Abstract
Chapter 4's focus is on African American crimefighters from Sidney Poitier’s iconic Mr. Tibbs in The Heat of the Night to the hip hop stars of the “hood” films of the 1990s such as New Jack City, along with Denzel Washington’s more than dozen crimefighter roles. Given Hollywood’s history of black representations dominated by criminality—a prime target the white rogue exists to police—it remains difficult for a black crimefighter to replicate the archetype’s performance of nation. Also explored are the mega-hit cop films by Eddie Murphy, Beverly Hills Cop and its sequels, although the comic premise undermines any serious challenge to the white crimefighter’s dominion. Other films include Gang in Blue, The Glass Shield, Deep Cover, and several films featuring Wesley Snipes.
We have to live a double standard … work twice as hard as a white officer to be accepted … work three times as hard to convince the [black]community that [we’re]… there to do a job… to help them.
Black officer, as quoted in Black in Blue: African-American Police Officers and Racism
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Chief Reuben M. Greenberg, quoted in W. Marvin Delaney, Black Police in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), ix. Also, the intertwined history of blacks and the Irish—the latter moving up the ranks of political machines and securing police jobs through patronage—met again under increasingly hostile conditions, including the race riots of the nineteenth century, when “Irish police officers were just as antagonistic and brutal toward blacks as the Irish workers who led the mobs. These conflicts fed an animosity that survived for generations.” Ibid., 3–4.
- 2.
Ibid., 17. The government reported only 576 blacks served as police, most in Northern cities; while in the South, only four Texas cities and Knoxville, TN, employed black officers.
- 3.
Ibid., 115.
- 4.
Geoffrey P. Alpert and Roger G. Dunham, Policing Urban America (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1997), 215. In the early 1970s, Baltimore, Newark, Memphis, Miami, and New Orleans had populations with roughly 40 percent minorities but had less than seven percent minority membership in their police departments. Criticism of filling the void too fast also occurred in San Francisco, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, and Philadelphia; promotions attained by adjusting standards or scores, which further incited interracial friction, as well as to put those promoted under suspicion of tokenism—a charge that dogged affirmative action policies from their inception.
- 5.
Delaney, Black Police, 102.
- 6.
See Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto, Dilemmas of Social Power (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
- 7.
James Foreman argues that the hiring of more black police chiefs in urban departments from the 1970s forward did not significantly change incarceration rates for black youth, and, in many cases, made matters worse. These black leaders responded to their communities’ pleas for crackdowns on crime, but the reforms they pushed through only exacerbated the systemic racism within the larger justice system. Moreover, black officers often learn to conform to the existing blue culture of their departments (and its baked-in racism), rather than successfully transform law enforcement agencies into being more race-sensitive. See Foreman’s, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).
- 8.
Kenneth Bolton, Jr. and Joe R. Feagin, Black in Blue: African-American Police Officers and Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 27–28.
- 9.
Ibid., 95.
- 10.
Scholars point to D. W. Griffith’s terrifying would-be rapist in his 1915 film Birth of a Nation as a key moment in film history, reinforcing the racialized myth that black males are lustful beasts, which Bogle argues erased sexualized black men from Hollywood films for the next half century and that continues to resonate in contemporary cinema and television programming. Bogle, Toms, 10. See also James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37–45; and Vincent F. Rocchio, Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 29–54.
- 11.
Obama’s cool demeanor inspired the comedy team, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, to invent a sketch about an “anger translator” named Luther. Luther (Key), barely able to contain his rage and channeling every available stereotype, paces behind Obama (Peele), transforming the president’s carefully measured words into bursts of street slang, curse words, and exasperated shouts about issues the president cannot express, including about his “missing” birth certificate. “If he gets angry, he’s the angry black man. If he doesn’t say anything, he’s uppity or ineffectual. The guy couldn’t win. So that’s where this raging id standing next to him, of Luther, was founded,” Key says. See Michele Moses, “Keegan-Michael Key on Playing Obama’s ‘Anger Translator,’” The New Yorker, October 27, 2016. Available online.
- 12.
Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, 37.
- 13.
Poitier won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963).
- 14.
In The Heat of the Night, directed by Norman Jewison, Amazon Prime (The Mirisch Corporation, 1967).
- 15.
Steve Weinstein, “In the Heat of the Night Sends a Message: Popular NBC Series Gives Positive Role Model of Race Relations, Says Producer,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1989. Available online.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
There were a few exceptional independent films such as The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), which includes a black cop who is asked to choose between his black and blue loyalties within a revolutionary scenario. See Michael T. Martin, David C. Wall, and Marilyn Yaquinto, Race and the Revolutionary Impulse: The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).
