SOURCE: Nadell, James. “Boyz N the Hood: A Colonial Analysis.” Journal of Black Studies 25, no. 4 (March 1995): 447–64.

[In the following essay, Nadell praises Singleton for using his films to address such important and relevant social issues as drugs in African-American communities and the effects of “Euro-American racist capitalism.”]

Although several issues of consequence are addressed by John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991), mainstream, capitalist media inquiry has emphasized the peripheral, sensational events surrounding the film, failing to provide the necessary structural and contextual analyses that Boyz merits. The raw human tragedy and triumph depicted by Singleton sears and energizes the consciousness of the viewer. In order that this energy not be squandered, it must be channeled into a holistic understanding of the psychological/political/economic/cultural matrix within which the phenomenology portrayed in the film is played out. This article will attempt to provide the structural and contextual analyses that have heretofore been lacking, further enhancing the didactic value of Boyz long after its run in the theaters has drawn to a close.

Three interwoven factors lay at the roots of the crises treated in the film:

1. The demoralizing effects of Euro-American racist capitalism on the material and psychosocial existence of the African American masses;

2. The low intensity warfare waged by the Euro-American state apparatus against the Black liberation struggle; and

3. Drugs in African American communities.

Let us consider these factors in isolation as well as examine the process linking them, thereby contextualizing the historical moment treated so powerfully by Singleton's film.

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE COLONIAL DIALECTIC

For every sand castle, there is the same size hole in the ground.

(Sedition Ensemble, 1981, Numbered Blues)

European and Euro-American capitalist expansion has in greatest part been fueled by the oppression and exploitation of African and Third World labor and resources (Asian, Latino, Native, and African colonies in the United States included). This dialectic has meant the enrichment of Euro-American and European elites and the corresponding underenrichment of Africans and other Third World peoples. To a lesser though still significant degree, White working people, many of whom live in equal material despair, have also served as a source of this capitalist expansion, paying a heavy price in the process. As this article examines the ramifications of this process for African Americans, the impact on other exploited populations will not be dealt with, though such a pursuit is no less valid.

Writing on the nature of the European attack on African and Third World people, Fanon captures the essence of this dialectical reality in The Wretched of the Earth (1963, p. 163): “The wealth of the Europeans is our wealth too … Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from underdeveloped peoples.”

Ample quantitative analysis is available to document this statement, notably Davidson (1961, 1969) and Williams (1944). Reviewing the relevant literature, Rodney concludes as follows: “From an African viewpoint, that [colonial dialectic] amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped” (1981, p. 149). Rodney, throughout this same work, establishes further that the various industries, financial institutions, and mechanisms of European and American commerce were capitalized with the profits derived from the slave trade and colonialism.

Through the twin systems of slavery and internal colonialism, the Euro-American state apparatus, its casuists, and its many blind followers have created a similar (but distinct) material reality insofar as African Americans are concerned. Although individual differences, gender, and class must be factored into any analysis of African American people, the modal experience of Africans in America has been one of an oppressed, colonized population:

Like the people of the underdeveloped countries, the Negro suffers in varying degrees from hunger, illiteracy, diseases, ties to the land, urban and semi-urban slums, cultural starvation, and the psychological reactions of being ruled over by those not of his [her] kind. … From the beginning, the American Negro has existed as a colonial being. His [her] enslavement coincided with the colonial expansion of European powers and was nothing more or less than a condition of domestic colonialism. … The only factor which differentiates the Negro's status from that of a pure colonial status is that his [her] position is maintained in the home country in close proximity to the dominant racial group.

(Cruse, 1968, pp. 75–77)

The quantitative evidence supports Cruse's assertion. In areas such as life expectancy, infant mortality, median income, poverty levels, unemployment rates, and quality of education, the African American masses represent an internal Third World relative to Euro-Americans (Farley & Allen, 1987; Marable, 1983).

An African American infant is twice as likely to die as his or her White counterpart. African American adult death rates are 150٪ those of Whites (Farley & Allen, 1987, pp. 42–49). According to the Centers for Disease Control, in certain areas, Black males between the ages of 15 and 25 are more likely to die from homicide than a U.S. soldier was likely to be killed in Vietnam (Young Blacks, 1990). Whereas 20٪ of all American children live in poverty (an outrage in itself), 50٪ of African American children exist below the poverty level (One-Fifth, 1989). Blacks spend less than 7٪ of their consumer dollars within the race, the wealth being externalized in traditional colonial fashion (Marable, 1983, p. 165). It is estimated that 45٪ of Black men do not have jobs (Gresham & Wilkerson, 1989, p. 116).

