Abstract
This chapter examines the place of commercial black filmmaking in the cultural politics of the post–civil rights era United States and argues that a material and symbolic reassertion of antiblackness in public policy and popular culture has accompanied the clamor about “blacks in officialdom” that both neoliberal multiculturalism and neoconservative colorblindness have amplified over the last generation. The guises of black empowerment, particularly images of black masculinity as state-sanctioned authority, are viewed as extensions of the illegitimacy, dispossession, and violence that seem to otherwise monopolize the signification of racial blackness. Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day (2001) provides a case study and the director’s broader professional career articulates the structural conditions for an antiblack black visibility on a global scale.
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.
- 2.
I write “projections” here rather than “project” in order to distinguish the formal activities of the right-wing think tank that guided the Bush Administration (2001–2009), the Project for the New American Century, from the broader neoconservative political movement and the global hegemony of neoliberalism (Ryan 2010; Simon et al. 2016). The New American Century platform is not identical to the Trump Administration’s efforts to “Make America Great Again”—owing principally to the latter’s openly pronounced white nationalism—but there is, of course, significant overlap in their respective objectives and personnel.
- 3.
Not surprisingly Berry’s mode of expression received derisive sniping in the press, while the substance of her remarks about the cinema’s exclusion of black female talents was only superficially acknowledged.
- 4.
Jewison’s film won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was adapted to the screen by Stirling Silliphant (who also won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay) from John Ball’s 1965 Edgar Award-winning novel of the same name. Ball went on to write six sequels to his debut novel between 1966 and 1986. As well, the film adaptation inspired two sequels starring Poitier—Gordon Douglas’s They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970) and Don Medford’s The Organization (1971)—and served as the basis of a successful television series starring Academy Award-nominee Howard Rollins (Supporting Actor, Ragtime) as Tibbs and running a full eight seasons (1988–1995). This is all to say that the cultural production of the character of Virgil Tibbs, in print and onscreen, spanned more than two decades and met with great acclaim. Perhaps not coincidentally, Ball is also the author of much hawkish Cold War literature (the Tibbs series included), most famously The First Team (1971), in which the USA is invaded by the Soviet Union without firing a single shot because it has been weakened by a liberal President and the progressive and radical social movements of the day (civil rights, anti-war, etc.). Ball also served for a time as a Los Angeles County Sheriff. Dudziak (2002) explores at length the historical connections between racial liberalism and anti-communism in the United States.
- 5.
However, it is worth mentioning the film’s oblique critical commentary on the gendered dynamics of shame and responsibility (i.e., the white boyfriend is under pressure to provide money to his girlfriend for the abortion of an unwanted pregnancy lest they wind up in a shotgun marriage; when he incidentally murders the propertied Northern white man that he robs to that end, he helps to scapegoat Tibbs for the crime) and the racialization of reproductive politics (i.e., the white woman’s unplanned pregnancy is aborted illegally by a black woman from the other side of town in order to protect her public reputation and outsource the risk of prosecution).
- 6.
On this score, it would be interesting to revisit Fiedler’s contention: “We [white male Americans] continue to dream the female dead, and ourselves in the arms of our dusky male lovers” (Fiedler 1960, 29). In this light, the vexed interracial male bonding trope may appear as less a symbolic homoerotic resolution to a real political antagonism than a reiteration of that antagonism as a permuted form of homoerotic assault.
- 7.
In seventy-four years and two hundred ninety-six possible Academy Awards, only four black actors—Sidney Poitier, Cuba Gooding Jr., Louis Gossett Jr., Denzel Washington—and two black actresses—Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg—had won to that point. Since then, Jamie Foxx, (Best Actor, Ray [2004]), Morgan Freeman (Best Supporting Actor, Million Dollar Baby [2004]), Jennifer Hudson (Best Actress, Dreamgirls [2006]), Forest Whitaker (Best Actor, The Last King of Scotland [2006]), Mo’Nique (Best Supporting Actress, Precious [2009]), Octavia Spencer (Best Supporting Actress, The Help [2011]), Lupita Nyong’o (Best Supporting Actress, 12 Years a Slave [2013]), Mahershala Ali (Best Supporting Actor, Moonlight [2016]), and Viola Davis (Best Supporting Actress, Fences [2016]) have taken home trophies—in other words, the number of black Oscar winners has doubled and achieved relative gender parity in the last fifteen years or so.