- 18.
Melvin Van Peebles wrote, directed, and starred in the 1971 film, the most successful independent production to date at the time. See Jesse Algeron Rhines, Black Film/White Money (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 43. Also see Gladstone L. Yearwood, Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), 185–216.
- 19.
Parks earned acclaim for writing, producing, and directing The Learning Tree in 1969. Parks’ son, Gordon Parks, Jr., made Superfly (1972), which generated its own popularity and critical controversy.
- 20.
Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 84. S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 21.
Ibid., 84.
- 22.
Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
- 23.
The upsurge in black sidekicks and buddies co-starring in mainstream Hollywood products also produced what Ed Guerrero labels a period of “neo-minstrelsy.” Ed Guerrero, “The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1983), 237–238.
- 24.
After adjusting for inflation, Beverly Hills Cop remains among the 100 top-grossing films of all time. Source material available online at boxofficemojo.com. The film’s success fostered sequels in 1987 and 1994.
- 25.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 2001), 18.
- 26.
See Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You? Popular Culture from the ‘Hood and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
- 27.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Assassination of the Black Male Image (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 144–145. Also see Boyd’s chapter 4.
- 28.
Deep Cover, DVD, directed by Bill Duke (New Line Home Video, 1999).
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Snipes was far more experimental than other major black actors with onscreen romances with non-black females, including in Money Train, Jungle Fever (1991), Rising Sun (1993), in which a Japanese woman is the prize for which Snipes competes while serving as Sean Connery’s buddy detective; also in One Night Stand (1997) as his character is married to an Asian American woman but has an affair with the German born Nastassja Kinski; finally, in U.S. Marshals (1998), with French born Irène Jacob. The only two white females in the above list are foreign born, perhaps making them acceptable as his lovers by leaving the taboo on homegrown interraciality undisturbed.
- 35.
Jack E. White, Time Atlantic, July 17, 2000.
- 36.
I concur with Ta-Nehisi Coates who charges that the film’s characters are contrived representations meant to present “arguments and propaganda” that violently bump into each other and become “impressed with their own quirkiness.” Rather than a serious critique of race in America, Crash “is the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism” that lacks genuine characters through which to interrogate racism. See “Worst Movie of the Decade,” The Atlantic, December 30, 2009. Available online.
- 37.
Ebony featured a story in January 1997 identifying factors that may inhibit black actors from wider success, including lack of major awards, success in action films not carrying over into other genres, the scarcity of roles for black actresses, and finally, the prohibition against onscreen relationships with white actresses.
- 38.
While their versatility helps to maximize their A-list potential, for most of their careers they had few onscreen romances—the fear of black sexuality, especially with respect to white women that Cornel West posits is deeply rooted in white fear of interracial sex and marriage. See West’s Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
- 39.
See Marilyn Yaquinto, “Denzel Washington: A Study in Black and Blue,” Black Camera, 22, no. 2 (2008), 3–23.
- 40.
In the 2004 film, Man on Fire (2004), Washington portrays a burned-out government assassin named John Creasy who attempts to redeem himself by avenging the harm done to a family for whom he now works as a bodyguard, growing especially protective of yet another young white girl. Creasy had been recruited for the job by his former American employer who had previously relied on Creasy’s talents for eliminating enemies of the state.
- 41.
Like many of Washington’s characters, Hobbes meets an attractive white female, Gretta Milano (Embeth Davidts), for whom he has feelings, but which are not expressed beyond a farewell embrace.
- 42.
Fallen, DVD, directed by Gregory Hoblit (Warner Home Video, 1998).
- 43.
bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 85.
- 44.
Jamila Akil, “While Promoting ‘Flight,’ the Real Reason Denzel Washington Avoided On-Screen Romances with White Women is Revealed,” November 13, 2012. Available online at beyondwhiteblack.com.
- 45.
Vanessa Martinez, “Casting Latina Actresses/Black Actors: Revisiting the Trend,” May 8, 2012. Available online at indiewire.com.
- 46.
Inside Man, DVD, directed by Spike Lee (Universal Pictures, 2006).
- 47.
Once considered as dangerous a threat as African Americans, the nineteenth-century Irish were regarded as “Negroes turned inside out.” Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40. When the Irish Catholic first arrived, he was outcast and relegated to sharing living and working space with blacks and other marginalized peoples, resulting in a degree of intermingling, which was enough to prompt the 1850 census to include the new category of “mulattoes,” or mixed raced people, who comprised up to a quarter of many states’ “colored” population.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yaquinto, M. (2019). Black Crimefighters: Portraits in Blue. In: Policing the World on Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24805-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24805-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24804-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24805-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)