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.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 55