Urban marginality in Los Angeles as seen through the film Boyz N The Hood - Essay Example

? 9 August Urban marginality in Los Angeles as seen through the film Boyz N The HoodIntroduction In the contemporary dynamic and rapidly changing world in which the peace-making agencies and organizations are more empowered than ever before, evils like inequality, marginality, poverty, and racial segregation have become increasingly apparent. The effect of these changes in light of the new global economy’s creation is daunting particularly for the African Americans. Amongst numerous communities that have gone through tough times as a result of capitalism induced economic prosperity, African Americans have arguably been the biggest sufferers. African Americans in the US have been an insignia of perpetual degradation historically as they have been shuttled and chained all the way through the slave economy to the capitalist economy. Charles Scruggs wrote, “The forms of the invisible city are joined at key points: The invisibility of Afro-Americans in this culture, their reduction to stereotype, is closely related to the phenomena of the mass media and the world of consumer desire, part of an economics of mass consumption” (Scruggs cited in Massood 85). The Significance of Suburbs in Movies Suburb in the movies is used as a contested idea. A vast majority of Americans think of suburb as any type of establishment around a large city’s periphery, though they may be present in small cities as the populations settled around the points of intersection of main highways are also referred to as the suburbs. A movie can be included in the category of suburban movies if it is shot in suburbs for its major part, and also it is important that its characters significantly relate to the imagined or real ethos of the suburbs. The movie Boys N the Hood fulfills these criteria of the suburban movies as hood is the central location of the movie in which all its events happen. A Brief Review of Boys N the Hood The movie Boys N the Hood portrays the life of a group of young African Americans living in South Central Los Angeles, who are struggling to escape the widespread violence in the city. Some are keeping their hopes high to get educated and excel in sports, while others become victims and part of the violent gangs. The movie is not perfect as it makes an attempt to capture every single challenge that the African Americans living in Los Angeles are exposed to in a matter of just one and a half hours of screen time, that is practically too less to do justice with any of the issues discussed. Too many issues shoved into such a short movie make the whole movie in general and the symbolism in particular appear forced, and the audiences sometimes find the movie unbearably heavy-handed. However, the audiences tend to draw the intended meanings of the sounds and images temporarily abandoning their disbelief in the theater’s darkness, so as to gain full essence of the movie. “Of course, viewers recognize that movies do not present unfiltered reality: The characters are actors, the speech is scripted, and probably most of the artifacts are phony” (Muzzio and Halper 548). Indeed, filtered reality is in a way, the strength of the movie since the fundamental reason why audiences opt to go to the cinemas to watch the movies is that they want to have the unfiltered reality of the real world replaced with the filtered reality shown in the movies. Reflection of Urban Marginality in Boyz N The Hood Boyz N the Hood reflects the efforts of young film-literate director of the African American descent, and gives a detailed account of the difficulties experienced by their young protagonists as they come of age. The narrative in Boyz N the Hood has been placed in the geographic boundaries of hood that has precise coordinates i.e. South Central Los Angeles in the case of this film. The selection of hood as the canvas of the story has a solid reason as the hood encompasses a variety of metaphorical meanings that apply to the characters as well as their lives as portrayed in the film. In the capacity of an urbanscape, the hoods encapsulate meanings that project far beyond the domain of the modern genre of films based on hoods, and the meanings are associated with a rich history of urban representation of the African Americans. Films like Boyz N the Hood based on the urban life of young African Americans living in the hood cause the interest of mainstream media in the real-life problems of the residents of inner city to rise. The hood has been frequently used as an important and culturally significant place in the African American production. The roots of the hood are planted deeply in the traditional literature belonging to the African Americans. The cityscape of Boyz N the Hood has strong roots in the multilayered cultural and historic legacy according to which, the urbanscape is an utopia, that means a space that provides its occupants with economic mobility and freedom, and at the same time, a dystopia, that is a reflection of the segregation and economic impoverishment of the ghetto. From this point of view, the city can be thought to serve as a signifying place that fulfills the real as well as the imaginary purpose. Charles Scruggs has explained this duality in context of the African American literature as a dialogue that compares the imaginary city with the real city. When placed