- 8.
Berry’s role in the film is, of course, more complex than this pat judgment would suggest and I am glossing aspects of the black press’s reception in pointed language only to emphasize divergence with the mainstream press. For a subtle reading of Berry’s performance and the politics of race, gender, sexuality and death in Monster’s Ball, see Holland (2006). For a detailed critique of Forster’s film from another perspective, see Wilderson (2010).
- 9.
Spike Lee and John Singleton had been nominated previously, but neither of them won. Since 2002, Lee Daniels directed Mo’Nique’s Oscar-winning performance in Precious (2009); Steve McQueen directed Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar-winning performance in 12 Years a Slave (2013), which also won for Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley) and Best Picture; Denzel Washington directed Viola Davis’s Oscar-winning performance in Fences (2016); and Barry Jenkins directed Mahershala Ali’s Oscar-winning performance in Moonlight (2016), which also won for Best Adapted Screenplay (Tarell Alvin McCraney and Barry Jenkins) and Best Picture. Director Ezra Edleman also won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his O.J.: Made in America (2016).
- 10.
This is perhaps the place to say something about what I take to be the principle functions of images of blacks in officialdom after 9/11 and the launch of the War on Terror. Sure enough, flattering representations of black politicians, police, or military personnel (like black achievements in arts, entertainment, industry, etc.) can serve as foils to deflect criticism about the racist structure of US foreign policy (including the military invasion of Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003) and the policing of the homeland (including the defense of racial profiling, indefinite detention, and torture). But it is important to emphasize that, in the historic instance, the racial coding of state power and/or capital as black is more profoundly a reactionary paranoia about inverted racial domination than a liberal delusion or even a cynical conservative insistence about racial equality. In that sense, it enjoys a genealogy reaching back to the Reconstruction era at least (Blight 2001).
- 11.
Examples include: the African Diaspora Film Festival, the Black Filmmakers Foundation, the Pan African Film and Arts Festival, Rainforest Films, and New Millennium Studios, among others.
- 12.
The situation for black women directors in Hollywood has been changing slowly, given contemporaneous productions by Neema Barnette (All You’ve Got [2006]), Sanaa Hamri (Something New [2006]), Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou [1997]), Nnegest Likke (Phat Girlz [2006]), Darnell Martin (Cadillac Records [2008]), Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball [2000], The Secret Life of Bees [2008]), Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S [2004]), and Alison Swan (Mixing Nia [1998]), among others. More recently, we can note productions by Ava Duverney (Middle of Nowhere [2013], Selma [2014]), Tanya Hamilton (Night Catches Us [2010]), Dee Rees (Pariah [2011], Bessie [2015]), among others. See, generally, Welbon (2003) and Reid (2005). On black women’s considerable inroads in television, see Toby (2016).
- 13.
Like F. Gary Gray (Friday, Set It Off) before him, Fuqua was a highly successful music video director before making the transition to feature-length filmmaking, having directed videos for R&B and hip-hop artists the likes of Toni Braxton, Coolio, Chanté Moore, Ce Ce Peniston, Prince, Queen Latifah, Shanice, Usher, and Stevie Wonder.
- 14.
Fuqua and Washington were generally evasive in interviews regarding the issue of police power. The gist of their commentary, individually and collectively, was that the institution of the police is basically sound, but that certain rogue officers may participate in exceptional cases of corruption. Moreover, they offered that terrible and unjust things happen to members of black communities, but that similarly terrible things happen to anyone under the right circumstances. In one interview, Fuqua states: “I don’t think [the police] care what color you are anymore. I think if they are having a bad day, you’ve got a problem” (Dudek 2001). Notwithstanding the insipid colorblindness of the passage—which would deny the existence of racial profiling and the overwhelming racial dynamics of mass imprisonment—Fuqua disavows the absence of legal recourse against the state he describes here, the horror of a system in which “you’ve got a problem” simply because a cop is “having a bad day.” Fuqua is half right, of course. It is true today that the law grants the police impunity against the entire civilian population. However, the police see to the difference that race makes in the street-level practice of racial profiling. Fuqua has since teamed up with director Cle ‘Bone’ Sloan, former member of the Athens Park Bloods in Los Angeles, to produce Bastards of the Party (2006), a documentary examining the social, political and economic history of black street gangs in the LA area since the 1960s. Sloan’s film is more critical of the systemic nature of racist police violence—including its function as political repression—than Training Day. That Fuqua saw fit to produce Bastards, however, suggests that he is not so much ignorant of the history of black radicalism as he is managing its contemporary significance.
