Black Children in Hollywood Cinema - Debbie Olson

Debbie Olson
BLACK CHILDREN IN
HOLLYWOOD CINEMA
CAST IN SHADOW
Black Children in Hollywood Cinema
Debbie Olson
Black Children in
Hollywood Cinema
Cast in Shadow
Debbie Olson
Department of English
Missouri Valley College
Marshall, Missouri, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-48272-9 ISBN 978-3-319-48273-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962192
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Parts of Chapter 2 were originally published in Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters:
Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors © 2015 Edited by Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland
by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640
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For Pecola
Acknowledgments
Just like it takes a village to raise a child, so too did it take a village of
friends, family, and colleagues to help raise this project from idea to a real-
ity. Special thanks go to Dr. Stacy Takacs, Oklahoma State University, who
provided unwavering support, particularly in the face of unexpected chal-
lenges, and without whom this project would not have been possible. My
deepest gratitude to Dr. Demetria Shabazz, University of Massachusetts
Amherst, for her help and encouragement, and for staying the course. I
want to thank my friends and colleagues Lyn Megow, Eastern Washington
University, and Dr. Scott Krzych, Colorado College, for their support
and patience as I sought their advice during moments of doubt. My fam-
ily were a bedrock of support, my sons Rick and Justin, and particularly
thanks to my husband, Curt, who spent many lonely days while I closeted
myself in my office writing. And finally, I’d like to thank the late Dr. Peter
C. Rollins, who gave me the confidence, as a budding scholar, to strike out
on my own. I will keep the Legacy, Dear Pedro de Lake.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Establishing the Discourse of the Child 13
3 African American Girls in Hollywood Cinema 63
4 Boys in Black and the Urban Ghetto Child 121
5 Soldier Bo(d)y: The Transnational Circulation of

the African (American) Savage Child Image 159
6 The Black Child Star 189
Erratum to: Black Children in Hollywood Cinema E1
Bibliography 209
Index 223
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Lewis Hine: girl in cotton factory. Courtesy Library of

Congress, National Child Labor Commission 6
Fig. 2.1 Slave auction, Martinique, 1826, image reference NWO308,
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division 24
Fig. 2.2 Internal slave trade, c. 1830, image reference NWO336,
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division 25
Fig. 2.3 “Age of Innocence.” Sir Joshua Reynolds 1785 or 1788 28
Fig. 2.4 Plantation owners visiting slave quarters, c. 1700s. Harpers
Weekly, 1876 August 19, p. 677 29
Fig. 2.5 N.K. Fairbank Co. “Why Doesn’t Your Mama Wash You with
Fairy Soap?” Accessed 15 July 2015, http://siris-archives.si.edu/
ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!245130!031
Fig. 2.6 Pygmy natives posing with European, c. 1921 38
Fig. 2.7 Masai warriors, c. 1906. Original images from Collier’s New
Encyclopedia, Volume 1 (1921), opposite page 58, panel B 39
Fig. 2.8 Gator bait images from “Caricatures of African Americans:
The Pickaninny,” Authentichistory.org, http://www.
authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/7-
alligator/, accessed 15 July 201541
Fig. 2.9 The Blackboard Jungle. Directed by Richard Brooks.
Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955. frame grab 46
Fig. 2.10 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab 47
Fig. 2.13 Duke Custis (Hampton Clampton) in The Cool World; directed
by Shirley Clarke. Wiseman Film Productions, 1963. frame
xi
xii List of Figures
grab (The film is not available on DVD, but can be viewed

here: accessed 15 July 2015, http://vdownload.eu/watch/
13039405-the-cool-world-1963-by-shirley-clarke.html)51
Fig. 3.1 Popular representation of Saartjie Baartman, Dec 31, 1809,
Library of Congress, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.
loc.gov/pictures/item/2007680266/64
Fig. 3.2 Busta Rhymes “Twerkit,” frame grab, accessed 15 July 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j47MYli8pj469
Fig. 3.3 Precious. Directed by Lee Daniels. Los Angeles: Lionsgate,
2009, frame grab 80
Fig. 3.4 Billy Thomas as “Buckwheat.” The Little Rascals, “Bear
Facts.” Hal Roach Studios, 1938, frame grab 87
Fig. 3.5 Quvenzhané Wallis as “Hushpuppy.” Beasts of the
Southern Wild. Directed by Behn Zeitlin. Cinereach, 2012,
frame grab 88
Fig. 3.6 “Beast it.” Beasts of the Southern Wild, frame grab 91
Fig. 3.7 Butter. Directed by John Field Smith. Los Angeles: Michael
de Luca Productions, 2011. frame grab 100
Fig. 3.8 Butter, frame grab 102
Fig. 3.10 The official poster for the film and the Blu-ray cover 105
Fig. 3.12 Twitter, frame grab 109
Fig. 3.13 Annie collection poster, Target.com 110
Fig. 3.14 Annie clothing line, Target.com 111
Fig. 4.1 Jordan Brown mug shot age 11, yearbook picture, and Brown
at football practice (Jordan Brown, “Boy Who Killed Dad’s
Pregnant Fiancée, Moving to Dad’s House,” Huffington Post,
1 December 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/
12/01/jordan-brown-killing-kenzie-brown_n_2223585.html;
Caitlin Keeting, “Six Years After Being Charged with Murder
at age 11, Jordan Brown May Get New Trial,” People, 6 March
2015. http://www.people.com/article/jordan-brown-murder-
hearing-trial; Andrea Canning and Maggie Burbank, “Jordan
Brown Murder Case takes Emotional Toll,” abcnews.com, 28
April 2010. Accessed 5 August 2015. http://abcnews.go.com/
Nightline/jordan-brown-murder-case-12-year-adult/
story?id=10288704)124
Fig. 4.2 Left:Lionel Tate, age 12 mug shot, center and right: age 13
at trial (Antonia Monacelli, “Murderous Children: 12 year old
Lionel Tate killed a 6 year old girl,” accessed 25 July 2015,
http://antonia-monacelli.hubpages.com/hub/Murderous-
List of Figures xiii
Children-Lionel-Tate; “When Life Means Life,” St. Petersburg

