When I saw this film in the summer of 1991 with my thirteen-year-old son—and I took him to see it at least seven times—I cried each time. The film spoke to so many issues that are critical to black male life: father and son bonding, the difficulty of rearing boys in poor and working-class communities, the vicious self-hatred that threads through gang violence, the devastating costs of social policies that overlook the economic and social needs of black males, and the magical power of black love. Like the lead character Furious Styles, played with incredible sensitivity and maturity by Laurence Fishburne, I got custody of my son when he ran into trouble while living with his mother. Singleton’s film gave me and my son a common point of reference in discussing important issues between black fathers and sons. In this chapter, I discuss the predicament of black American men while reflecting on Singleton’s mature-beyond-his-twenty-three-years vision of the social situation of black masculinity, and the equally intelligent writing of his screenplay. I don’t fail to notice the film’s troubling gender politics—that only black men can rear black men, a fact rebutted by the wise, brave black women who do it every day. Still, I applaud Singleton’s cautionary tale of the disappearing black father, a disappearance often supported by the culture and underwritten by the state. This film remains the high-water mark of Singleton’s career.
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.
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:
Anyone who has a moderate knowledge of African-American culture knows this was foretold in a thousand rap songs and more than a few black films. When Ice Cube was with NWA (Niggas With Attitude), he didn’t write the lyrics to “Fuck tha Police” just to be cute. He was reciting a reflection of reality as well as fantasizing about what it would be like to be on the other end of the gun when it came to police relations. Most white people don’t know what it is like to be stopped for a traffic violation and worry more about getting beat up or shot than paying the ticket. So imagine, if you will, growing up with this reality regardless of your social or economic status. Fantasize about what it is to be guilty of a crime at birth. The crime? Being born black . . . . By issuing that verdict, the jury violated not only Rodney King’s civil rights, not only the rights of all AfricanAmericans, but also showed a lack of respect for every law-abiding American who believes in justice. (Singleton, 75)
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.
Amid these hostile conditions, Furious is still able to instruct Tre in the rules of personal conduct and to teach him respect for his community, even as he schools him in how to survive. Furious says to Tre, “I know you think I’m hard on you. I’m trying to teach you how to be responsible. Your friends across the street don’t have anybody to show them how to do that. You gon’ see how they end up, too.” His comment, despite its implicit self-satisfaction and sexism (Ricky and Doughboy, after all, do have their mother, Brenda), is meant to reveal the privilege of a young boy learning to face life under the shadow of fatherly love and discipline.
While Tre is being instructed by Furious, Ricky and Doughboy receive varying degrees of support and affirmation from Brenda. Ricky and Doughboy have different fathers, both of whom are conspicuously absent. In Doughboy’s case, however, his father is symbolically present in that peculiar way that damns the offspring for their resemblance in spirit or body to the despised, departed father. The child becomes the vicarious sacrifice for the absent father, although he can never atone for the father’s sins. Doughboy learns to see himself through his mother’s eyes, her words ironically re-creating Doughboy in the image of his invisible father. “You ain’t shit,” she says. “You just like yo’ Daddy. You don’t do shit, and you never gonna amount to shit.”
Brenda is caught in a paradox of parenthood, made dizzy and stunned by a vicious circle of parental love reinforcing attractive qualities in the “good” and obedient child, while the frustration with the “bad” child reinforces his behavior. Brenda chooses to save one child by sacrificing the other—lending her action a Styronian tenor, Sophie’s choice in the ghetto. She fusses over Ricky; she fusses at Doughboy. When a scout for USC’s football team visits Ricky, Brenda can barely conceal her pride. When the scout leaves, she tells Ricky, “I always knew you would amount to something.”
In light of Doughboy’s later disposition toward women, we see the developing deformations of misogyny. Here Singleton is on tough and touchy ground, linking the origins of Doughboy’s misogyny to maternal mistreatment and neglect. Doughboy’s misogyny is clearly the elaboration of a brooding and extended ressentiment, a deeply festering wound to his pride that infects his relationships with every woman he encounters.