- 15.
There are, as yet, no “A-list” black women actors, Berry’s once $10 million average salary notwithstanding. In fact, Berry ranked tenth at the time on a list of the ten highest paid women in Hollywood, behind Reese Witherspoon, Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Renée Zellweger, Sandra Bullock, Drew Barrymore and Jodie Foster (Associated Press 2007). Forbes magazine’s most recent data on the highest paid actresses in the world feature no black women (Robehmed 2016). More to the point, Kidman, Roberts and Witherspoon are the only women to date to have been listed on James Ulmer’s famous “A+list” of the ten most bankable actors in Hollywood.
- 16.
Elsewhere he writes: “The antiblack world is conditioned by what we can here describe as two principles of value: (1) it is best to be white but (2) above all, it is worst to be black. When one fails to achieve principle (1), it becomes vital to avoid embodying the group designated by principle (2). We can reformulate our two principles thus: (1*) be white but (2*) don’t be black” (Gordon 1997, 124).
- 17.
Latinos—here mainly Chicanos/Mexicans and Central Americans—not only represent the largest percentage, though not the largest proportion, of prisoners in Los Angeles County and the State of California, Training Day’s fictional setting, but also constitute a bulk of the victims at the center of the so-called Rampart Scandal of the late 1990s, upon which David Ayer’s screenplay is based (Hayden 2000; Bailey 2001). It is important to note that the principal defendant in the prosecution, and the lightning rod for much of the public outrage, was Officer Rafael Pérez, a Puerto Rican Afro-Latino with alleged connections to the Bloods street gang. Along with three Bloods-affiliated African American LAPD officers—Gino Durden, Kevin Gaines, and David Mack—Pérez was indicted for, among other things, the attempted murder of Javier Ovando, former member of the largely Chicano/Mexican 18th Street gang. The character of Alonzo Harris is loosely based on Pérez, whose racialization as black rather than brown in the U.S. context is only highlighted by the casting of Washington for the role. The diversification of Harris’s corrupt crew in the film—his partners in crime are both black and white—seems a half-hearted attempt to demonstrate that, as it were, evil has no color.
- 18.
I disagree on this point with Kellogg (2002), who overestimates the irony with which Washington is able to play the role of Harris by failing to consider fully the plot and the interrelationship of its central characters. Considering the broader resonance of the Kong reference in film culture, we note that the Great Ape has returned to the screen again in Peter Jackson’s remake King Kong (2005) and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s reboot Kong: Skull Island (2017), recent entries in a long line, including Merian Cooper’s original King Kong (1933) and John Guillermin’s remake King Kong (1976), Ernest Schoedstack’s Mighty Joe Young (1949) and Ron Underwood’s remake Mighty Joe Young (1998). There have been remakes of other ape films of late, for instance, Frank Marshall’s Congo (1995) and Tim Burton’s remake Planet of the Apes (2001), the latter without the political critique of Franklin Schaffner’s earlier Planet of the Apes (1968). The more recent Planet reboot series now features Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).
- 19.
Fuqua maintains that one of his primary influences in shooting Training Day was Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and, by extension, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness, though it is unclear whether Fuqua has read Conrad’s novella or is at all versed in the contemporary debates it engendered (Conrad 1987). The stimulus is nonetheless apparent in the overarching organization of Alonzo’s story and it is crystallized in the scene that introduces Jake/Marlow, and the audience, to Alonzo’s/Kurtz’s lair. Midway through the day’s events, Alonzo informs Jake that they will be pausing so that Alonzo can visit his wife. Ostensibly, this pit stop is meant to give Jake the rest needed to continue the mission, but at the level of film image it paints the canvas of the jungle from which Alonzo hails and over which he continues to reign: wild, menacing, indecipherable. In order to establish this backdrop, Fuqua quotes Coppola’s mise-en-scène and cinematography and he borrows liberally from narrative elements as well. However, Training Day suffers from contradictory effects as a result of the racial logic that girds the attempt, as Baldwin has it, “to bring black men into the white American nightmare.” Because the violence of racial warfare is made flesh in a figure otherwise indistinguishable from the target population, the drama of “civilized man gone native” (pace Conrad and Coppola) plays out in Fuqua’s rendition as oxymoron. Alonzo’s adventurism serves as a stage for the film’s largely counterfeit meditation on proper police conduct, yet the frightening image of the unchecked criminal cop is overshadowed, if not fueled, by a discourse of a priori black criminality. Hence the supposed outrage of the black rogue cop—which might otherwise provoke reappraisal about the reach of law—cannot avoid contamination by an extant culture of criminalization that takes blackness as its master sign (Miller 1996; Bhattacharjee 2002).