Times Online, 3 June 2001, http://www.sptimes.com/News/
060301/photos/truelifegallery/pages/tl-tate.htm; “Enough
Blame to Go Around,” CBSnews.com, 9 March 2001, http://
www.cbsnews.com/news/enough-blame-to-go-around/)125
Fig. 4.3 “Child’s Play, Deadly Play,” A&E, 1993, frame grab 130
Fig. 4.4 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Directed by Melvin
Van Peebles. Los Angeles: Yeah, Inc., 1971, frame grab 133
Fig. 4.5 The Grapes of Wrath. Directed by John Ford. Los Angeles:
Twentieth Century Fox, 1940. Opening shot, frame grab 141
Fig. 4.6 Fresh. Directed by Boaz Yakin. Los Angeles: Lumière
Pictures, 1994. Opening shot, frame grab 142
Fig. 4.7 Rosie’s feet. Fresh, frame grab 145
Fig. 5.1 Save the Children (left), Unicef (center), Partners for Care
(right) (“Save the Children,” accessed 19 July 2015,
savethechildren.org; “UNICEF,” accessed 19 July 2015,
unicef.org; “Partners for Care,” accessed 19 July 2015,
partnersforcare.org)161
Fig. 5.2 Lord of War. Directed by Andrew Niccol. Los Angeles:
Lions Gate Films, 2005. Opening “life of a bullet” scene,
frame grab 166
Fig. 5.3 Blood Diamond. Directed by Edward Zwick. Los Angeles:
Warner Bros., 2006. Childsoldier, frame grab 179
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
“A magnificent blonde child—how much joy, and above all how much
hope! There is no comparison with a magnificent black child; literally,
such a thing is unwonted.”
–Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask
On 23 March 2012, the much-anticipated film version of Suzanne Collins’

popular young adult novel Hunger Games was released in American the-
aters. As of 14 November 2014, the film had earned over $600 mil-
lion worldwide (boxofficemojo.com). David Daniel with CNN reported
that Hunger Games had the third largest opening day in US box office
history.1 Along with the normal hype that accompanies the release of a
Hollywood blockbuster came a very vocal backlash among some of the
Hunger Games fan base. According to Dodai Stewart, writing for Jezebel.
com, a blog on Hunger Games (http://hungergamestweets.tumblr.
com/) revealed a growing and disturbing racist reaction to the casting of
black actors in key roles in the film. Much of the racist commentary origi-
nated as single-line tweets on the social website Twitter, but quickly went
viral across the Internet when a fan of the Hunger Games books began
compiling screenshots of the racist Twitter comments using the blogging
platform Tumblr.2 Some of the Twitter comments are as follows:
“why does Rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie”
(Maggie Mcdonnell, @maggie_mcd11)
© The Author(s) 2017 1

D. Olson, Black Children in Hollywood Cinema,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_1
2 D. OLSON
“cinna and rue werent supposed to be black/why did the producer make all
the good characters black smh” (Mari)
“EWW rue is black?? I’m not watching” (Joe Longley, @joe_longley)
“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as
sad” (#ihatemyself, Jashper Paras, @jashperparas)
“nah, I just pictured darker skin, didn’t’ really take it all the way to black”
(Jordan Wright, @JBanks56)
“rue is black?!?! Whaa?!” (@MAD_1113)
“Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde
innocent girl you picture” (Alana, @sw4q)3
One common thread running through these remarks is the surprise that
a black girl would play an “innocent child,” despite the fact that the
author’s description in the novel specifically described Rue as having
“dark brown skin.” Maria Tatar in “Little, Blonde, Innocent, and Dead,”
observes that the criticism of the film by fans was not directed at the
“sacred prohibition against the onscreen killing of children” that com-
prises the film’s plot, but rather was because those children themselves
violated the expected ethnicity of the sympathetic character or the hero.
Tatar observes how, culturally, it is the deaths of blonde girls that most
often capture media attention; there is rarely a national media blitz for
missing young black girls (or boys, for that matter).4 Tatar suggests that
such attitudes about who is innocent and who is not, who should be the
hero or the savior, can be traced back to the literary depictions of two
young girls: Little Eva, the golden-haired, angelic child, and Topsy, the
orphaned and abused slave child, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852
novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, standard reading in most American literature
survey classes. As Tatar describes:
In a spacious bedroom decorated with white muslin curtains, an alabaster

