Example research essay topic: Representations Of The Black Male In Film - 1,182 words

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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 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; Signed 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 Cars, 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" (q. in Richardson C 13). 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) 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 (Nova). 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...

Research essay sample on Representations Of The Black Male In Film