Mere numbers can never capture the human suffering endured, but this limited glance at the material status of African Americans reveals the colonial nature of their existence: an “externalized cost” of Euro-American capitalist super-exploitation, or “collateral damage” in present day Gulfspeak. As the impulse for freedom is no less intense in African people than in any other people, the pacification of the population has required an attack on psychological and cognitive fronts, in addition to traditional Euro-American methods of violence. A self-perpetuating cultural dialectic was thus erected as a tactic in this pacification program, exalting European and Euro-American excellence to the degree that it degrades African and African American modes of existence. An insidious mechanism manipulated by ruling elites to psychologically colonize African American minds, so as to better control and prevent resistance, this cultural dialectic is best summed up by Fanon:

It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. … The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, destroying all that has to do with beauty or morality. …

(1963, p. 41)

Echoing Fanon's analysis with reference to the American setting, Akbar (1985) characterizes this cultural dialectic:

There are few, if any monuments, statues, or reminders of Black accomplishment. Even the walls of our own homes pay tribute to the accomplishments of European Americans and often prominently display even a Caucasian symbol of God. … Beauty is always the opposite of our most usual features. Power, in combination with “Black” is an obscene and militant declaration of war. This is the message of the culture from the parks of our major cities to the constant parade of European-American excellence on television.

(p. 30)

Marable (1983) provides a similar analysis of the American racial cultural dialectic: “The aesthetics and popular culture of racist societies constantly reinforce the Anglo-Saxon ideal in the minds of Blacks, creating the tragic and destructive phenomenon of self-hatred and cultural genocide” (p. 9).

Even this malevolent device, in combination with the extreme violence of the colonizer, has not been able to eradicate African American self-love and the correlated quest for freedom. The empirical and phenomenological data reflect the fact that although many African Americans experience various levels of self-alienation around the issue of race, many more do not, as Poussaint (1972), Grier and Cobbs (1968), and Akbar (1984; 1987) theorize.

Fanon's observations (1963, pp. 138–39) that colonized Africans are inoculated against racial self-alienation to the degree that they are able to insulate themselves within a protective African national culture, lends itself well to the American scene. Through the creation of an African American national culture, African Americans become immersed in a social substance that filters the toxic elements from the racist American indoctrination system, preserving the basic human impulse toward self-love and self-creation, individually and collectively, as a review of the related literature indicates (Akbar, 1987; Cross, 1985, 1987; Semaj, 1985; Spencer, 1987).

Although it would run counter to the laws of human psychological development to suggest that slavery and internal colonialism have not had a profoundly damaging effect on the psychobehavioral states of African Americans, resistance was and remains strong, also consistent with human tendency. Far from being vanquished (in psychological or material terms), African Americans have fought and sacrificed for freedom since their enslavement in North America, as Aptheker's carefully documented study (1969) of slave guerrilla warfare and militant Black resistance details. This impulse toward freedom was no less evident as chattel slavery gave way to internal colonialism, evidenced by a rich and manifold history of struggle (Allen, 1969; Forsythe, 1977; Marable, 1983; Newton, 1972; White, 1984; Malcolm X, 1965).

This resistance has challenged the capacity of the American state apparatus and its competing elites to rob and exploit oppressed people, at home and abroad. As such, the state has responded to this challenge (the threat of democracy) with utmost hostility, attempting to neutralize it with extreme prejudice, by any means necessary. The rapid demise of the Garvey movement, the assassination of Malcolm X, the meteoric rise and fall of the Black Panther Party, and the destabilization of the Black liberation struggle in general are all directly and causally related to this state policy, as the very internal record of the national political police, the FBI, unequivocally documents (Vander Wall & Churchill, 1990). The reverberations of this low intensity warfare program and the American racist capitalist system that gave rise to it are felt to this very day and are inextricably linked to the very phenomenology dealt with by Boyz N the Hood.

THE REAL CRIMINAL

All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs. … Our most serious problem today is cocaine, and in particular, crack. Who's responsible?

(George Bush, September 5, 1989)

The real criminal is in the White House in Washington, D.C.