desk, and marble vases, the dying Little Eva, pale and pious, distributes locks
of her golden-brown hair along with nuggets of Christian wisdom. Her
blondeness is linked with beauty and fairness, in all its semantic nuances …
‘There stood the two children, representatives of the two extremes of soci-
ety. The fair high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiri-
tual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle,
cringing, yet acute neighbor’ … Stowe was most likely seeking to extend
the protective energies generated by beauty to an innocent victim of social
injustice, and indeed Topsy, against all odds, survives, and has the chance to
be ‘an angel forever.’ ‘Just as much as if you were white,’ Eva reassures her,
using a phrase that makes alarm bells go off in our heads.5
INTRODUCTION 3
Tatar quotes Stowe’s juxtaposition of the two children only in part; the
rest of that passage from Stowe continues: “There stood the representa-
tives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, edu-
cation, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression,
submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!”6 Though these descriptions of the
two races are over 100 years old, they are still repeated daily in the ways
that visual media articulate, to use Stuart Hall’s notion, children from the
Global North and the Global South.
The descriptions of the two girls from Stowe share some rhetorical sim-
ilarities with the tweets about the Hunger Games’ black characters. The
dehumanizing use of the phrase “some black girl” in the tweet by Alana
suggests an assumption of the homogeneousness of all black girls—that
they lack an individual identity, humanity, or visibility (“some” black girl,
any black girl—they are all the same). Many of the tweets contain an ele-
ment of surprise that black children could be cast in the role of a sympa-
thetic character, much like Stowe’s Eva casts Topsy as an angel but only “as
if [she] were white.” Such comments reveal long-standing beliefs in white-
ness as angelic where children are concerned. Anna Holmes explains that
these tweets demonstrate “microcosms of the way in which the humanity
of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they underscore how infu-
riatingly conditional empathy can be.”7 As disturbing as these social media
comments are, they do illuminate some interesting notions about the way
Western societies, and the US in particular, view children.
What this discussion of race in Hunger Games does is highlight the
glaring absence of children of color in the discourse of childhood. This
absence of black children from notions of childhood is clearly expressed in
the absence of black children within American mainstream cinema, which
is not too surprising given Hollywood’s history of racist exclusion. Yet
at this moment in history, with an African American president and with
prominent, popular black directors like Spike Lee and Tyler Perry, there
are still beliefs about children and the condition of “childness” that mar-
ginalize African American children; indeed, such beliefs often elide black
children from the landscape of childhood itself. While the term “childish”
refers to specific actions or behaviors that mimic cultural notions of the
way children behave, “childness” refers to the essence of being a child
or of being perceived as having the characteristics of a child (mentally,
emotionally, or physically). The viewer reaction to the black characters in
Hunger Games raises a number of important questions about how we, as
a culture, imagine children and childhood, and whom we do not imagine
as children.
4 D. OLSON
This study will explore cultural conceptions of the child and flesh out
the connections between historical imagery and beliefs about Africans
and the cinematic absence of black children from the contemporary
Hollywood film. The condition of childhood is perpetually constructed
and reconstructed within popular imagery from a predominantly Western
model, leaving little room for the representation of other modes of real or
imagined childhoods. Within the discourse of children’s studies and film
scholarship in relation to the conception of “the child,” there is often little
to no distinction among children by race—the “child” is most often dis-
cussed as a universal entity, as the embodiment of all things not adult, not
(sexually) corrupt. As Sean Moreland and Markus P.J. Bohlmann explain,
the symbolic nature of “the child” serves as “the locus both of all that is
most esteemed in our humanity, and all that is most inhuman about us.”8
Although there are works that examine the African American child in rela-
tion to socio-economic or gender influences, those studies tend to isolate
black children from the “norm” of childhood because of the effects of
adverse economic conditions or assumptions about gender that are based
on specious cultural beliefs about race. Discussions about children of color
among scholars often take place within contexts such as crime, drugs,
urbanization, poverty, or lack of education that tend to reinforce histori-
cally stereotypical beliefs about African Americans. For instance, Carter
Godwin Woodson’s 1933 classic The Mis-Education of the Negro, the infa-
mous 1965 Moynihan Report, Janet E. Hale’s Black Children: Their Roots,
Culture, and Learning Styles, Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, and
Pedro A. Noquera’s City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the
Promise of Public Education frame the black child within the “problem” of
their [lack of] education (or inability to be educated).9 There is a veritable
cornucopia of studies on African American juvenile crime with the most
recent, and disturbing, trend the “school-to-prison pipeline” discussed in
Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt’s The School-to-
Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform.10
Black children are also often located within historical “problems,” such
as slavery or youth violence discussed in such works as Wilma King’s sig-
nificant study African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from
Slavery to Civil Rights (2005) or Anna Mae Duane’s Suffering Childhood
in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim.11
While King’s study is one of the first to expose experiences of black
childhood within the historical contexts of (and the problems of) slavery,
Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, Duane’s study locates black
INTRODUCTION 5
children within the problem frame of “victimhood.” Duane convincingly

