“Boyz N The Hood: A Colonial Analysis� – James Nadell
It is easy to watch the film, Boyz N The Hood, without grasping the full meaning behind its racial undertones. Nadell makes a deliberate effort to ensure that the significance of the characters’ behaviors is fully comprehended. Nadell accomplishes this task by dissecting the film, breaking it down into its raw components. He first explains the ways in which Euro-America has effected the African American masses, expanding on this with the hand that White America has played in the struggle for African American communities in the United States.
Many White Americans tend to fail to comprehend the hand that Euro-America has played in exploiting African Americans, leading to the lifestyles they live today. James Nadell states that “Euro-American capitalist expansion has in greatest part been fueled by the oppression and exploitation of African and Third World labor and resources� (Nadell, 448). This makes for an interesting perspective that “the enrichment of Euro-American and European elites� goes hand-in-hand with “the corresponding underenrichment of Africans� (Nadell, 448). Industries, financial institutions and mechanisms of American and European businesses were capitalized with the profits derived from the slave trade and colonialism; “The wealth of the Europeans is our wealth too…The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from underdeveloped peoples� (Nadell, 448). It is easy to remain ahead when you start ahead, as Euro-America has; however, if you are an ‘underdeveloped’ people, you will remain behind because you have been exploited from the very beginning. Is it any wonder then, that life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty levels, unemployment rates and education quality are so vastly unequal for African Americans in comparison to Whites (Arrigo, 2008).
Nadell expands on this notion of Euro-American overtaking and concurrent “pacification program� by explaining that European and Euro-American excellence was exalted to the degree that it degraded “African and African American modes of existence� (Nadell, 450). It was not enough for the ‘settler’ to overtake the land of the ‘native’, they subsequently demonized the ‘native’ by negating any and all of their morals and values, making them the root of “absolute evil� (Nadell, 450). It is no wonder that White racist societies consistently reinforce the “Anglo-Saxon ideal in the minds of Blacks,� creating destructive feelings of self-hatred and cultural genocide in Black communities (Nadell, 451). The White Supremacist racist is the fuel that feeds the fire in the cycle of reciprocal hatred; one that continues to pull the Black community down, while nurturing and uplifting the privileged White Anglo-Saxon.
Consequently, the ‘real criminal’ in this cycle of destruction is the narcotics trade of the ‘hood (Nadell, 452). Furious exhibits an astonishing portrayal of the mainstream White capitalist media as the real criminal, controlling the means by which African Americans obtain drugs. Narcotics are dispersed throughout the African American communities in an effort to destroy the population from within, while it is “willfully and scandalously ignored by mainstream� media (Nadell, 452).
James Nadell has excellently portrayed the real criminals in this discussion about a film that seems to portray Black youths in the ‘hood as the ‘bad guys’. It is not until one dissects the root of the ‘colonial relationship’ between the ‘colonizer’ and ‘native’ that it becomes clear why African American communities are full of violence, drugs, and resentment toward the White mainstream capitalist media.
- Hasti Fashandi