(Malcolm X, 1963)

The rollers only arrest us, the young niggahs, they don't f—k with the rich mugs that sell dope. My brother went to Vietnam and he said the government let Vietnam dudes bring big dope from Nam.

(Larry, age 15, Detroit gang member, in Taylor, 1989)

Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's goin' on in the 'hood.

(Doughboy in Boyz N the Hood)

A driving force of the within-group violence depicted in Boyz N the Hood is the illicit narcotics trade. Laying it down to the folk, Furious recognizes a crucial point that remains willfully and scandalously ignored by mainstream capitalist media and the vast majority of its lawmakers: African Americans do not control the means of narcotics production, refinement, or international transshipment, and only marginally control the retail, low-end domestic distribution networks. Despite this fact, the American masses are fed a steady diet of a drug-crazed or drug-dealing Black Lumpenproletariat, taking the onus off the very structures of power most deeply involved in the flood of narcotics into African American communities.

Expanding on this point, the devastation of the Black Nationalist movement is directly tied to the low-intensity warfare waged against it, of which one feature was/is the inundation of Black communities with narcotics. Too vast to exhaustively review here, a body of quality scholarship amply documents the historic and ongoing complicity of the American state apparatus in this nefarious activity (Chomsky, 1989; Cockburn, 1987; Kruger, 1980; McCoy, 1972; Sheehan, 1990; Stockwell, 1988).

In synthesizing this data, it becomes abundantly clear that the American security state greased the wheels of the international narcotics trade to further the ends of elite interests, crushing resistance to their hegemony both at home and abroad:

The net result of wartime [WWII] and post-war anti-communist policy was a revival of organized crime operating initially under U.S. military government protection, ultimately under CIA protection. So that as the trafficking routes get reestablished through the Middle East and Europe to the United States, a revived, restored Mafia in Sicily and the Corsican syndicates in southern France are majority participants in this traffic. Half a world away, in Asia, you get a similar phenomenon.

(McCoy, 1991, p. 65)

Quoting a classified 1972 secret field report to U.S. customs, Cockburn and Cockburn (1988) confirm McCoy's hypothesis: “It was ironic that the CIA should be given the responsibility of narcotics, particularly since they were supporting the prime movers. Even though the CIA was in fact facilitating the movement of opiates to the U.S. they steadfastly hid behind a shield of national security.”

Domestically, the flood of this high-quality Asian heroin into African American communities in the late 1960s and 1970s dealt a most serious blow to the Black liberation struggle, as potential participants were narcoticized and put out of action. As Ward Churchill establishes (Churchill, 1990; Vander Wall & Churchill, 1990), this program dovetailed nicely with the FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a low-intensity warfare program that decimated the Black Panther Party through means including outright murder, the creation and exacerbation of factionalism within the party and with other Black nationalist groups, media disinformation campaigns, and Justice Department harassment. In crushing the Panthers specifically, and the nationalists generally, the state apparatus eliminated what may have been the most powerful antinarcotics forces in African American society.

In Chicago, the FBI moved to prevent the politicization of a huge criminally oriented street gang, the Blackstone Rangers, and eventually helped coordinate the police murders of Panther leaders Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. The Panthers soon after fell apart, whereas the Rangers evolved into a major retail drug distribution syndicate known as El Rukin, filling the vacuum left in the wake of the Panthers' demise (Churchill, 1990; Vander Wall & Churchill, 1990, p. 417).

This result was similarly duplicated in southern California through infiltration, state violence, judicial neutralization, and media disinformation. As the politicos were eradicated, the criminal drug syndicates were allowed to flourish, particularly the CRIPS and Bloods, whose turf battles are common knowledge to even casual observers, many of whom are often caught up in the crossfire of these self-perpetuating rivalries (Churchill, 1990; Vander Wall & Churchill, 1990). When both liberal and conservative opinion makers express indignation over crime in the Black communities of America, they should look at their own policies as a primary cause.

Far from ancient history, U.S. state facilitation of the international narcotics trade continues, most recently surfacing in relation to CIA and CIA-supported off-the-shelf operations in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. These operations were in the tradition of terrorist programs run out of Miami against Cuba in the early 1960s, whose participants resurfaced in Southeast Asia between 1965 and 1975, as documented by former CIA agent John Stockwell (1988), Daniel Sheehan (1987), Albert McCoy (1991), and, most exhaustively, Heinrik Kruger (1980). All substantiate that the highest levels of the American executive and security branches are and have been deeply involved in these activities, directly and indirectly, escaping scrutiny, thanks to the gutlessness and willful self-deception of powerful opinion makers and legislators.

