad and black is now truly beautiful.
These reversals of black and white seem to suggest that Priest is in a position of power and is in control. But the structure of the economic character relationships in Superfly tells a different story: the corrupt white cops literally enslave Priest and Eddie in their jobs. Instead of being factors in the production of white cotton on a plantation, Priest and Eddie deal in white cocaine in the city. And Eddie promotes the slave myth; with the same slave-myth mentality put forth in Hallelujah, having “8-tracks and color TVs in every room” is just an updated version of the happy slaves on the plantation. Although they are in the city and not on a plantation, the relationship of the white cops to the black dealers parallels that of a slave-based economy.
The whole movie plays upon the fact that Priest wants out of the drug- dealing scene. Priest’s struggle as the black protagonist striving to escape the symbolic enslavement of white slavery is what makes him a heroic figure. Priest has the “street cool” of urban black culture. He has a style that makes it easy to want to be like him–the big car, the clothes, the hair. He has the walk and the talk, and he even has a funky Curtis Mayfield soundtrack that plays for him everywhere he goes. Priest is cool.
But behind all this cool are the movie’s flaws. It cannot contain the surplus that comes out of the montage of users enjoying coke: the victims of urban drug dealers and the violence that surrounds them. The way Priest plans to finance his retirement–selling 30 kilos of coke for a cool half million in cash–is paramount to genocide. Priest saves his skin at the expense of his own race.
Black people, especially black males, need positive role models, not drug-dealing action heroes. The allure of movie characters like Priest–the cool poses and the clothes and the car and the funky soundtrack–makes everybody want to be like them. But this “cool” allure sends the wrong message to an impressionable audience, who embrace the criminal aspects of these characters as part of the “cool” package (Johnson, “Part 1” 16).
Dennis Greene condemns the effect of this “cool” on black youth:
This situation would be bad enough if economic exploitation of the community was the only consequence. But it isn’t. These films validate the pathologies they depict. The constant projection of the black community as a kind of urban Wild Kingdom, the glamorization of tragic situations, and the celebration of inner city drug dealers and gangsters has a programming effect on black youth. The power of music in film is a particularly seductive and propagandistic force which . . . has rarely been used in a positive social manner. (28)
Bowing to public pressure, the Blaxploitation genre quickly died out. While Hollywood continues to portray black male characters with “good” or “bad” extremes, some progress is being made. Audiences in the 1990’s are experiencing a boom of movies by black directors (Guerrero, Framing 158).
Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995), is an example of a film that shows improvement in how the black male is portrayed.
Clockers is the story of drug dealer Strike and his relationship with the white cop Rocco. Like Priest in Superfly, Strike deals death to his own people in the form of crack cocaine. But Strike is more complicated a character than Priest, just as Clockers deals with more socially relevant issues than does Superfly. Where Superfly merely provides an escapist vehicle for black audiences, Clockers deals with the epidemic of violence and death carried out by blacks on other blacks (Blake 24).
And where Superfly drew criticism because young blacks were emulating a negative role model, Lee addresses this issue within the film. Reviewer Todd McCarthy remarks:
Didactically but effectively, Lee illustrates how the tough, independent, successful images of young men like Strike and his dealer buddies dominate the impoverished projects, inspiring young kids to dress, talk and behave like them and making men who try to do the right thing, by earning an honest living and living according to principles, look impossibly square, even stupid, to impressionable eyes. (73)
Lee puts the problem right up front. The audience is allowed to stand back and pass judgment in the young men who imitate the dealers, instead of being the ones who imitate the dealers. Although Strike seems similar to Priest in that he deals death to his own people, Strike represents more than a black action hero who triumphs over whitey. In fact, neither Strike nor Rocco triumph over one another; the victory is in Strike’s internal change. “You find yourself both despising Strike’s blindly amoral opportunism and pulling for his survival,” says Newsweek reviewer David Ansen. There is something about Strike that is worth saving, and that is Lee’s message.
Strike is, however, an extraordinary character in an extraordinary tale. Characters like Strike do not quite furnish the image that has been missing in film–that of the ordinary black male as a loving father and devoted husband. And this is still a problem. “[T]here are no simple stories about Black people loving each other, hating each other, or enjoying their private possessions,” says Manthia Diawara, Professor of African Studies at New York University (4).
Although Strike is a step in the right direction, young black audiences need positive role models in the films they see to give them a sense of direction in their lives (Reynaud 331).
“What has to be developed in filmmakers,” says Charles Burnett, “is a sense of who you are, what you want to say, and how you want to say it–a world view or perspective that you can express in your own terms” (qtd. in Reynaud 329).
Some think the only way for black people to get their films to a wide audience is to buck the system–Hollywood’s politically motivated enterprise–and do it themselves (Bobo 429).
Since Hollywood is not changing, or not changing fast enough, it is time for wealthy black individuals and black-owned businesses to form an economic alliance and create a black film production and distribution industry. Others say that the audience needs to change. “Audience commitment and not Hollywood manipulation is responsible for any lack of variety seen in black films,” says Bill Duke, director of such films as A Rage in Harlem (1991) and Deep Cover (1992), “Our community has to be a little bit more responsible about its philosophies” (qtd. in Lyons 43).
Duke has a point–hit Hollywood where it hurts: at the box office. Hollywood will drop its racist political agenda only when it cannot make money with it. The time is here for movie audiences–especially black movie audiences–to make a statement at the box office and demand more realistic representations on the screen.
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