firmly in this tradition, the films based on hood like Boyz N the Hood analyze this duality in a self-conscious manner by showing the cityscape in a complicated way. In the course of achieving this, the producer has combined specific tendencies from the historic literature pertaining to the African Americans so as to express concern with the issues for the African American community, their individualistic and collective personal and social issues, constraints in their access to the opportunities of employment and education, and hurdles in their integration into the society. The hood was first mapped into the mind of popular imagination in the film Boyz N the Hood. Basically, the narrative of the film is a traditional tale of African American boys coming-of-age that explains Tre’s rites of passage, who plays the role of a young protagonist in the film. Nevertheless, the fundamental emphasis of the film is upon the power relations between the geography and space. The mise-en-scene of the film elaborates this fact by showing defined and enclosed spaces. The South Central neighborhood of the film is a contained community that is shown with the help of signs that put constraints on the movement of the film’s characters in South Central Los Angeles. It also reflects in the signifiers that are encoded into the terrain which not only signifies the urban milieu of the film but also depicts the limited movement of the characters both inside and outside the parameters. The text shown in the film is urban that is equipped with figurative and the real street signs right from the start as a plane flying is shown as a sign. Two meanings can be extracted from this; one is the prime theme of hood films i.e. the desire to movie inside and outside the ghetto, and the second meaning is the framework of institutional constraints placed to limits this movement. History of African Americans’ Settlement in Los Angeles Although settlers of the African descent predominantly chose to live in Los Angeles, yet the population of African Americans in the city in 1900 was only 2100. In 1910, Los Angeles was the city with the maximum percentage of African American residents amongst all major cities in the US, with the number of African American home owners greater than 36 per cent. The number of African Americans in Los Angeles increased to 15000 by 1920. Los Angeles was described by W.E.B. Du Bois as a “wonderful place” owing to the fact that racial discrimination against them in the city was not much, and there were several other challenges that the city was exposed to like the bad terms between Mexicans and Anglo Americans. However, the status of Los Angeles as a wonderful place for the African Americans changed during the 1920s as segregation enforced by the restrictive covenants began to spread across the city. As a result of this, the African Americans were confined along small enclaves in Pacoima, and Watts. These areas lacked services and facilities as compared to rest of the areas in Los Angeles. With the end of the Second World War, the population of African Americans in Los Angeles increased from 63774 to 170000 between 1940 and 1950 as a result of massive migration of the African Americans from the South in search of better employment, educational, and other facilities. In the year 1960, the population of African Americans in Los Angeles was the fifth largest among all cities in the US. Although their population was larger than other Southern cities, yet a vast majority of the African Americans stay put in segregated enclaves. In spite of the ban placed by the Supreme Court upon the legal enforcement of restrictive covenants on the basis of race, the African American home ownership in Los Angeles continued to decline. For several decades after the mid of the 20th century, African Americans were racially oppressed in Los Angeles. Their rights were subjugated and they were exposed to mistreatment by the police. This maltreatment of the African Americans laid the basis of the Watts riots of 1965. In one of the unfortunate incidents, 34 people were killed while another 1034 were severely bruised and injured in looting and property damage. Although the authorities in Los Angeles tried to improve the facilities for the African Americans in the city, yet their efforts were made ineffective as most of the industrial jobs had already gone, that had created unemployment for the African Americans. The circumstances were further aggravated by the growth of drug dealers and street gangs. In the year 1990, the LAPD increased alienation from the minority communities as a result of increasing claims of racial profiling. In the year 1970, the population of African Americans in Los Angeles was left only 18 per cent. Since early 1980s, the middle-class African Americans started leaving the central core of Los Angeles in large numbers with an intention to get settled either out of state or in the California municipalities. During all these years, the African Americans’ migration out of Los Angeles has been so massive that as of 2010, their population in Los Angeles was left only 10 per cent. Nevertheless, Los Angeles still maintains the largest population of African Americans among all cities in the Western US. Life in the Suburban Los Angeles In the contemporary age of globalization, the city of Los Angeles is going through a round of demographic commotion and economic