Summarizing the nature of this long-standing criminality, Lifschultz (1988) cites McCoy's (1972) classic, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia:

Practicing a ruthless form of clandestine realpolitik. … [CIA] agents made alliances with any local group willing and able to stem the flow of “communist aggression.” … American diplomats and secret agents have been involved in the narcotics trade at three levels: coincidental complicity by allying with groups actively engaged in the drug traffic; abetting the traffic by covering up for known heroin traffickers and condoning their involvement; and active engagement in the transportation of opium and heroin. It is ironic, to say the least, that America's heroin plague is of its own making.

(p. 14)

When connected to the parallel needs of supporting clandestine warfare and terror to maintain the right to rob and exploit Third World peoples and of quelling resistance by the domestic Third World (Chomsky, 1985, 1988, 1989), this historic and ongoing pattern described by McCoy is not ironic but rational, at least from the vantage point of ruling elites. A more recent entry in this sordid history is provided by the report of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, released April 13, 1989, quoted by Christopher Hitchens in the May 8, 1989 Nation:

Payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by the federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies. … In each case, prior to the time that the State Department entered into contracts with the company, federal law enforcement had received information that the individuals controlling those companies were involved in narcotics. … The State Department selected four companies owned and operated by narcotics traffickers to supply humanitarian assistance to the contras.

(p. 619)

I have not yet seen any serious treatment of this report in mainstream national press or by electronic media. Were the elite intellectual class less indoctrinated and/or less servile to private power, these facts would be worthy of substantial attention. In more intellectually honest times, one would expect the facts raised above to receive at least a fraction of the play granted the low-end retail sector of the narcotics industry, invariably projected to be young African American Lumpen men and women. Rather than spend 48 Hours on Crack Street, maybe Dan Rather could better serve the public (who theoretically own the airwaves) by spending some of those hours digging into major financial institutions, CIA Headquarters, and … the White House.

Synthesizing the materials highlighted above, American racist capitalism, via the institutions of slavery and its offspring internal colonialism, created the psychological/political/economic/cultural oppression suffered by African Americans. As would any people faced with these conditions, African Americans have responded in a number of ways dependent on an interaction of variables. Relevant among these responses are valiant resistance made possible by collective self-love; narcoticization to escape this misery by means of substances (legal and illegal) pumped into their communities by ruling elites; and the vicious and suicidal pursuit of advancement as low-end retail distributors in the ranks of the dead-end, illegitimate opportunity structure of an illicit economy owned and operated by an alliance of gangster, security, finance, and political elites.

What has heretofore been developed are the interrelated structural features of the African American colonial reality that Furious merely alludes to when “schoolin' the brederin and sisteren.” This amalgam of forces must be fleshed out in order for Boyz N the Hood to fulfill its immense potential as a teaching tool, elevating the consciousness of all concerned people, race aside, interested in creating a world that best satisfies all human needs rather than the prerogatives of centralized power, regardless of the ism that serves as the rationale for this centralized control. An accurate, holistic analysis of the psychological/political/economic/cultural substance underlying the phenomenology sampled so powerfully by Boyz is inherent to furthering the solutions, just as an accurate diagnosis guides effective treatment. Perhaps this article has made a small contribution in this regard.

In addition to the contextual framework in which the film is immersed, many of the film's nuances merit attention. Let us briefly highlight a few of them, as they serve as vehicles by which the viewer is made to process the truths illuminated by Boyz.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Names and labels can have a profound effect on the cognitive appraisal of the entity so labeled. Consider the imagery and emotions that accompany the terms Negro, Black, and African American. Although Negro is merely an Anglo variant of the Latin term meaning Black, in American society it is a term used by the dominant culture to strip people of African descent of their cultural identity, their connection to the African motherland.

As such, Negro was eventually rejected when those so labeled recognized the racial bond that connected them in America and defined themselves as Black, rejecting the classification of the oppressor. Black soon gave way to African American, as the self and social awareness of the people blossomed to such a degree that the African cultural imperative had to be fulfilled, as the refusal to be defined by the colonizer naturally spiraled into self-definition.