argues that the “vulnerable and victimized child emerged as an essential
element in structuring ‘natural’ ways of thinking and feeling about the
often violent process of nation-making.”12 Popular discourses about chil-
dren also used the victimized white child to structure a “natural way of
thinking” that limited the notion of childhood and innocence to white
children via the exclusion of black children. Duane’s argument finds that
the “malice underlying the infantilization of blackness” worked to equate
black childhood with notions of adulthood and sexual knowledge, con-
ceptions that continue today within the discourses of childhood and visual
representations of the black child.13
In contrast, when white children are interpreted within historical matri-
ces, they are presented not as marginal or as a social problem, but rather as
contributing members to significant and (arguably) positive social change.
For example, Vivian A. Zelizer’s work Pricing the Priceless Child and
Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-
Century American Culture both use the universal term “child” (i.e., white)
to refer to the changing nature of (white middle-class) childhood and
how that change had historical significance to American culture broadly.14
Though both texts give cursory mention of African American children,
neither text includes African American families within the broad cultural
shifts in attitudes towards children or changing childhood conditions. For
instance, Zelizer argues that the “productive value of children disappeared
with the rise of industrial capitalism” and that changes in families during
the industrial era also contributed to the changing nature of childhood.
Zelizer names white, middle-class children as the focus of this change, and
in many ways she is correct—the rhetoric of the early twentieth-century
reform movement for child labor focused solely on the plight of poor,
white children in factories, fueled in part by the visual evidence made
famous by photographer Lewis W. Hine (Fig. 1.1).
Hine’s numerous photographs showing small, ragged white children in
coal mines or factories fueled the growing outrage over unregulated child
labor. According to Shelley Sallee, in her astute study The Whiteness of Child
Labor Reform in the New South, black children who labored served the his-
torical need to sacralize the white child from every economic background:
“The emphasis on the whiteness of the South’s child laborers gave rise to
a white transregional Progressive culture willing to ignore the plight of
African Americans in the name of progress in the South.”15 But black chil-
dren who labored, who participated fully in the rising industrial revolution,
6 D. OLSON
Fig. 1.1 Lewis Hine: girl in cotton factory. Courtesy Library of Congress,
National Child Labor Commission
were not considered a positive part of the changing discourse of childhood.

For example, Sallee shows that reformers used black children’s desire for
education as a “threat” to white supremacy, thereby shifting the discussion
from a “disempowering charge of sentimentalism into [a] powerful rhetoric
of racial politics.”16 Black children were effectively excluded from the early
twentieth-century sentimentalization of children and used as a threat to
white “innocence.”
There is very little discourse that considers race as a factor in popular
representations of children. This study is designed to fill a void in chil-
dren’s studies and film scholarship by investigating the Western model
of childhood and what part race may play in the construction of the idea
of the child and childhood, and, ultimately, how black childhood is por-
trayed in cinema. What preexisting ideas about children and childhood
did those viewers of The Hunger Games have that elicited such racist reac-
tions? Why does the image of the black child seem to negate empathy and
compassion, indeed, sometimes prompting ire or fear? How (and where)
do images of black childhood fit (or not) in the Western model of the
child? How is black childhood constructed, particularly within Hollywood
INTRODUCTION 7
films, and are such constructions influenced by a transnational flow of

