American Politics & Pop Culture

Nadell suggests that three interwoven features lay at the roots of the tragedies in Boyz in the Hood: effects of Euro-American racist capatilization on African-Americans, Euro-American low intensity warfare against blacks, and drugs in African-American communities. Nadell makes many good points to support this thesis throughout the rest of his aticle. Basically he suggests overall that the impoverished blacks are made so due to forces out of their control, due to reactions to these forces that they could control but don't know how to, and due to the vicious cycle they've fallen into due to history and lack of opportunities.

Nadell talks about how European capatilism has always been fueled by exploitation of third world cultures and in a sense, African-American communities represent an internal third-world relative to America as a whole. He mentions how the CIA was in charge of taking care of the narcotics situation while they were simultaneously facilitating the inward flow of opiates. Boyz in the Hood's Furious Styles points out that blacks are the lower end of the narcotics production-- they don't have the plans or boats to get the drugs, they're just the retail portion of the process. Clearly white forces are behind most of this exchange.

While many people would argue, not unlike American HIstory X's Derek, that blacks ultimately are in charge of their own lives and haven't they gotten enough time to "get over" the impact of slavery already? Yet this article and the movies we've watched in class tell a different story. Doughboy doesn't want to be the way he is, he sees that his life is unsatisfactory and at times he seems to deal with an internal struggle to do better: the end of the film shows him throwing away the rest of the alochol he has routinely drunk throughout the rest of the movie, but then we are told just minutes after that that he gets murdered a few weeks later suggesting that even with good intentions, it's hard to break free of the vicious cycle.