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
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character is…a ‘normal’ white character • One of the ‘realistic’ elements of the films incorporating black magical men is their attention to the work lives of their white male characters • The magical ‘power’ of black men in the films serves as an expression of their economic vulnerability • The relations between white and black men are more complex To know your place • The film Unbreakable, a mystical black men to help a depressed and alienated white man find his place in the world • David Dunn, defined economically first by his wife, he has to abandon his career because of her, and then by a mysterious black men, Elijah Price • A recurrent theme within the film: ‘men must struggle free of the influence of women, who threaten to ‘break’ them • David’s wife would only marry him if he set aside his dreams of being a pro football player • The male black character becomes committed to restoring David’s life • David’s discovery of superhuman strength, Elijah believes if someone can be as fragile as him there is someone opposite of him such as David • Elijah’s role is as the architect of David’s transformation (‘buddy film’), from freeing him from his wife’s control • David’s son acknowledges Elijah’s theory, parallel between man and boy • Later we learn, Elijah’s relation towards David is far from love or loyalty • Elijah has caused several acts of sabotage in order to discover someone like David and to find out his place in the world • A permanently ‘broken’ being, the black man needs a white man to be a hero • After Elijah is sent to an institution, he sacrifices his own economic and social position to find his place • Unbreakable sets a revision to social order, white men feminized by the service economy regain power from women and blacks
• 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
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spheres
• 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
us” • Family Man, a film that transports a businessman into an alternative life and explores the tensions for white men btw their self-conception as public workers and as private husbands/fathers • The MAAF in the film is compared with a young child who eases the white protagonist’s transformation • Jack Campbell, is changed from masculine power and economically disempowered figure • All three films are similar: rather than a guardian angel, the black magical man becomes the marginalization and disempowerment the white man is fated to suffer in a feminizing service economy • Jack is has the opportunity from magical intervention of a supernatural black man to see what his life would have been life if he has settled down with his girlfriend Kate, 13 years earlier • She declared ‘I choose us,’ a tension that pits a model of masculine power associated with autonomy and economic prosperity • By not ‘choosing us’ Jack has achieved a remarkable degree of economic autonomy and social prestige • The role of the magical black character, Cash, during Christmas Eve, Jack enters a convenience store only to witness Cash get in an altercation with the shop owner • Jack returns home and wakes up in an alternate universe where he stayed with Kate and had two kids • Cash later explains that Jack is being given a rare opportunity of the life he could have had, having the film also romanticize family life in the suburbs • Jack has earned the comforts of masculinity through his paid, public work but then his life is merged with hers • He now works for a small business rather than giant, now in a low-level service position, and his designer suits are now a set of uniforms • Jack is trained in his new life by his young daughter, Annie, and who is a double of Cash • Cash offers Jack a small bell where when rung Cash will appear yet it is Annie who appears • The magical black man functions interchangeably with a young white child • Jack attempts to merge his new life with his old yet he wakes up to his old life and decides to search for Kate • Jack is in a position of advocating a more feminized existence for both of them, he rushes to implore Kate not to go to Europe • Cash’s name, like Elijah Price’s, draws attention to the economic relations in which he is embedded • Collective social relations can certainly be rendered in positive terms Conclusion • Black men systematically excluded from public, paid work because of the threat to white male hegemony they might pose if economic power • They are shown instead as from another dimension, ‘magical’ because their lives are a mystery and their means of existence are a mystery • “black men are ‘power brokers’ who interact with their white counterparts not for selfless reasons, but to fulfill their own needs
...ir eyes off of the naked women dancing. The outbursts towards the black men is farther evidence that during that time, blacks had little to no say and had not felt equal to their white counterparts. Perhaps the most conspicuous symbol of all is the battle itself. The white men pitted a group of black men against each other; the black men were in a no win situation. Instead of expressing their displeasure with the white men, the black men were forced to take their anger out on each other. The narrator also seems to seek approval by the white men; remembering his speech as he fights the other men. According to the protagonist: Should I try to win against the voice out there? Would not this go against my speech, and was not this a moment for humility, for nonresistance?” ( ). He’s worried about defying the white men; letting them down by not performing well enough.