historically racist imagery? In this age of globalization, images of children
from all around the world are readily available and viewed, yet the visual
depiction of childhood in Hollywood cinema continues to embrace the
white child as the representative of childhood as such. The transnational
nature of image dissemination in the global age would seem to suggest
a more diverse field of childhoods within dominant Hollywood cinema
is warranted, yet this has not materialized. I will interrogate the ways in
which Hollywood cinema perpetuates the exclusion of black children from
popular discourses of childhood with the aim of understanding how such
absence continues to shape cultural beliefs about children and childhood.
There is little scholarly recognition of the historical trajectory of American
representation of black children, nor is there discussion of the connec-
tion between historical images of African children, and their residue upon
current trends in depictions of black American children. This study seeks
to discover if there is a relationship between the image of the African
child within popular media and the social construction of the black child
and black childhood in the USA. And, if so, what are the mechanisms
that inform such a relationship? This study will interrogate the tension
between the historical fear of blackness in US society, in its various forms,
and images of black children in popular media, particularly cinema. It is
the negotiation with those child images that I argue is central to the cul-
tural construction of childhood, and black childhood, today.
After establishing the history of black erasure, I will examine a few nota-
ble counter-examples and ask how does the image of the black child affirm
or subvert popular notions of childhood in contemporary US society? For
instance, do prevalent black “gangsta” images help inform cultural notions
about black children? Does the historical image of the African child inform
notions about the African American child? Or is the historical image of
the African child, and by association the African American child, so effec-
tively “epidermalized,” in our culture, to use Charles Johnson’s term, that
she is just never viewed as a child?17 And finally, how has the black child
been represented in, or excluded from, contemporary Hollywood cinema?
Significantly, how are historical images of black children tied to modern
cinematic images of black children? My argument here parallels Toni
Morrison’s discourse of the “Africanist presence” in Playing in the Dark,
in which she argues: “Just as the formation of the nation necessitated
coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with racial disingenu-
ousness … so too did literature, whose founding characteristic extend into
8 D. OLSON
the twentieth century [film], reproduce the necessity for codes and restric-
tion. Through significant and understood omissions [my emphasis], heav-
ily nuanced conflicts … one can see that the real or fabricated Africanist
presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.”18 In similar ways, the
black child in Hollywood cinema functions as the “Africanist presence”
that normalizes white middle-class childhood.
My methodology consists of textual and discourse analysis through
the lenses of children’s studies, cultural studies, critical race theory, and
postcolonial theory. My inquiry is informed by such theorists as Stuart
Hall, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Franz Fanon and Toni Morrison.
This analysis locates itself at significant junctures where these scholarly
approaches intersect—in the interstice between cultural notions about
children and childhood and their visual representation in cinema. I will
draw on both cultural studies and theories about transnational cultural
flows as tools to unlock the discursive conditions that inform social mean-
ings about children and childhood as they are presented in Hollywood
cinema. I will look at historical conceptions of childhood within scholarly
discourse, the child character in popular film, and what space the black
child (both African and African American) occupies within that ideal. In
that way, I will show how the cinematic absence of the black child contin-
ues the discourse of racial exclusion while at the same time contextualizing
white childhood as the norm. I will then present case studies that inter-
rogate how Hollywood visually defines those spaces for the black child;
for instance, what interpretive fracture is visible in the Hunger Games fans’
racist articulations about who is worthy of innocence, even in death? I will
further argue that the transnational circulation of the black child image
informs, constructs, and mediates popular conceptions of black childhood
in contemporary Hollywood cinema and beyond.
I have specifically chosen Hollywood-produced or -distributed films
that had national and international showings. One of the challenges of this
project has been to find Hollywood films that star black children! What
I found was a very limited body of films that star black children; the idea
that I can “choose” from a range of films is non-existent. This absence
of films featuring black children protagonists is a significant comment on
the ways Hollywood envisions both childhood and the black child. So, I
am looking at “all” the recent Hollywood films that star black children.
Most of the films I look at have received Academy Award nominations,
with the exception of Butter and After Earth. One of the reasons for these
INTRODUCTION 9
film choices (as opposed to the wide variety of independent films starring
black children) is that they were widely seen and as such, these films reveal
consistent racial discourses that position black children as “Other” and
lesser-than-white children for the general population, thereby functioning
as conduits for reaffirming notions about childhood and race. The films in
this volume are representative of the way the Hollywood industry regu-
larly characterizes black children. Chapter 2 will examine the historical
discourses of both “the child” and black children within popular culture,
while Chapter 3 takes a close look at the way black girls are portrayed in
Hollywood cinema. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the cinematic portrayal of
black boys, and Chapter 6, the conclusion, reflects on the star power of
Jaden Smith, currently the most famous black child actor in the world.
Notes
1. David Daniel, “Hunger Games sets Box Office Records,” CNN,
26 March 2012. http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/25/showbiz/
hunger-games-box-office/index.html
2. Anna Holmes, “White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in
Hunger Games,” The New Yorker, 30 March 2012. http://www.
newyorker.com/books/page-turner/white-until-proven-black-
imagining-race-in-hunger-games
3. Dodai Stewart, “Racist Hunger Games Fans are Very Disappointed,”
Jezebel.com, 26 March 2012. http://jezebel.com/5896408/
racist-hunger-games-fans-dont-care-how-much-money-the-
movie-made
4. In recent years, the website Peas in Their Pods has made a point of
highlighting, via social media, missing children of color. Their
efforts have raised awareness of missing children of color that the
regular media tend to ignore. http://www.peasintheirpods.com
5. Maria Tatar, “Little, Blonde, Innocent, and Dead,” The New Yorker,
11 April 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/
little-blonde-innocent-and-dead
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1851–52 (New York:
Bantam, 1981), 244.
7. Anna Holmes, “White Until Proven Black”.
8. Sean Moreland and Markus Bohlmann, Holy Terrors: Essays on
Monstrous Children in Cinema (New York: McFarland, 2015), 7.
10 D. OLSON
9. Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1933