restructuring. “[A]nother new Los Angeles has taken shape, and the cultural matrix of chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs is giving way to new social interactions that mirror the striking changes that have transformed the region since the postwar period” (Avila 230). The capacity of Los Angeles for rapid transformation and innovation has blurred the cultural and physical distinctions between the space of the White Americans and that of the African Americans. In spite of the fact that the heterosocial interactions have increased in the past few decades in Los Angeles, the geography of the recent urban landscape is still shaped by the race in different ways. Although after the Civil War, the African Americans were no more enslaved, yet their former white owners kept them subjugated. “This time period of the post-Civil War era held thenorth experiencing even greater economic growth than prior to the war due to theadvancements in technology and industry made during the war; while the south wasleft decimated and its economy highly inflated” (Moses 9). As the gap between the White Americans and the African Americans increased because of increasing difference of financial status, the demographic change of Los Angeles caused a strong challenge to surface towards the domination of the White Americans in the suburbs. The number of immigrants in the Southern California increased manifolds since the year 1970 that played a big role in the transformation of the city from a predominantly middle-class White American population to the non-White population. Today, Los Angeles has become the most diverse urban region not only within the US but also all across the globe. “Since the 1970s, the increasingly transnational currents of economic exchange have positioned the Los Angeles urban region to emerge as a “nodal point” within a new global economy” (Avila 231). Horrible things have been happening to the African Americans in Los Angeles for many decades and there is no accurate yardstick with which the tragedy can be measured. The impact of these unfortunate events on the quality of life of the citizens of Los Angeles in general and the African Americans in particular has been immense. Till the early 1990s, not many of the promises made during the 1960s’ era of civil rights and subsequently during the 1970s’ and 1980s’ era of Tom Bradley were fulfilled as the rate of unemployment among the African Americans remained substantially high i.e. up to 25% of all young African American men were unemployed during the 1990s. In addition to that, the rates of alcoholism, violence, and drug addiction remained alarmingly high during these years while the gang violence in the South Los Angeles was also at its peak. During the two years 1991 and 1992, the rate of homicide in Los Angeles was extremely high as the number of citizens murdered in these years was above 3200 a vast majority of which were young African American men (Sides). Most of the negativity surrounding the African Americans in the media as well as in the real life is reinforced in them by stereotyping them in the negative ways. African Americans have been frequently shown as gangsters, bullies, rapists, and drug dealers. This has affected the psychology of the African Americans for the worse. This is the fundamental reason why Tre and his father find the black police officer much more inconsiderate as compared to the Caucasian American police officers. Racial stereotyping is affecting African Americans belonging to all classes and age-groups, even the students. “Based on their past feelings of being restricted and excluded, some African-American students may be more likely to act out when they perceive that teachers are being unfair” (Clemmitt and Clark 15). In March 1991, the videotaped footage of 56 baton blows inflicted by the LAPD officers upon Rodney King, a young African American was broadcast worldwide. Subsequently, the unfortunate incident of murder of a 15 year old African American girl called Latasha Harlins by a Korean grocer was broadcast in the year 1993. It was on 29 April 1992 when “a jury in Simi Valley, one of the whitest exurbs of Los Angeles, acquitted three of the four officers involved in beating Rodney King” (Sides). This incident ignited a spark all across the South Los Angeles as a result of which, thousands of citizens including both Latinos and African Americans commenced a 4-day riot in which they destroyed over 1000 buildings, killed 58 people leaving another 2500 injured, and a total damage worth $1 billion. Before the end of these riots, the Governor Pete Wilson and the Mayor Tom Bradley announced the rebuilding of Los Angeles and assigned this task to Rebuild LA that was essentially a task force meant to become a nonprofit organization in the following years. Rebuild LA attempted to use the private sector’s strength at places where the public sector had not worked. However, due to certain political causes, Rebuild LA showed underachievement and its promises remained unfulfilled. Changes made with a positive intention during those years did not yield fruitful results either. For instance, to eradicate drug dealing, drug laws were changed in a way that the sentences for the guilty were made three times longer for those who possessed crack as compared to the ones who possessed cocaine powder. As a result of this, thousands of African Americans, Latinos, and