Conover begins his investigative journey as he goes through the training required to become a prison guard. The process that each potential guard has to graduate from highly resembles that of which the military uses. Perfectly made beds, matching uniforms, roll calls, shooting practice, and psychological tests are all engrained into the schedules of potential guards. When this realizations strikes the author he says, “It dawned on me that I had reported to boot camp.” The emphasis on uniformity and discipline clearly showed the correlation those who controlled prisons saw between the prisons and warzones. The rhetoric is nearly identical as well, as evidenced by the “sergeant” who states,” The gray uniforms are the god guys, and the green uniforms are ...
In fact, we could even say that the film is liberating because young black men are able to see themselves in a new reimagining of black masculinity in opposition to the stereotypes of whites and blacks alike.
New Jack City, noted as ‘the crime film of the 90’s’,serves as an important episode for African-American people in America. Set in New York city, the film depicts the story of a success-driven antagonist Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) who builds an empire powered by organized crime, drug trafficking, and Black delinquent young adults trapped in the cycle of crime. Ronald Reagan’s economic policy coupled with the popularity of crack-cocaine in the inner city creates inconsistencies and untapped markets in the poor community which Nino Brown brilliantly capitalizes on and exploits. His empire is able to successfully cut out the middle men in the drug trafficking market and centralize their operation in a single low-income housing complex inhabited
The first social issue portrayed through the film is racial inequality. The audience witnesses the inequality in the film when justice is not properly served to the police officer who executed Oscar Grant. As shown through the film, the ind...
... Not only does this provide an example of the ambient racism in this story, but it also relates to the previous statement of how the filmmakers exaggerated the sexual energy of black people.
In the movie “Boyz in the Hood” director John Singleton, paints a clear image of the problems that happen very often in the African American communities. The movie deals with issues such as: the importance of a father in a young man’s life, the ongoing violence of black on black crime, and how black people are put in situations where they are put to fail and not succeed in life.
The submissive and sacrificial role, that the only canonical non-white character inhabits, paints a clear picture on how the writers view the role of black female
builds up whiteness as the ideal through its treatment of the three protagonists, the femme
The White Savior Complex is a damaging subconscious underlay of the Hollywood system, and more broadly all of western society. It is used to further separate the notions of “us” and “other” by creating a firm separation fueled by self-righteousness, and a sense of entitlement. Hollywood attempts to address race relations, but fails because of this trope. Kingsle, from the article “Does My Hero Look White In This?” described that both racism and colonialism are acknowledged, but not without reassuring that not only were white people against the system of racist power dynamics, but also were actively fighting against it in leadership roles (2013). In the remainder of my essay I will be commenting on many modern films and their use on this trope, and why subscribing to this filmmaking strategy is problematic.
In The Marrow of Tradition, author Charles W. Chesnutt illustrates examples that signify the thoughts that whites had of and used against blacks, which are still very much prevalent in public opinion and contemporary media. Chesnutt writes, “Confine the negro to that inferior condition for which nature had evidently designed for him (Chesnutt, 533).” Although significant strides have been made toward equality, the media, in many instances, continues to project blacks as inferior to whites through examples observed in television shows, music videos, films and newscasts.
Seitz points out racial myths of Black characters being negatively portrayed in movies as a way of benefiting White Americans. Over the
balanced, realistic depictions of blacks in America The film is about a Chicago family who
In this narrative essay, Brent Staples provides a personal account of his experiences as a black man in modern society. “Black Men and Public Space” acts as a journey for the readers to follow as Staples discovers the many societal biases against him, simply because of his skin color. The essay begins when Staples was twenty-two years old, walking the streets of Chicago late in the evening, and a woman responds to his presence with fear. Being a larger black man, he learned that he would be stereotyped by others around him as a “mugger, rapist, or worse” (135).
The violence that continues to endanger all members of the Black community has become commonplace. In one of the opening chapters of the novel, the narrator