(New York: Seven Treasures Publications, 2010); Janet E. Hale,
Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles (Salt
Lake City: Brigham Young University Press, 1982); Jonathan
Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Broadway Paperbacks,
1991); and Pedro A. Noquera, City Schools and the American
Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education (New York:
Teacher’s College Press, 2003). See also Jawanza Kunjufu,
Developing Positive Self-Image and Discipline in Black Children
(New York: African American Images, 1984) and Countering the
Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys (New York: African American
Images, 1985); Michael Porter, Kill Them Before They Grow:
Misdiagnosis of African American Boys in the Classroom (New York:
African American Images, 1998); Baruti K. Kafele, Motivating
Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life (Alexandria, VA:
Association for Supervision and Development, 2009).
10. See also Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image
in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Hanover, NH:
Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Dennis Rome, Black Demons:
The Media’s Depiction of the African American Male Criminal
Stereotype (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2009); Monique
W. Morris, “Race, Gender, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline:
Expanding the Discussion to Black Girls,” accessed 10 July 2015,
http://www.otlcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resources/
Morris-Race-Gender-and-the-School-to-Prison-Pipeline.pdf;
Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino
Boys (New York: NYU Press, 2011).
11. Wilma King, African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives
from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005); Anna Mae Duane, Suffering Childhood in Early America:
Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2011).
12. Duane, Suffering Childhood, 3.
13. Duane, Suffering Childhood, 159.
14. Vivian A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994) and Karen Sánchez-Eppler,
Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
INTRODUCTION 11
15. Shelley Sallee, The Whiteness of Child Labor in the New South
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 10. See also
Rebecca de Schweinitz, If We Could Change the World: Young
People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009).
16. Sallee, The Whiteness of Child Labor, 82.
17. Charles Johnson, “A Phenomenology of the Black Body.” Michigan
Quarterly Review 32, no. 4 (1993): 603. Johnson describes enter-
ing into a bar full of white people in Manhattan (NY), and much
like Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the black body seen through
colonial white eyes (White Skin, Black Mask), Johnson experiences
an exteriority of his blackness through those white eyes—“But, as
black, seen as stained body, as physicality, basically opaque to oth-
ers … my world is epidermalized, collapsed into the … stained
casement of my skin” (603).
18. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 5.
CHAPTER 2
Establishing the Discourse of the Child
To find any critical mention of the African or African American child within
the scholarship about children can be a daunting task. In The History of
Childhood, Lloyd deMause observes among historians and psychoanalysts a
lack of focus on the history of childhood as an important area of study. As
he states, historians have been so busy with the more public “noisy sand-
box of history” that they have completely missed what is “going on in the
homes around the playground.”1 The same can be said about the ways
scholars look at children as an object of study—scholars are so busy with the
“noisy sand-box” of Euro-American childhood that any other childhoods
are drowned out, pushed to the margins, or out of the box all together.
Since deMause’s astute observation there have been a few notable histories
of childhood, beginning with Philippe Ariès’ groundbreaking Centuries of
Childhood. And yet, while their value to the study of children and child-
hood is not in question, they do share common perspectives: these stud-
ies set the foundation for a discourse—both popular and scholarly—that
constructs white children in the West as “the” signifier for all childhoods.
A discourse analysis must first look at the ways children and childhood
are discussed or visually depicted culturally and then examine the power
relationships that inform such conversations.2 How Americans talk about
and think about children and childhood “combine[s] social relevance and
The updated original online version for this chapter can be found at
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_2

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_2
14 D. OLSON
textual specificity”3 in ways that inform broader discursive practices. Such

practices—like Hollywood films—highlight the ways in which “social rela-
tions are exercised and social identities are manifested … [and] constructed
(reproduced, contested, restructured) in discourse.”4 The early discourse
about children and childhood, for example, gives evidence to some naive
assumptions about how representation relates to reality. While early stud-
ies were groundbreaking in their recognition of childhood as a separate
condition from adulthood, their methodology often relied on assumptions
that a visual representation was reality. Early discourse about children and
childhood lacked attention to how texts—visual and written—construct
and shape, rather than reflect, reality. Popular discourses about children
and childhood had, and still have, very real effects on social policies, rela-
tions, and conditions for children. And popular discourse regularly omits
black children from the dialogue about childhood, which, I argue, results
in the persistent visual presentation of the black child as a non-child.
Ariès’ examination of childhood, published in France in 1960, was the
first study to focus solely on children and childhood from a historical per-
spective. Centuries marked a point of interest in the study of, and rhetoric
about, children and childhood and is considered the first comprehensive
study of children and childhood in an academic context. Ariès’ study is
divided into three sections—the idea of the child, school, and the family—
and draws on renaissance art and a bevy of personal letters and notes from
which he makes broad assertions. Ariès concludes, mistakenly, that the
notion of childhood did not exist until around the thirteenth century. He
based much of his conclusions on the lack of images of children from select
paintings leading up to the thirteenth century. He also, somewhat naively,
assumed that a visual depiction in a painting represented the way life really
was for the people pictured. According to Adrian Wilson, Ariès’ broad
conclusions are based on very little, or dubious, textual evidence as well as
select artistic works. Wilson argues Ariès’ work is neither situated within
social, political, or economic contexts, nor explained in relation to other
historical moments. He also points out the vagueness of Ariès’ timeline as
developments in the child and family tend to change within his text.5
Ariès’ Centuries encompasses a wide historical range: from the Middle
Ages up through the early 1960s. But his study is very narrow in its geo-
politics: European childhood represents all childhood. Most tellingly, the
first chapter begins with a comparison of the European child who “knows
his age” to those children in the “African bush” who, Ariès argues, con-
sider age “quite an obscure notion, something which is not so important
that one can forget it.”6 Ariès is quite obviously paraphrasing from Dudley
ESTABLISHING THE DISCOURSE OF THE CHILD 15
Kidd’s 1906 study of “Kafir” children, Savage Childhoods, in which Kidd

