Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (review)

In a previous work, Black Camelot: African American Culture Heroes in their Times 1960–1980 (1999), William L. Van Deburg presented the African American hero as an icon who shaped social values in the late twentieth century by providing black America prideful role models, helping to build bridges between the races. Now, in Hoodlums, the professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison turns his attention to the black villain, interrogating that icon's history of reflecting and influencing American cultural values. The full significance of African American villains across history has yet to be fully examined or understood, Van Deburg asserts, in much the same way that many of us "still do not have enough accurate information about the nation's racial past to make historically informed decisions on present-day issues" (xii). Hoodlums argues that a clear consideration of these anti-heroes in their various guises—villains, social bandits, and hoodlums—will contribute to a more truthful, if complicated, understanding of American racial history. "Just as villainy of any sort gives definition to heroism, black evildoers help define honor and virtue for whites" (217). For students, scholars, and teachers of modernism, this book provides a range of information to bracket the early twentieth century's insistence on newness, though it offers little consideration of the modernist era itself.

Van Deburg seeks to identify the intersection of race and villainy, and as his first chapter offers a wide-ranging examination of binary divisions between good and evil, the evocation of binary racial divisions necessarily follows. Satan was colored as black early in history, Van Deburg notes, and the association of blackness with evil unfolded from there. "Is there cultural significance," he asks rhetorically, "in our blackening of prominent villains and in the manner in which they have been linked to the Great Deceiver, fount of natural evil?" (11) Hoodlums traces the cultural and social history through which black skin became inextricably associated with wickedness, sexual depravity, physical disfigurement, immorality, ignorance, laziness, dirtiness, and on and on. Much of Van Deburg's delineation underscores the racially self-serving nature of this projection: "Dazzled by their own brilliance," he notes, "whites easily confused essentialism with empiricism as they placed science in the service of racial subordination" (49). Van Deburg establishes the connection between evil and blackness in a convincing and wide-ranging fashion, though this is not, one notes, a particularly novel observation.

Van Deburg proposes that we distinguish between villainous types: for example, he suggests that "black social bandits" of various kinds address racial injustice through multifaceted strategies of activism designed to challenge white racial supremacy. As opposed to those villains whose selfish evildoing serves the individual, social bandits saw themselves as "agents of change . . . in order to improve the lives of beleaguered kinsmen" (68). Problematically, the individualistic black villainy—personified in, for example, the antebellum black slave owner who engages in all of the most reprehensible behavior of the white slave owner—challenges the community-oriented social bandit in continual intra-racial struggle. It is precisely this challenge, Van Deburg asserts, that defines the difference between what he calls "bad blacks"—those whose villainy undermines the community through its selfishness and sheer evil—and "baadd blacks"—those trickster figures whose primary function is to stick it to the Man.

Hoodlums jumps rather quickly among historical periods, and these leaps create some curious assertions about late twentieth-century African-American culture, the period in which the book is most interested. For example, Van Deburg asserts that postbellum America's legacy of slavery, racial violence, and racial injustice (in the proliferation of turn of the century lynching bees, for instance) led to "the African American world view (that) privileged suspicion over fear" (107) evident in recent urban myths and conspiracy theories about government sponsored racial genocide. In Van Deburg's view, the important point here is that this suspicion testifies to the prevalence of white...