For instance, at the party to celebrate his homecoming from his recent incarceration, Brenda announces that the food is ready. All of the males rush to the table, but immediately before they begin to eat, Tre, sensing that it will be to his advantage, reproves the guys for not acting gentlemanly and allowing the women first place in line. Doughboy chimes in, saying, “Let the ladies eat; ho’s gotta eat, too,” which draws laughter, both from the audience with which I viewed the film and from the backyard male crowd. The last line is a sly sample of Robert Townsend’s classic comedic send-up of fast-food establishments in Hollywood Shuffle. When his girlfriend (Regina King) protests, saying she isn’t a “ho,” Doughboy responds, “Oops, I’m sorry, bitch,” which draws even more laughter.
In another revealing exchange with his girlfriend, Doughboy is challenged to explain why he refers to women exclusively as “bitch, or ho, or hootchie.” In trying to reply, Doughboy is reduced to the inarticulate hostility (feebly masquerading as humor) that characterizes misogyny in general: “ ’Cause that’s what you are.”
“Bitch” and “ho,” along with “skeezer” and “slut,” have by now become the standard linguistic currency that young black males often use to demonstrate their authentic machismo. “Bitch” and equally offensive epithets compress womanhood into one indistinguishable whole, so that all women are the negative female, the seductress, temptress, and femme fatale all rolled into one. Hawthorne’s scarlet A is demoted one letter and darkened; now an imaginary black B is emblazoned on the forehead of every female.
Though Singleton’s female characters do not have center stage, by no means do they suffer male effrontery in silent complicity. When Furious and Reva meet at a trendy restaurant to discuss the possibility of Tre returning to live with his mother, Furious says, “I know you wanna play the mommy and all that, but it’s time to let go.” He reminds her that Tre is old enough to make his own decisions, that he is no longer a little boy because “that time has passed, sweetheart, you missed it.” Furious then gets up to fetch a pack of cigarettes as if to punctuate his self-satisfied and triumphant speech, but Tre’s mother demands that he sit down.
As the camera draws close to her face, she subtly choreographs a black woman’s grab-you-by-the-collar-and-set-you-straight demeanor with just the right facial gestures, and completes one of the most honest, mature, and poignant exchanges between a black man and a black woman in film history.
It’s my turn to talk. Of course you took in your son, my son, our son and you taught him what he needed to be a man. I’ll give you that, because most men ain’t man enough to do what you did. But that gives you no reason, do you hear me, no reason to tell me that I can’t be a mother to my son. What you did is no different from what mothers have been doing from the beginning of time. It’s just too bad more brothers won’t do the same. But don’t think you’re special. Maybe cute, but not special. Drink your café au lait. It’s on me.
Singleton says that his next film will be about black women coming of age, a subject left virtually unexplored in film. In the meantime, within its self-limited scope, Hood displays a diverse array of black women, taking care not to render them as either mawkish or cartoonish: a crack addict who sacrifices home, dignity, and children for her habit; a single mother struggling to raise her sons; black girlfriends hanging with the homeboys but demanding as much respect as they can get; Brandi (Nia Long), Tre’s girlfriend, a Catholic who wants to hang on to her virginity until she’s sure it’s the right time; Tre’s mother, who strikes a Solomonic compromise and gives her son up rather than see him sacrificed to the brutal conditions of his surroundings.
But while Singleton ably avoids flat stereotypical portraits of his female characters, he is less successful in challenging the logic that at least implicitly blames single black women for the plight of black children.9 In Singleton’s film vision, it is not institutions like the church that save Tre, but a heroic individual—his father Furious. But this leaves out far too much of the picture.
What about the high rates of black female joblessness, the sexist job market that continues to pay women at a rate that is 70 percent of the male wage for comparable work, the further devaluation of the “pink collar” by lower rates of medical insurance and other work-related benefits, all of which severely compromise the ability of single black mothers to effectively rear their children?10 It is the absence of much more than a male role model and the strength he symbolizes that makes the life of a growing boy difficult and treacherous in communities such as South Central L.A.