observes that the “Kafirs” have no “method of identifying the year” and
so cannot remember a child’s specific birthday. For Kidd, as for Ariès, this
omission of what is a standard Western rite of childhood—the celebration
of a child’s birthday—is a singular loss of what childhood stands for: “All
those perennial and brooding fancies that centre round the next birthday,
which play a large part in the lives of European children, are unknown to
the Kafirs, who are thus deprived at a single stroke one of the supreme
and aching joys of childhood. The loss is absolute and unredeemable.”7
Kidd’s use of the offensive word “Kafir” (from the Arabic Kafir meaning
“non-believer,” and is used as a derogatory term that refers to Africans in
much the same way the word “nigger” is used as a racial slur to refer to
black people in the Americas) establishes a disconnect between the African
child—as subject—and “normal” European children. Though Ariès con-
tinues to discuss how knowing one’s age is a part of “technical civiliza-
tion,” such a distinction between European and African children about
knowledge deemed of value to the West sets a tone of dismissal for African
children who are marginalized from the outset by a standard of childhood
that first Kidd, then Ariès defines as the norm.
In Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian explains that those in power
often disparage the Other through temporal references that establish a
“civilized West as the pinnacle of universal human progress.”8 Labels like
“savage,” “primitive,” or “undeveloped” set up “temporal structures” that
situate those peoples and cultures in the past, whereas the “developed,”
“civilized,” and “modern” West is framed within the here and now, setting
up a hierarchy in which only Western-style knowledge is valued.9 There is
rarely any discussion about what kinds of knowledge African children do
have, but the inference by both Kidd and Ariès is that they do not have
any knowledge of value. In the last sentence of Ariès’ book, he closes as
he began—with an acknowledgment of children who are not in the white
middle class—that is, as dismissive of race as his opening: “The concept of
the family … and perhaps elsewhere the concept of race, appear as manifesta-
tions of the same intolerance towards variety, the same insistence on uni-
formity” (my emphasis). For Ariès, “variety” means segregation—people
keeping to their own “kind”—and then those groups create the “variety”
Ariès refers to. Ariès espouses a pluralist view here and bemoans a modern
society that he believes seeks to eliminate what he considers the “high
contrast” and beneficial separation of groups (by class and race) a “juxta-
position of inequalities, hitherto something perfectly natural,”10 in favor
of a family structure he contends forces conformity to standards of social
16 D. OLSON
sameness. For Ariès, black families are not the same as white families and
should not be treated as the same. Ariès’ notion about family is problem-
atic in that he suggests a community is better, made stronger through the
otherness of some groups. As Roland Barthes describes in his discussion
about the naturalizing function of myth, the “difference between human
morphologies is asserted, exoticism is consistently stressed … [and yet]
from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced.”11 Ariès’ use
of the term “race” preceded by the vague “perhaps” appears here as an
afterthought; yet, writing in 1960s France, which saw the beginning of the
end for France’s colonial hold over Africa, would seem to suggest in Ariès
a consciousness that race may be a factor within conditions of childhood,
but that European childhood and parental attitudes are the natural norm
and the only ones worthy of examination.
Ariès is considered the founder of the Western model of discourse
about childhood—white, middle- or upper-class, bourgeois values, inher-
ent innocence, idealized, loved, protected. His singular approach to
the history of the child and family has established a prevailing discourse
that tends to align all childhoods with white middle-class Western child-
hoods. Even today’s UNESCO proclamation of a “right to childhood”
is based on the white Western notion of what a childhood should be.12
Ariès’ conscious dismissal of any other parental attitudes or childhoods
has established a base from which later discourses about childhood would
emerge. Indeed, I would suggest Ariès’ dismissal of race, and African bush
children, is representative of colonial-based discourses, which worked to
erase African history as a whole.13 Throughout Centuries, Ariès laments
the loss of social, economic, and racial differences that, in his view, repre-
sent a freedom of sorts as “children mingled with adults in everyday life,”
albeit within their socially prescribed positions, which for Ariès is a type
of freedom.14
Ariès’ study of childhood is also limited to the conditions of the upper
class, which reflects his own economic condition: a bias that has become
a persistent feature of discourses about children and childhood. On occa-
sion he makes reference to the lower classes, but only to suppose those
parents must also feel the same way towards their children but with differ-
ent, less desirable, results. For instance, regarding “coddling,” Ariès states
that for the upper classes coddling gave parents much pleasure as they
enjoyed the “antics” of their youngsters, but for the lower classes, Ariès
states that “the children of the poor are particularly ill-mannered because
‘they just do as they please, their parents paying no attention to them,
even treat[ing] them in an idolatrous manner.’”15 It is this assumption that

