Malibu's
Most Wanted, The Beat Goes On
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
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Hollywood
movies have always exhibited a sort of cultural politics
in their treatment of ethnicity, but their usages of
African- Americans have always seemed more resistant to
change, even under the pressure of social crisis. - Thomas
Cripps from Split Image African Americans in The
Mass Media, p.125 |
Just as whites co-opted
ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues (turning R&B into Rock and
Roll) Hip Hop is now being hijacked right before our very eyes
using a myriad of media, CDs, videos, and film. Contrary to
popular opinion, art is not neutral. Art can be and often is
very political in its message, intent, and purpose. Western art
promotes white supremacy and by extension the denigration of
"the other," meaning all nonwhites.
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The AOL-Time Warner movie
Malibu's
Most Wanted is a prime example of this phenomenon. Like
Bringing
Down The House which is still raking in mad money
at the box office,
Malibu's
Most Wanteddeals
with white family alienation but this time the
protagonist is an adolescent white boy named Brad (B-Rad)
Gluckman played by Jamie Kennedy who thinks he's a
gangsta rapper although he and his wanna be crew are
livin' large in Malibu California. His father Bill Gluckman
played by Ryan O'Neal is a candidate for governor of California
and B-Rad's trying-to-be hard core lifestyle prove to be an
embarrassment to him and his campaign. Gluckman's handlers plot
to get B-Rad out of the picture and come up with the idea to
stage a kidnapping, take him to LA, show him simulated life in
the ghetto to scare the black out of him and bring him to his
senses.
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Blair Underwood plays Tom
Gibbons who hires two nonghetto oreo- type black actors --Taye
Diggs and Anthony Anderson -- to pose as thugs carjack and
kidnap young Gluckman, take him to the hood for a taste of
simulated ghetto life.
The film which is rated
PG-13 is aimed at whites which makes it all the more insidious
because it plays to every negative stereotype imaginable, the
hoochie mommas, thugs-r-us ghetto dwellers and their poverty
gripped sociopathic lifestyles.
I went to check it out and
this film is a weapon of mass destruction in that it destroys
black people as fully developed human beings. Further it
emasculates all the black men in the movie and makes being a
goofy wanna-be-black white boy from a dysfunctional family seem
cool. For the black male characters nothing turns out right:
Underwood's character gets fired, Diggs and Anderson’s
characters are like fish out of water in the hood interacting
with the hard core gang bangers and they are depicted as real
punks.
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The gang leader eventually adopt B-Rad
into their gang (it's a long story) but in the end his
house gets destroyed. Except for Shondra played by
Regina Hall, all the sistahs are portrayed as skeezers.
Shondra who has dreams of being an entrepreneur (that's
how she gets roped into the kidnapping scheme by her
cousin Anderson) leaves the hood but incredibly ends up
with B-Rad who in the end helps her accomplish her dream
of opening the first of a string of beauty salons. Oh, by the way B-Rad reconciles with his
father who in the end is elected governor. The
film is not high art and doesn't pretend to be. It is
white supremacy at its best, using sly subtle yet in
your face stereotypes to stigmatize not only Hip Hop but
black people. When things get out of hand and tight,
Ryan O'Neal fires Blair Underwood and takes off to save
his son who has inadvertently gotten caught up in the
ghetto thug life. |
Even B-Rad's well to do suburban fake-gangsta crew,
an East Indian, Arab, Afghani phenotype named Hadj, a punk rock
type looking white girl named Mocha and another fake looking
gangsta white boy named Monster summon up the courage to attempt
to save their friend while the black males in the movie who are
supposed to be "real gangstas" wimp out and back down
from not only B-Rad but his father and his crew.
So not only does the goofy
white boy get the fine head-on straight black girl, he
reconciles with his on-the-way-up daddy. He and his crew make
all the black men in the film look like punks and buffoons --
typical Hollywood. Like I said earlier this film is insidious.
It is characteristic of a white boy's idea of comedic cinema.
From an analytical and African consciousness perspective,
Malibu's
Most Wanted is not funny.
The
Digital Underground hosted by Junious Ricardo
Stanton airs live on Sundays from 12 noon to 2 PM Eastern time
on www.NewBlackCity.com This week's guest
will be Gary Grant and Ridgley Muhammad President and Vice
President of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association
who will speak about programs to support black farmers, co-ops
buying clubs etc. The second hour will feature Sheila
and Sharon Peters of the Memphis Tennessee based Peters
Group who will talk about juvenile female offenders,
parenting and intervention strategies and the disproportionate
incarceration of people of color. Log on and learn. Engage in
mental decolonization, free your mind the rest will follow.
26 April 2003
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 6 August
2008
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