- 20.
I want to underscore as well the inaptness of the rubric of “exploitation,” which I take to be a conceptual correlate to the misnomer “universal victim.” See Wilderson (2003) for a generative discussion of the radical difference between exploitation and accumulation, the latter of which I take to be a more adequate explanatory framework for the structural position of the black. We should also note the connection here with Snead’s earlier point regarding the political and sexual threat posed by black skin on screen. In a similar vein, Guerrero writes: “If nothing else, the huge, black, and fantastic King Kong climbing the Empire State Building while clutching his scantily clad, blonde object of desire presents us with a powerful, enduring metaphor for dominant society’s barely repressed fears of black masculinity, sexuality, and miscegenation” (Guerrero 1995, 395). Again, it is not only the political threat of state repression that Alonzo symbolizes, but also, like the homeless black man in the alley, the sexual threats of rape, sexual coercion and miscegenation. The difference here is that the endangered are less white women in the old-fashioned, categorical sense as they are near white or light-skinned women (and men) on a color spectrum, most coded as Latina (i.e., Jake’s wife Lisa, the schoolgirl Letty, Alonzo’s wife Sara, etc.). What all of those women (and men) threatened by black male sexual violence have in common is, crucially, that they are non-black.
References
Adelman‚ Larry. 2008. Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? DVD. Directed by Llewellyn Smith‚ Tracy Heather Strain‚ Patricia Garcia Rios‚ Maria Teresa Rodriguez‚ James M. Fortier‚ Ellie Lee‚ Eric Strange, and James Rutenbeck. San Francisco: California Newsreel.
Alexander, Elizabeth. 1996. ‘We’re Gonna Deconstruct Your Life!’: The Making and Un-Making of the Black Bourgeois Patriarch in Ricochet. In Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham, 157–172. New York: Routledge.
Associated Press. 2007. Reese Witherspoon Highest-Paid Actress. Washington Post, December 1. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113000445.html.
Bailey, Sam. 2001. L.A.P.D. Blues. DVD. Directed by Michael Kirk. Boston: Frontline.
Baldwin, James. 2000. The Devil Finds Work: An Essay. New York: Delta.
Bhattacharjee, Anannya (ed.). 2002. Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization. Boston: South End.
Blight, David. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bogle, Donald. 2016. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 5th ed. New York: Bloomsbury.
Bradshaw, Peter. 2002. The Invisibility of Black Actors Has Long Been a Scandal. The Guardian, March 26. Accessed May 28, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/mar/26/artsfeatures.awardsandprizes.
Cashmore, Ellis. 1997. The Black Culture Industry. New York: Routledge.
Cashmore, Ellis, and Eugene McLaughlin (eds.). 1991. Out of Order? Policing Black People. New York: Routledge.
Conrad, Joseph. 1987. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Courtney, Susan. 2004. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cripps, Thomas. 1993. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942. New York: Oxford University Press.
Diawara, Manthia (ed.). 1993. Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge.
Dillard, Angela. 2001. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. New York: NYU Press.
Dudek, Duane. 2001. Washington Takes on His First Role as Bad Guy in Cop Film, Journal Sentinel, October 3.
Dudziak, Mary. 2002. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. New York: Routledge.
Fanon, Frantz. 2006. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Fiedler, Leslie. 1960. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion.
Foner, Eric. 2007. Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press.
