WHITE GIRLZ N THE HOOD

Audrey Thompson
University of Utah

As portrayed in Menace II Society, Boyz N the Hood, and other mainstream forums, the hood is a Black Never Never Land of crime, violence, gangs, drugs, anger, and poverty. Unlike the James Barrie version, though, it is a place to escape from and not to — these are not boys who refuse to grow up but boys who play adult games all too soon and who may never have the chance to grow up. The difference, of course, is that these Lost Boys are Black. In Peter Pan, the Lost Boys feel threatened by society; in the nineties hood morality play, the Lost Boys are themselves a menace to society.

That this construction of the hood is specifically a narrative construction seems to me a central point to be made in any discussion of the politics and aesthetics of race relations.¹ A different narrative construction might have yielded us Menaced by Society, for example, rather than Menace II Society, in recognition of the pressures on young Black men in a racist society. Another narrative construction might yield a richer and more complex cultural account of the hood: the hood as neighborhood, and not simply as moral wasteland of random (“senseless”) violence and hair-trigger emotions. Instead, in mainstream portrayals “the hood” symbolizes and at the same time is taken literally as a breeding ground of destruction and despair. It is the eighties and nineties version of the inner city as rendered in Elvis Presley’s song, “In the Ghetto,”² with the same “vicious cycle” motif and the same moral message. In movies, newspaper articles, and television panel discussions, the portrayal of the hood takes the form of a morality play, and its narrative construction is betrayed by its cast of characters. African-American women and girls scarcely figure in the story, their roles confined to those of bit player, symbol, or narrative device. African-American men may occasionally serve as teachers and guides but for the most part are cast as absentee fathers (dead, drifted, or incarcerated) and failed or corrupt role models. The boys are the central characters: the Lost Boys, the menace to society. White men and boys have walk-on roles, which, whether benign or malevolent, are largely irrelevant to the main story. White girls and women do not show up at all — by definition, the hood is no place for white girls.

The mainstream definition of the hood in terms of danger, despair, and uncontrolled appetites stands in specifically dramatic contrast to the mainstream definitions of white girlhood according to which white girls represent purity, morality, nuanced sensitivity to others’ needs, innocence, and at the same time, somewhat paradoxically, the hope of the future and of civilization. Dated as it sounds, that image continues to inform any number of contemporary discourses, including those within feminism and within education. It’s an image that has underwritten countless westerns, adventure movies, Playboy features on “the girl next door,” romance novels, lynchings of Black men, and rapes of Black women.³ It has helped shape the feminization of the teaching profession and it continues to inform such feminist debates as those concerning victimhood, feminine and feminist ethics, essentialism, and the role of race in feminist theory and politics.

In the dominant discourses concerning “the hood” and “white girls,” the only connection between the two is the implicit threat that Black hoods (in both senses of the term) pose to white purity and innocence. It is a measure of both our racism and our liberalism, I believe, that we do not acknowledge or deconstruct the absence of white women and girls from mainstream depictions of the hood. Silence is our polite way of not-saying that the hood cannot be allowed to contaminate white girls, as symbols of innocence and as reproducers of whiteness and of civilization-as-we-know-it.⁴ In other words, silence is the only not-overtly racist stance available to us when the very terms of whiteness, femaleness, and the hood are constructed in specifically racist relations. In order to discover another, anti-racist form of response, we will need to redefine the terms. Doing so will mean, in turn, redefining some of our most pivotal concepts, including those of identity, gender, sex, childhood, morality, relationships, authenticity, and integrity.⁵

In her provocative essay on “Pleasure, Pain, and Ethical Responsibility,” Hilary Davis takes up the question of how a white feminist can respond to a text such as Menace II Society without either subordinating the text to her own pleasure or abandoning the possibility of pleasure in her concern to acknowledge non-white authorial meaning.⁶ How, she asks, is the white reader to respond to texts written by “Others” without “othering” them? The solution she offers is an abandonment of the atomistic sense of self and other whereby the inclination to conquer, possess, define, and use the other is relinquished in favor of a recognition of the other as a being like oneself. Quoting Jessica Benjamin, Davis explains that “I am ‘compensated for [my] loss of sovereignty by the pleasure of sharing, the communion with another subject.’”

While I applaud Davis’s project of interrogating the racialized self and her rejection of those terms of selfhood according to which others are to be subordinated to the pleasures of the self, I wish to argue that the solution offered in place of atomism in fact recapitulates atomistic relations. That is to say, the “both-and” resolution to the dichotomy of self/other still accepts the dichotomy as a description of relationships. It naturalizes the master-slave relationship by suggesting that the white self must be wooed from a supposedly natural impulse to exploit others in the interests of personal (“authentic”) pleasure. Master-slave relations are certainly to the point here, but if whites must be compensated for our “loss of sovereignty,” then we have not yet realized how morally abhorrent that sovereignty is or how parasitic and therefore inauthentic our ideals of self and integrity are.⁷ If our notions of selfhood and sovereignty are predicated on the existence of a service class (whether Black, female, and/or working-class), then, from an anti-racist and feminist point of view, extending the recognition of “selfhood” to all others is no solution to oppressive relationships, even though it universalizes the right to be master and then “transcends” the problem of universal master-slave relations by an appeal to “shared anotherness.” At best, such notions of selfhood would be non-descriptive and misleading; at worst, they would obscure and mystify actual power relations.⁸