people belonging to races other than White Americans were put in prison for years although they were non-violent, whereas the White Americans who were both more affluent in nature and used powder cocaine managed to escape the heavy sentences. This trend only led to an increase in racial segregation. Although it has been 20 years since the riots starting in the April of 1992 swept Los Angeles, yet no comprehensive understanding of their significance can still be drawn. However, numerous important alterations in the cultural and institutional landscape of the city can be noticed. The investors, politicians, and other people in power and authority in Los Angeles proposed several ambitious proposals in the wake of riots with an intention to eradicate the issues of poverty, unemployment, and violence from the city, but not many of those proposals were effective enough to produce significant changes in quality of life of the African Americans in the South Central Los Angeles. One of the most significant unplanned changes that occurred during the last two decades was the transformation of Los Angeles from the African American ghetto to the community of Latino immigrants. “In many respects the story of South Los Angeles since 1992 is a cautionary tale, one that reminds us of the profound limits of planning and policy-making in regions of extraordinary demographic dynamism” (Sides). Boys N the Hood as a Cultural Context In order to comprehend and explicate the empowerment of the suburbs, Americans have become involved in different kinds of public discourses which explain the reality as comprehensible stories. This is achieved by making the narratives contradictory and satirical so that the hardships as well as the joys of the suburban life can be captured. The analyses have been made in complimentary social settings and various types of media have been used to transmit these conversations. Such media forums include but are not limited to scholarly treatises, governmental deliberations, television, movies, radio, books, magazines, newspapers, and lately Internet as well. Movies happen to be one of the most important forums of media in this respect as they can be the most dramatic and at the same time, the most realistic among all of the other types of media. In addition to that, movies have the tendency to capture the interest of the audiences as there is a lot of room for manipulation through effects. Movies made in a certain time are a reflection of the events and circumstances happening at that particular point in time, as well as the history of events that have led the circumstances to where they get at that time. In this context, movies are like cultural texts just like art, map, landscape, and fiction. These cultural texts are components of open-ended narratives that lead to the development of discourses that are a congeries of controversial interpretations. There are two interconnected processes which explain the controversial reality of the ghetto of the African Americans near the end of the 20th century; the material and relational process, and the discursive or symbolic process. “The first process is what I will call, after Norbert Elias, the de-civilizing of the segregated core of large US cities, these veritable domestic Bantustans that are the ghettos of the old industrial centres of the Rustbelt states, such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cleveland” (Wacquant 96) because of the state’s retreat into its different components as well as the public space’s disintegration that ensued. The second process is of demonizing the African American urban sub-proletariat. This second process is strongly related to the first process by means of a complicated functional relation. Conclusion African Americans have a long history of suffering in the US in general and Los Angeles in particular owing to the fact that they dwell in Los Angeles in large numbers. African Americans have been subjected to racial segregation, oppression, and violence. They have been victimized, and yet they have been stereotyped in media as the cause of violence. The societal perceptions about the African Americans have been recorded in media at various points in time. Over the years, there has been a change in the portrayal of African Americans in the movies as more realistic movies like Boys N the Hood have been made. Boys N the Hood has too much information to provide the audiences with in just one and a half hour regarding the life of young African Americans in the suburbs, the challenges they are exposed to, and the struggle they have to go through in order to build their academic and professional career. Although there has been a change in the social status of the African Americans in the US over the years, and for the most part of it, the change has been for the better, yet there is a lot for the authorities to deal with in order to provide the African Americans with just the same lifestyle as all other communities, particularly, the White Americans are provided. Works Cited Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. University of California Press. 2006, Print. Clemmitt, Marcia, and Clark, Charles S. Fixing Urban Schools. USA: CQ Press, 2011. Print. Moses, Dylan. “Theories of Radical Political Economy: A Study of African-Americans as a Symbol of Exploitation by Capitalism.” Academia.edu. n.d. Web. 9 Aug. 2012. Read More