The film’s focus on Furious’s heroic individualism fails, moreover, to fully account for the social and cultural forces that prevent more black men from being present in the home in the first place. Singleton’s powerful message, that more black men must be responsible and present in the home to teach their sons how to become men, must not be reduced to the notion that those families devoid of black men are necessarily deficient and ineffective. Neither should Singleton’s critical insights into the way that many black men are denied the privilege to rear their sons be collapsed to the idea that all black men who are present in their families will necessarily produce healthy, well-adjusted black males. So many clarifications and conditions must be added to the premise that only black men can rear healthy black males that it dies the death of a thousand qualifications.
In reality, Singleton’s film works off the propulsive energies that fuel deep and often insufficiently understood tensions between black men and black women. A good deal of pain infuses relations between black men and women, recently dramatized with the publication of Shahrazad Ali’s infamous and controversial underground bestseller, The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman. The book, which counseled black women to be submissive to black men and which endorsed black male violence toward women under specific circumstances, touched off a furious debate that drew forth the many unresolved personal, social, and domestic tensions between black men and women.11
This pain follows a weary pattern of gender relations that has privileged concerns defined by black men over feminist or womanist issues. Thus, during the civil rights movement, feminist and womanist questions were perennially deferred, so that precious attention would not be diverted from racial oppression and the achievement of liberation.12 But this deference to issues of racial freedom is a permanent pattern in black male–female relations; womanist and feminist movements continue to exist on the fringe of black communities.13 And even in the Afrocentric worldview that Singleton advocates, the role of black women is often subordinate to the black patriarch.
Equally as unfortunate, many contemporary approaches to the black male crisis have established a rank hierarchy that suggests that the plight of black men is infinitely more lethal, and hence more important, than the condition of black women. The necessary and urgent focus on the plight of black men, however, must not come at the expense of understanding its relationship to the circumstances of black women.
At places, Singleton is able to subtly embody a healthy and redemptive vision of black male–female relations. For instance, after Tre has been verbally abused and physically threatened by police brutality, he seeks sanctuary at Brandi’s house, choreographing his rage at life in South Central by angrily swinging at empty space. As Tre breaks down in tears, he and Brandi finally achieve an authentic moment of spiritual and physical consummation previously denied them by the complications of peer pressure and religious restraint. After Tre is assured that Brandi is really ready, they make love, achieving a fugitive moment of true erotic and spiritual union.
Brandi is able to express an unfettered and spontaneous affection that is not a simplistic “sex-as-proof-of-love” that reigns in the thinking of many teen worldviews. Brandi’s mature intimacy is both the expression of her evolving womanhood and a vindication of the wisdom of her previous restraint. Tre is able at once to act out his male rage and demonstrate his vulnerability to Brandi, thereby arguably achieving a synthesis of male and female responses and humanizing the crisis of the black male in a way that none of his other relationships—even his relationship with his father—are able to do. It is a pivotal moment in the development of a politics of alternative black masculinity that prizes the strength of surrender and cherishes the embrace of a healing tenderness.
As the boys mature into young men, their respective strengths are enhanced and their weaknesses exposed. The deepening tensions between Ricky and Doughboy break out into violence when a petty argument over who will run an errand for Ricky’s girlfriend provokes a fistfight. After Tre tries unsuccessfully to stop the fight, Brenda runs out of the house, divides the two boys, slaps Doughboy in the face, and checks Ricky’s condition. “What you slap me for?” Doughboy repeatedly asks her after Ricky and Tre go off to the store. She doesn’t answer, but her choice, again, is clear. Its effect on Doughboy is clearer still.
Such everyday variations on the question of choice are, again, central to the world Singleton depicts in Hood. Singleton obviously understands that people are lodged between social structure and personal fortune, between luck and ambition. He brings a nuanced understanding of choice to each character’s large and small acts of valor, courage, and integrity that reveal what contemporary moral philosophers call virtue.14 But they often miss what Singleton understands: character is not only structured by the choices we make, but by the range of choices we have to choose from—choices for which individuals alone are not responsible.
Singleton focuses his lens on the devastating results of the choices made by Hood’s characters, for themselves and for others. Hood presents a chain of choices, a community defined in part by the labyrinthine array of choices made and the consequences borne, to which others must then choose to respond. But Singleton does not portray a blind fatalism or a mechanistic determinism; instead he displays a sturdy realism that shows how communities affect their own lives and how their lives are shaped by personal and impersonal forces.
