Hoodoo Economics Essay

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Hoodoo Economics: White Men’s Work and Black Men’s Magic in Contemporary American Film
• African Americans as magical figures, Magical African American Friends (MAAFs)
• Blacks are represented in terms out of a fundamental ignorance of African American life and culture
• “most Hollywood screenwriters don’t know much about black people other than what they hear on records by hip-hop stars Eminem
• Instead of getting life histories or love interests, black characters get magical powers
• MAAF genre is that the black males are not magical or saintly but have magic that direct toward helping a white male character
• Black characters are assigned as good to counteract the racism white audiences automatically direct toward them, ‘a saintly black …show more content…

• The film invites the fantasy, black men exist in childlike relations to economic matters and would cede their material gains to be in a certain set of social relations
• Where white men are always heroes who have just misplaced their capes
Death row as dream job
• The Green Mile, interactions btw death row prison guards and a black inmate who possess supernatural powers of healing
• The black protagonist, John Coffey, is a mixture of racist stereotypes: represented as ignorant, childlike, and hypersexualized
• The film prioritizes the guard lives’ as workers over the inmates’ experiences
• Film explores white working men and dramatizes the men’s negotiation of their gendered identity through their work lives
• The white male workers experience femininity on their identities, and against which they rebel
• The film imagines the white workers on death row as much more fully in command of their masculinity
• The Green Mile, focuses on an era when working as a guard still provided white men with prestige and a decent wage
• No female character in the film, virtually, organizes its meditation on the workplace in deeply gendered terms and imagines death row as a merging of public and private …show more content…

• The ‘Green Mile’ is a place where the inmates are cared for and disciplined like children
• The male guards play a domestic role in relation to their infantilized prisoners
• Percy, is the feminized other in the world of white male control and order
• A black man with supernatural powers is assigned the role of negotiating the social relations of white men to gender and work
• John conveys a hyper sexuality to Paul through his touch
• The functions of Elijah and John offer a construction of the white male worker as a heroic protector
• The film can be seen as a celebration when white men still made the rules
• The guards can be gentle or stern because they are in control of their world, the uniforms they wear underscore the power granted by their gender and race
• Paul learned that his work threatened innocent lives and left the ‘Green Mile’ to work at a juvenile delinquent shelter
• During the end, John grabs Paul’s hand, later Paul is well over one hundred years old and has become ‘unbreakable’
• The film uses a black man’s magic to imbue a white man with superhuman power
• John’s agency is instilling this power-which-is-not-power in his white counterpart

“I choose

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