My argument, then, is that the very notion of selfhood in a racist society is problematic, so that the attempt to achieve authentic, yet anti-racist, responsiveness to othered others reintroduces racism in the appeal to authenticity. Davis makes a related argument in her astute observation that our embodied experiences of pleasure and pain — what might seem to be our most authentic responses to others — may be where racism most readily finds a home. Thus, she deconstructs her “felt-situated” response to Menace II Society and finds it racist. Yet, she recognizes that if she had seen the movie in a white setting, she might not have had to confront that racism — a point nicely addressed to the limitations of institutional, educational environments as forums for unlearning racism. As Davis observes, seeing a Black movie in a predominantly white women’s studies class is not the same as seeing it in a cinema with a largely Black audience.

At issue here, surely, is the structured and lived separation of white and Black lives. African-Americans in the inner city seldom see whites; most middle-class whites live out their lives in predominantly white settings, going to white shops, banks, restaurants, schools, realty companies, political gatherings, churches and synagogues, for example. Given that the separateness of Black and white lives is shaped in large part by white racism, whether embodied or institutionalized, and that that separateness, while shaping our sense of self and other, at the same time allows us to ignore the racist construction of self and other, can we learn non-racist responsiveness without changing our lives structurally? In the last analysis, no. Changing our possibilities of adequate responsiveness to those who are oppressed demands, fundamentally, undoing the oppression. But as to whether we can begin to learn different kinds of authentic responsiveness — something, perhaps, akin to what Maxine Greene has called wide awakeness — a responsiveness that begins the task of reshaping habits and relationships: yes. That is what education is for. But as Hilary Davis’s essay suggests, the re-education of whites will need to begin and end outside the classroom, in the hood.⁹

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1. Toni Morrison makes a fascinating argument for the intertwining of literary constructions of race with conceptions of freedom and identity in her monograph, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1992). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes comparable arguments with respect to male identity and homophobia in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

2. This so-called “sociological” song was written by Mac Davis, whose non-”sociological” hits include “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked On Me” and “One Hell of a Woman.”

3. A recent news story speaks to this issue. In Charlotte, N.C., the site of this year’s PES conference, eleven young African-American women were strangled by a serial killer over a period of two years. Yet the crimes went virtually unnoticed in the press, there was no public outcry, and the crimes were unsolved for two years despite evidence that could have led to early apprehension of the killer. As one commentator noted, “I feel like they wrote us off as some fast little black girls who didn’t really matter.” Associated Press, “With Accused Killer in Jail, Many Wonder What Took So Long,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 March 1994, A8, col. 6.

4. In a talk entitled “On Moms, Mammies, Madonnas, and Matriarchs: Racism, Nationalism, and Motherhood” (University of Utah, 1 March 1993), Patricia Hill Collins pointed out that keeping women “pure” is a nationalist as well as patriarchal project, in which the sanctity of a given race is protected by sequestering women as racially uncontaminated breeders.

5. As Toni Morrison and others have pointed out, these terms are in fact often literary or quasi-theatrical conventions that depend for their coherence on the maintenance of dramatic foils “naturalized” by their association with gender, sexual orientation, race, or social class, for example. In addition to Morrison and Sedgwick, see Ronald A. Sharp, Friendship and Literature: Spirit and Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986). Kathryn Kish Sklar, Carole Pateman, and Barbara Fields make parallel historical and political arguments.

6. Menace II Society, as I read it, is part morality play, part genre gangster movie (with all the conventions of “realism,” drama, film noir, and macho adventure), part didactic documentary. White film critics loved it, for the most part, and this seems to me unsurprising; who else would respond to the cliché of the “vicious cycle of poverty” as if it were the grittiest of realism? This is not to say that whites were the only intended audience, but it is to say that the framing of the story fits comfortably with much of white liberal thinking about race issues.

7. This confusion continues to characterize much of the discourse concerning institutionalized affirmative action and gender equity in the classroom. “But if girls get more of the teacher’s attention, then boys will get less, and that’s not fair either. That’s reverse discrimination,” is one version of the resistance to gender equity, and of course the resistance to affirmative action even more pointedly assumes that its beneficiaries are undeserving. The assumption is that grandfathered privileges cannot be abridged without violence to individual freedom.

8. This is one of the criticisms raised concerning liberal feminism: that, by accepting the terms of autonomous masculine selfhood and simply extending them to women, it either obscures the actual work women do (the “second shift”) or transfers that work to an even more marginalized group — Black, working-class, and/or immigrant women.

9. I would like to thank Raymond Christy, Kathleen Spencer-Christy, and Ivan Van Laningham for watching and discussing Menace II Society with me. I also want to thank Kathy for many illuminating conversations about gender, race, racism, and education.