![]() The manager of the theater reacted in shock and asked them to leave. The students, most of them black and Hispanic, laughed at some of the most violent scenes in the film. ![]() ![]() A group of Castlemont High School students were taken to see Schindler's List (1993) on Martin Luther King Day as part of the school's effort to deepen their sense of history, oppression, and to broaden their understanding of the struggle for human rights. Moreover the discourse of race and violence provides a sense of social distance and moral privilege that places dominant white society outside of the web of violence and social responsibility.Īnother example of how cinematic representations and "objective" reporting mutually reinforce a narrow, racial coding of violence can be seen in an incident that happened at a local movie theater in Oakland California. ![]() Such racially coded discourse serves to mobilize white fears and legitimate "drastic measures" in social policy in the name of crime reform. In this particular instance, the representation of black youth was used as a vehicle to thematize the causal relationship between violence and the discourse of pathology. The press did not use these events to call public attention to the "violence to the mind, body, and spirit of crumbling schools, low teacher expectations, unemployment and housing discrimination, racist dragnets and everyday looks of hate by people who find guilty by suspicion." Instead of focusing on how larger social injustices and failed policies, especially those at the root of America's system of inequality, contribute to a culture of violence that is a tragedy for all youth, the dominant media transformed the growing incidence of youth violence into a focus on black on black fratricide. In examining these real and symbolic representations of black on black violence, the popular press used the incident to link exposure to media violence with aggressive, anti social behavior in real life. The relationship between the everyday and cinematic representations is often taken up as causal, as when the national media recently focused on Hispanic youth in Los Angeles, New York, and New Jersey who rioted or fought each other outside of the movie theaters in which black youth gangsta films were being shown. Real life and celluloid images blur as the representations of race and violence proliferate more broadly through the news media's extensive coverage of youth violence, not infrequently highlighting the gore, guts, hysteria, and other tawdry Hollywood effects to punctuate its sensationalist often racist commentary. Cinema appears to be providing a new language and aesthetic in which the city becomes the central site for social disorder and violence, and black youth in particular, become agents of crime, pathology, and moral decay. 333-354.Īmerican cinema has increasingly provided a site of convergence for depicting both the inner city "reality" of black-on-black youth violence and for promoting a renewed "acceptability and/or tolerance of straightforward racist doctrine." Recent films focusing on black urban violence such as Boys N the Hood(1991), Juice (1992), Menace II Society(1993), Sugar Hill(1994), and Fresh(1994) have attracted national media coverage because they do not simply represent contemporary urban realities but also reinforce the popular perception that everyday black urban life and violent crime mutually define each other. ![]() Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal Violence: ![]()
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