Brenda’s choice to favor Ricky may not have been completely her own—all the messages of society say that the good, obedient child, especially in the ghetto, is the one to nurture and help—but it resulted in Doughboy’s envy of Ricky and contributed to Doughboy’s anger, alienation, and gradual drift into gang violence. Ironically and tragically, this constellation of choices may have contributed to Ricky’s violent death when he is shot by members of a rival gang as he and Tre return from the neighborhood store.
Ricky’s death, in turn, sets in motion a chain of choices and consequences. Doughboy feels he has no choice but to pursue his brother’s killers, becoming a more vigilant keeper to his brother in Ricky’s death than he could be while Ricky lived. Tre, too, chooses to join Doughboy, thereby repudiating everything his father taught and forswearing every virtue he has been trained to observe. When he grabs his father’s gun and is met at the door by Furious, the collision between training and instinct is dramatized on Tre’s face, wrenched in anguish and tears.
Though Furious convinces him to relinquish the gun, Furious’s victory is only temporary. The meaning of Tre’s manhood is at stake; it is the most severe test he has faced, and he chooses to sneak out of the house to join Doughboy. All Furious can do is tensely exercise his hands with two silver balls, which in this context are an unavoidable metaphor for how black men view their fate through their testicles, which are constantly up for grabs, attack, or destruction. Then sometime during the night, Tre’s impassioned choice finally rings false, a product of the logic of vengeance he has desperately avoided all these years; he insists that he be let out of Doughboy’s car before they find Ricky’s killers.
Following the code of male honor, Doughboy kills his brother’s killers. But the next morning, in a conversation with Tre, he is not so sure of violence’s mastering logic anymore, and says that he understands Tre’s choice to forsake Doughboy’s vigilante mission, even as he silently understands that he is in too deep to be able to learn any other language of survival.
Across this chasm of violence and anguish, the two surviving friends are able to extend a final gesture of understanding. As Doughboy laments the loss of his brother, Tre offers him the bittersweet consolation that “you got one more brother left.” Their final embrace in the film’s closing moment is a sign of a deep love that binds brothers; a love, however, that too often will not save brothers.
The film’s epilogue tells us that Doughboy is murdered two weeks later, presumably to avenge the deaths of Ricky’s killers. The epilogue also tells us that Tre and Brandi manage to escape South Central as Tre pursues an education at Morehouse College, with Brandi at neighboring Spelman College. It is testimony to the power of Singleton’s vision that Tre’s escape is no callow Hollywood paean to the triumph of the human spirit (nor is it, as some reviewers have somewhat perversely described the film, “life-affirming”). The viewer is not permitted to forget for a moment the absurd and vicious predictability of the loss of life in South Central Los Angeles, a hurt so colossal that even Doughboy must ask, “If there was a God, why he let mothefuckers get smoked every night?” Theodicy in gangface.
The film’s epilogue tells us that Doughboy is murdered two weeks later, presumably to avenge the deaths of Ricky’s killers. The epilogue also tells us that Tre and Brandi manage to escape South Central as Tre pursues an education at Morehouse College, with Brandi at neighboring Spelman College. It is testimony to the power of Singleton’s vision that Tre’s escape is no callow Hollywood paean to the triumph of the human spirit (nor is it, as some reviewers have somewhat perversely described the film, “life-affirming”). The viewer is not permitted to forget for a moment the absurd and vicious predictability of the loss of life in South Central Los Angeles, a hurt so colossal that even Doughboy must ask, “If there was a God, why he let mothefuckers get smoked every night?” Theodicy in gangface.
Singleton is not about to provide a slick or easy answer. But he does powerfully juxtapose such questions alongside the sources of hope, sustained in the heroic sacrifice of everyday people who want their children’s lives to be better. The work of John Singleton embodies such hope by reminding us that South Central Los Angeles, by the sheer power of discipline and love, sends children to college, even as its self-destructive rage sends them to the grave.