Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth

18. The Feminization and Victimization of the African American Athlete in Boyz N the Hood, Cooley High, and Cornbread, Earl and Me

Cinematic representations of black male camaraderie have occupied the center of discourse on black life over a period of nearly twenty years, in part because of mass appeal, in part because of the ability of these representations to generate crossover audiences, and in part because of their level of authenticity in revealing the fragility of black life. Three films that have most effectively presented the struggles of young black males are Cooley High, Cornbread, Earl and Me (both 1975) and Boyz N the Hood (1991). As representations of youthful black male camaraderie, these films collectively foreground the black male athlete and his tragic circumstances , exploring inner city life and its influences on the fate of the black male and displacing onto a young black male victim the larger sociopolitical dilemma of crime, poverty, and disenfranchisement . In these three films, young black athletes systematically die, rendered passive victims somewhat in the manner of the femme fatale. This essay examines how these films feminize the black athletic boy and set his victimization at a moment just prior to his arriving at maturity. Death is used narratively as a signifier of the transcendence adolescent boys must achieve in their struggle to reach adulthood. Despite dissimilarities within the plots of these films, the same story is ultimately reconstructed in all three of them. Over a twenty-year time span, in three separate films, black male adolescents are shown as unavoidably unable to escape their tragic plight as they are targeted for victimization. 333 18 the feminization and victimization of the african american athlete Charlene Regester in boyz N the hood, cooley high, and cornbread, earl and me charlene regester 334 Black Athletes The importance of depicting the black male as an athlete onscreen evolves out of the preeminence of sports in contemporary society and culture. Todd Boyd and Kenneth L. Shropshire suggest that because basketball symbolized dominance and superiority, it became a signifier of American culture more than did other sports (2000, 3). Boyd further argues that the sport of basketball becomes a microcosm for deconstructing the race and class politics that exist in contemporary culture (Baker and Boyd 1997, 133–34). Given the importance of sports, and basketball in particular, as cultural influences , the prominence of the black athlete in visual representation is certainly better understood. But these mediated constructions of the black athlete have helped create complicit representations of the black male onscreen. Aaron Baker charges that many films that focus on basketball construct the NBA as a utopia and fabricate illusory constructions of blackness. It is in these mythical constructions that the image of the black male athlete is complicated by a conundrum of race and class politics. Specifically, Baker refers to the commodification of the image of Michael Jordan who presents the false ideal that success is achievable for blacks in America, when the reality is that most blacks will not find ready access to such success. According to Baker, the heroic image of Jordan is often juxtaposed to the “hypermasculine menace” image embodied by players such as Charles Barkley and others whose “‘gangsta’ personas” often intersect with those of rap artists (2000, 217). Ultimately, what evolves is a disturbing representation that proliferates in popular culture and plays into the public’s imagination of blackness. John Hoberman charges that although integration has resulted in neutralizing racial differences, this progress is often directly opposed to the “merger of the athlete, the gangster rapper, and the criminal into a single black male persona that the sports industry, the music industry, and the advertising industry have made into the predominant image of black masculinity in the United States and around the world” (1997, xviii). Thus, a disturbing image of the black male athlete evolves, is popularized, and proliferates in contemporary culture, most vividly reified in films such as Boyz N the Hood, Cooley High, and Cornbread, Earl and Me—films that center the black male athlete in the narrative but that also manage to problematize his image. The Feminization of the African American Athlete 335 Boyz N the Hood introduces three black males—Ricky (Morris Chestnut), Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and Doughboy (Ice Cube)—who attempt to make the transition from adolescence into adulthood while growing up in the ’hood, South Central Los Angeles. Ricky is a rising football player who is recruited by the University of Southern California, while Doughboy, his brother, represents young black males who are displaced and...