African American speaks to a past, something as important to a people as memory is to the individual, particularly when the collective memory has been ruthlessly assaulted by the colonizer.

At the level of the individual, the power of naming is exemplified by two warrior spirits. Malcolm Little was a vice Lord; Malcolm X was a Black Nationalist freedom fighter, a follower of and chief spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI), abandoning his false consciousness and criminal vocation, enabling others to do likewise; El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was an independent thinker, elevating the struggle to another level, leaving the protective environs of the NOI to become a truly international pan-African revolutionary.

Cassius Clay was a championship boxer of rarely equaled grace and style; Muhammad Ali was/is a figure beloved all over the globe, a man who risked his class interest by refusing to give his seal of approval to a racist, genocidal neocolonial war in Southeast Asia. Clearly, thought and action influence and are influenced by the naming process. Boyz N the Hood is most instructive in this regard.

Throughout the film, two labels dominate the discourse. The young men refer to themselves as niggers and to the women as bitches or whores. Nicknames and jargon are often healthy expressions of humor, affection, and creativity, enabling a group or subculture to carve out a small domain of linguistic autonomy in defiance of authority. The terms nigger, bitch, and whore go far beyond this type of expression.

Nigger is a term that has been applied by the Euro-American colonizers to the inhabitants of the internal African colony. On one level of consciousness, when used among the oppressed in casual banter, the term nigger is more or less equivalent to such slang expressions of camaraderie as dude, homeboy, brother, cousin, and blood, lacking in any pejorative significance. At a deeper level of analysis, the frequent use of the word nigger in the discourse of Boyz speaks to an internalization of the colonizers' label on the part of the colonized. This internalization and subsequent verbalization is a reflection of racial self-alienation on the part of those who consciously or unconsciously make use of the word when referring to self or others.

The dynamic is similar with regard to the use of terms bitch and whore with reference to Black women. Again, there is a process of some Black men, particularly those represented in the film, internalizing the traditional Euro-American definitions and devaluations of African American women. As Black women are Black people, the use of these terms also reflects a degree of racial self-alienation that exists within some African Americans, specifically those who use these descriptive labels and those women who accept their use without objection.

As stated above, the idea that African Americans suffer self-alienation around the issue of race is a gross oversimplification, running counter to the diverse phenomenology and empirical findings concerning this matter. Nonetheless, the labels that circulate in the subculture portrayed by John Singleton call attention to the condition of racial self-alienation in some of this population, a dynamic initiated and perpetuated by Euro-American colonial structures.

BLACK ON BLACK VIOLENCE: INSTRUMENTAL AND AUTO-DESTRUCTION

Evil men make me kill you, evil men make you kill me, even though we're only families apart.

(Jimi Hendrix, 1969, “Machine Gun”)¹

The cycle of violence and homicide is arguably the most dangerous by-product that internal colonialism has created for African Americans. As the graphic that opens the film indicates, 5٪ of young Black men will die by homicide, almost exclusively at the hands of other Black men. Two factors appear to lie at the heart of this cycle of violence: Instrumental demand and racial self-alienation.

Instrumental demand refers to the use of violence on the part of the perpetrator to secure material or strategic benefits. When the American state apparatus and its agents carry out genocide against the indigenous population to take control of their resources and territory for the purpose of capitalist expansion, the violence is instrumental. The same is true of the American state with reference to its aggression against African people in solidifying the chattel slave system, and its aggression or sponsorship of aggression by local elites against Third World peoples, such as in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, Zaire, Iran, Cuba, the Philippines, Palestine, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, to name but a few (Chomsky, 1985, 1988, 1989).

In such cases, the violence enhances the material gain of the aggressors. At a different level, as Fanon (1963) has pointed out, the within-group violence of the colonized African is in part the result of a scramble for the limited resources available to the suffering masses, and thus serves an instrumental function:

Exposed to the temptations to commit murder every day … the native comes to see his neighbor as his relentless enemy. … For during the colonial period in Algeria and elsewhere many things may be done for a couple of pounds of semolina. Several people may be killed over it. … Every colony tends to turn into a huge farmyard, where the only law is that of the knife.

