The ruse of engagement: Black masculinity and the cinema of policing

American Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 39-63

  Sexton, Jared ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69449098705     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0057     Document Type: Review

References (75)

1. Training Day, DVD, directed by Antoine Fuqua (Burbank, Calif.: Warner Bros., 2001).
2. Peter Bradshaw, "The Invisibility of Black Actors Has Long Been a Scandal," The Guardian, March 26, s2002, http://film.guardian.co.uk/ oscars2002/news/0,,674216,00.html (accessed July 14, 2008);
3. Allison Samuels, "Will It Be Denzel's Day?" Newsweek, February 25, 2002, 55-61.
4. See, respectively, Nicole Rafter, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000);
5. Thomas Leitch, Crime Films (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
6. Neal King, Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999);
7. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2000).
8. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: An Essay (New York: Random House, 1976), 62.
9. Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 59.
10. Edward Guerrero, "The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood's Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties," in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 237-46.
11. Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997).
12. Cintra Wilson, "Oscars 2002: Somebody Make It Stop!" Salon, March 25, 2002, http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2002/03/25/oscars- 2002/index.html (accessed July 14, 2008).
13. George Curry, "An Academy Awards Program Finally Worth Watching," National Newspaper Publishers Association, February 28, 2005, http://georgecurry.com/columns/index1.shtml?id=1109582676 (accessed July 14, 2008).
14. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1994).
15. Berry's role in the film is, of course, more complex than this pat judgment would suggest and I am glossing my reading of certain aspects of the black press's reception in pointed language only to emphasize divergence with the mainstream press. For a subtle reading of Berry's performance and the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and (the) death (penalty) in Monster's Ball, see Sharon Holland, "Death in Black and White: A Reading of Marc Forster's Monster's Ball," Signs 31.3 (2006): 785-813.
16. For a detailed critique of Forster's film from another perspective, see Frank Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
17. Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, Four Little Girls) and
18. John Singleton (Boyz in the Hood) have each received Oscar nominations for their directorial efforts.
19. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollyw od (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988);
20. Jon Lewis, ed., The New American Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998);
21. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap, 2000).
22. Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans, The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy (Berkeley, Calif.: Prison Activist Resource Center, 1996);
23. Angela Dillard, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America (New York: New York University Press, 2001);
24. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Terror Austerity Race Gender Excess Theater," in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993): 23-37.
25. See Jared Sexton, "Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control," in Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James, 197-219 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
26. Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993);
27. Ed Guerrero, "A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age," The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis, 328-52 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).
28. Examples might include the African Diaspora Film Festival, http://www.nyadff.org/ (accessed July 14, 2008);
29. the Black Filmmakers Foundation, http://www.dvrepublic.org/ (accessed July 14, 2008);
30. the Pan African Film and Arts Festival, http://www.paff.org/ (accessed July 14, 2008);
31. Rainforest Films, http://www.rainforestfilms.com/ (accessed July 14, 2008);
32. and New Millennium Studios http://www.nmstudios.com/ (accessed July 14, 2008).
33. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 174.
34. The situation for black women directors in Hollywood is changing slowly, given recent productions by Sanaa Hamri (Something New),
35. Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou),
36. Nnegest Likke (Phat Girlz),
37. Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball),
38. Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S), and
39. Alison Swan (Mixing Nia), among others.
40. See the excellent documentary Sisters in Cinema, on DVD, directed by Yvonne Welbon (Chicago: Our Film Works, 2003). For more on recent black filmmaking, both commercial and independent, see Mark Reid, Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
41. Ellis Cashmore, The Black Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.
42. Jess Algeron Rhines, Black Film, White Money (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
43. In consulting various interviews with both Fuqua and Washington around the release of Training Day, I found generally evasive statements regarding the issue of police power. The gist of their commentary, individually and collectively, was that law enforcement is basically sound and upright, but that certain individual officers may participate in, or precipitate, exceptional cases of corruption. Moreover, it is said that terrible and unjust things happen to members of black communities, but that similarly terrible things happen to anyone under the right circumstances. See, for instance, Duane Dudek, "Washington Takes on His First Role as Bad Guy in Cop Film," Journal Sentinel, October 3, 2001, http://www2.jsonline.com/onwisconsin/movies/oct01/ denzel04100301.asp (accessed July 14, 2008).
44. Interestingly, Fuqua has since teamed up with director Cle "Bone" Sloan, a former member of the Athens Park Bloods, to produce a documentary, Bastards of the Party (New York: HBO Films 2006), that examines the social, political, and economic history of black street gangs in the Los Angeles area since the 1960s. To its credit, Sloan's film is far more critical of the systemic nature of racist police violence - including its function as political repression-than Fuqua's Training Day.
45. Ed Guerrero, "A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age," in The New American Cinema, ed. Lewis, 331.
46. Jon Lewis, "Introduction," in The New American Cinema, ed. Lewis, 4.
47. James Snead, White Screens, Black Images (New York: Routledge, 1994), 24.
48. David Marriot, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 32.
49. See Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997),
50. and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
51. Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995).
52. See also Lewis Gordon, "Race, Sex, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World," in Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference, and Interplay, ed. Naomi Zack (New York: Routledge, 1997), 124.
53. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992);
54. Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
55. See, for instance, Jorge Gracia and Pablo De Greiff, eds., Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights (New York: Routledge, 2000);
56. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996);
57. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999);
58. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez, eds., Latinos: Remaking America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
59. and George Yancey, Who Is White? Asians, Latinos, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide (Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner, 2003).
60. See, for instance, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001),
61. and Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Boston: South End Press, 2005).
62. See Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995);
63. Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997),
64. and Elizabeth Alexander, "'We're Gonna Deconstruct Your Life!': The Making and Un-Making of the Black Bourgeois Patriarch in Ricochet," in Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham (New York: Routledge, 1996), 157-72.
65. Latinos - here mainly Chicanos/Mexicans and Central Americans - not only represent the largest percentage (though not the largest proportion) of prisoners in Los Angeles County and the state of California, Training Day's fictional setting, but also constitute a bulk of the victims at the center of the so-called Rampart Scandal of the late 1990s, upon which David Ayer's screenplay is based. On the politics of the Rampart Scandal, see Tom Hayden, "LAPD: Law and Disorder," The Nation, April 10, 2000, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000410/hayden (accessed July 14, 2008).
66. Snead, White Screens, 8.
67. See also Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
68. On the concept of the homosocial, see Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
69. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 103.
70. I disagree with Kellogg's reading on this point. Kellogg overestimates the irony with which Washington is able to play the role of Harris because his analysis fails to consider fully the plot of Training Day and the interrelationship of its central characters. See Alex Kellogg, "Agh, a Negro! Denzel Washington Avoids the Racial Pitfalls of Hollywood and Redefines the Black Antihero," in Colorlines Magazine: Race, Action, Culture (Spring 2002), http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-83457956.html (accessed July 14, 2008).
71. Fuqua maintains that one of his primary influences in shooting Training Day was Coppola's Apocalypse Now and, by extension, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, though it is unclear whether Fuqua has read Conrad's novella or is at all versed in the contemporary debates surrounding it.
72. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
73. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 278.
74. I want to underscore as well the inaptness of the rubric of "exploitation," which I take to be a conceptual correlate to the misnomer "universal victim." See Frank Wilderson, "Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society," Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225-40, for a generative discussion of the radical difference between exploitation and accumulation, the latter of which I take to be a more adequate explanatory framework for the structural position of the black.
75. Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 2001).