Fuqua, Antoine. 2006. Bastards of the Party. DVD. Directed by Cle Sloan. New York: HBO Films.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 1993. Terror Austerity Race Gender Excess Theater. In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams, 23–37. New York: Routledge.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Gordon, Lewis. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Gordon, Lewis. 1997. Race, Sex, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World. In Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference, and Interplay, ed. Naomi Zack, 119–132. New York: Routledge.
Guerrero, Ed. 1993a. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Guerrero, Ed. 1993b. The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties. In Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, 237–246. New York: Routledge.
Guerrero, Ed. 1995. The Black Man on Our Screens and the Empty Space in Representation. Callaloo 18: 395–400.
Guerrero, Ed. 1998. A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age. In The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis, 328–352. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hayden, Tom. 2000. LAPD: Law and Disorder, The Nation, April 10. Accessed May 28, 2017. https://www.thenation.com/article/lapd-law-and-disorder/.
Holland, Sharon. 2006. Death in Black and White: A Reading of Marc Forster’s Monster’s Ball. Signs 31: 785–813.
Kellogg, Alex. 2002. “Agh, a Negro! Denzel Washington Avoids the Racial Pitfalls of Hollywood and Redefines the Black Antihero.” In Colorlines Magazine: Race, Action, Culture, Spring. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-83457956.html.
King, Neal. 1999. Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the US. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Leitch, Thomas. 2002. Crime Films. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lemieux‚ Jamilah. 2013. “Jonathan Ferrell: Supposed to Die?” Ebony‚ September 16. Accessed May 28‚ 2017. http://www.ebony.com/news-views/jonathan-ferrell-supposed-to-die-304#axzz4ugDTuw7S.
Lewis, Jon. 1998a. Introduction. In The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis, 1–10. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lewis, Jon (ed.). 1998b. The New American Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Marriot, David. 2000. On Black Men. New York: Columbia University Press.
Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mauer, Marc. 2006. The Race to Incarcerate. New York: New Press.
Miller, Jerome. 1996. Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, Toby, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang. 2005. Global Hollywood 2. London: British Film Institute.
Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Parenti, Christian. 2000. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New York: Verso.
Rafter, Nicole. 2000. Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reid, Mark. 2005. Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Rhines, Jesse Algeron. 1996. Black Film, White Money. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Robehmed, Natalie. 2016. The World’s Highest-Paid Actresses 2016. Forbes, August 23. Accessed May 28, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2016/08/23/the-worlds-highest-paid-actresses-2016-jennifer-lawrence-banks-46-million-payday-ahead-of-melissa-mccarthy/#522f63ec5625.
Robinson, Cedric. 1997. Black Movements in America. New York: Routledge.
Ryan, Maria. 2010. Neoconservatism and the New American Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Samuels, Allison. 2002. Will It Be Denzel’s Day? Newsweek, Febraury 25.
Satcher‚ David‚ George E. Fryer Jr.‚ Jessica McCann‚ Adewale Troutman‚ Steven H. Woolf and George Rust. 2005. “What if We Were Equal? A Comparison of the Black-White Mortality Gap in 1960 and 2000.” Health Affairs 24: 459–464.
Sedgwick, Eve. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sexton, Jared. 2007. Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control. In Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James, 197–218. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Silver, Jeffrey. 2001. Training Day. DVD. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Burbank: Warner Bros.
Simpson, Andrea Y. 1998. The Tie that Binds: Identity and Political Attitudes in the Post-Civil Rights Generation. New York: NYU Press.
Snead, James. 1994. White Screens, Black Images. New York: Routledge.
Springer, Simon, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy (eds.). 2016. The Handbook of Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge.
Toby, Mekeisha Madden. 2016. Who Runs the World? Black Women Showrunners, Of Course. Essence, November 15. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.essence.com/culture/black-women-showrunners-changing-television.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2002. From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US. New Left Review 13: 41–60.
Welbon, Yvonne. 2003. Sisters in Cinema. DVD. Directed by Yvonne Welbon. Chicago: Our Film Works.
Wiegman, Robyn. 1995. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. 2003. Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society. Social Identities 9: 225–240.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. 2010. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Willis, Sharon. 1997. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wilson, Cintra. 2002. Oscars 2002: Somebody Make It Stop! Salon, March 25. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.salon.com/2002/03/25/oscars_2002/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sexton, J. (2017). Chaos and Opportunity: On Training Day . In: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66170-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66170-4_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66169-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66170-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)