(pp. 307–308)

In addition to this type of instrumental violence, and also rooted in the capitalist underdevelopment of Black America, the illegitimate opportunity structure of the narcotics trade creates intense competition for turf and market share and thus the resultant violence, as more legitimate means of economic advancement are lacking in post-industrial capitalist society. The role of the American security state in this illicit trade has been discussed earlier and need not be repeated. This type of instrumental criminal violence is similar in nature to that carried out by segments of other ethnic groups who for a time were locked out of the legitimate opportunity structure, including Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Cuban immigrants. This violence was largely abandoned when a wider range of opportunities for advancement became available.

Fanon (1963) observes another source of within-group violence in the colony, reflecting the racial self-alienation of some colonized Africans: “Here we discover the kernel of that hatred of self which is characteristic of [intrapsychic] racial conflicts in segregated societies … in reality each man committed suicide when he went for his neighbor” (p. 307).

In view of the extended sense of self that is characteristic of African culture (“I am because we are, because we are I am”), and not entirely destroyed by Euro-American oppression (Azibo, 1989; Meyers, 1988: Nobles, 1972), Fanon's analysis is that much more valid. In acting violently toward another Black person, the individual may be aggressing against a hated aspect of self, Blackness, as Poussaint (1983) confirms: “A homicide can, for some Blacks, be viewed as saving their own egos from disintegration by displacing their aggressive discharge on other Blacks, on whom they project their own racial self-hatred” (p. 164). Grier and Cobbs (1968) and Akbar (1984) mirror this assessment.

The film's most extreme example of this process is the brutal, racially self-hating Black police officer, a man whose hatred of and violence against the very Black people he is supposed to serve and protect is primarily an expression of his own internal conflict with his Blackness. Considering the role of P. J. “Gloves” Davis in the Hampton and Clark assassinations (Churchill, 1990, p. 358), the officer portrayed represents a slice (not the whole pie) of reality, as does the film in general.

In light of the evidence, Black on Black violence in the American colonial setting tends to result from a combination of variables:

1. Instrumental and strategic motives, mostly connected to the narcotics trade (not to mention the activities of those addicts who act violently in order to get funds to procure drugs);

2. Competition for limited resources; and

3. Racially based self-alienation, the source of which is the racist colonial cultural dialectic, highlighted above.

Additionally, the frustration and correlated anger produced by the material deprivation suffered by the colonized African American synergistically interacts with the aforementioned factors to create the spiral of violence to which Singleton calls attention.

DIAGNOSTIC ANALYSIS AND TREATMENT

Having outlined and analyzed the context within which the phenomenology under consideration unfolds, what is to be done? Space does not allow for an adequate delineation of solutions. There is, however, one overriding principle that must be adhered to: Although Euro-American colonialism is the genesis and perpetuation of the ailments depicted in the film and discussed here, the bulk of the responsibility to remedy these maladies lies with the African American people themselves.

An accurate reading of the history of African American people would reveal that Black Nationalism (the cultural, economic, and political self-determination of African Americans) is the most effective means for uplifting the material and metaphysical conditions of the masses. With the institutionalization of a healthy Black Nationalist movement, free of sexism, homophobia, and doctrinaire isms, will come a great reduction of the pathology and suffering endured by African Americans as a result of their status as subjects of a racist internal colony.

Progressive Whites, who recognize that African and African American people historically and currently make the greatest contributions to a universal humanity when they are self-defining and self-creating, must help the White masses understand this. Though this will be most difficult and perhaps even impossible given the highly indoctrinated and racist nature of most of this population, the stakes are too high to forsake the effort.

John Singleton is to be commended for tackling such a meaty issue in such a skillful way. Unlike the vast majority of films dealing with African Americans and related subject matter, Singleton is able to capture a diverse range of characters. Positive, healthy, and realistic role models of both sexes are presented, although the very real problems and unsavory elements that exist in Black society are not ignored. Singleton very subtly confronts issues such as AIDS and sexual responsibility, parenting, and gentrification, all of which greatly affect African Americans.

Obviously, no one film can or should exhaustively grapple with every relevant issue. However, seldom has one attempted to make us think and feel about them to the extent of Boyz N the Hood. Let us transform this thought and these feelings into a holistic analysis aimed at constructing an alternative mode of existence to the colonial reality presently facing African Americans. So let it be done!

Note

1. “Machine Gun,” written by Jimi Hendrix. Copyright 1970, Bella Godiva Music, Inc. Administered worldwide by Don Williams Music Group, Inc.

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