“all” parents feel the same way toward their children—the same white,
Western way—that demonstrates the historical connection between pater-
nal colonial attitudes towards other races, as well as to the European poor,
and the discourses about childhood that have followed. It was common
during colonialism to equate those in the lower classes with the “savage”
populations of the colonies (American Indians, Africans, Native South
Americans, etc.). Irish immigrants during the 1800s were portrayed as
savage and were regularly depicted as monkeys; for instance, in the John
Leach cartoons for Punch magazine.16 Both groups, the colonized and
the poor, were considered in need of “parenting” to raise them from their
“savage” existence. Ariès’ early dismissal of bush children and his later
indifferent mention of race underscores his pluralistic ideas about child-
hood, resulting in a discourse that has consistently ignored or marginal-
ized other childhoods.
Within the growing scholarship about childhood, Ariès’ Centuries of
Childhood is significant to the discussion of the role race plays in child-
hood studies because it establishes a pattern of discourse about childhood
that examines the child through a homogenous lens. What arises from
his early study of, and discourse about, childhood has become the study
of white western European childhood presented as THE history of all
childhoods. In contrast to Ariès, Lloyd deMause’s 1974 The History of
Childhood approaches childhood through the lens of psychoanalysis, or,
more specifically, his own “psychogenic theory of history.”17 DeMause’s
disheartening and painful history is very much different than Ariès’ wistful
idealization of the child; yet its discourse is similarly raced in that white
European and US childhoods stand for “all” childhoods. For deMause,
childhood is a time filled with terror, infanticide, physical abuse, pedo-
philia, and incest. DeMause’s study is not a broad history in the traditional
sense or in the style of Ariès, but instead has a singular discourse that is
followed across a broad historical path. It is a labyrinthine descent into an
underworld filled with every imaginable torture (physical or mental) that
an adult can inflict upon a child, residing just below the cultural-norm
surface.
In his review of The History of Childhood, Julius A. Elias states that
deMause focuses solely on accounts of “starving and battered” children
and the horrors children suffered at adult hands, leaving no “provision
for anyone to have been nice to children,” despite “a good deal of evi-
dence to the contrary.”18 Elias finds that deMause characterizes instances
18 D. OLSON
of “horrifying” practices of child abuse as widespread when such prac-

tices, though they did (and still do) exist, were not the majority and do
not equal the totality of childhood’s history, nor are they representative
of most childhood experiences. As with Ariès, deMause’s discourse of
childhood is rooted squarely in the upper classes with scattered cursory
glances at the middle or lower classes, and no mention of racial differ-
ences. DeMause’s study seems to position childhood at the “juncture of
the ‘body and the ‘population,’” which, as Michel Foucault explains, is a
“crucial target of a power organized around the management of life,” so
much so that childhood, and threats to the notion of innocent childhood,
became a “theme of political operations, economic interventions … and
ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility.”
Those in power, the dominant classes, used notions of white, middle-/
upper-class childhood as a marker for a “society’s strength, revealing both
its political energy and its biological vigor.”19 And that societal “strength”
lies only in whiteness. So for deMause, these acts are tortures specifically
because they happen to white middle- and upper-class children.
But what is quite missing in deMause’s discourse of the child, surpris-
ingly as he appears to be enamored of children’s suffering, is the physi-
cal and mental suffering of black children in America (during slavery
and Jim Crow). DeMause’s History of Childhood contains one chapter
pointedly dedicated to white American childhood (as opposed to the rest
of the book’s focus on European childhood), entitled “Anglo-American
Child Rearing” and written by Joseph E. Illick, suggests two interest-
ing hypotheses: (1) a recognition that there are other US childhoods
because Illick felt the need to specify “Anglo” children from other chil-
dren, and (2) this recognition qua negation functions as an “I know you
exist but you do not exist here” position. Such a position, viewed within
the historical context of the ongoing civil rights movement throughout
the early seventies when The History of Childhood was written, suggests
Illick’s—and deMause’s—awareness of the black childhood that they
effectively dismiss with the word Anglo. Such a dismissal within deM-
ause’s and Illick’s overall context of systematic abuse renders invisible the
horrors visited upon African slave children, black children during the Jim
Crow era, and more pointedly, black children during the civil rights era
within which deMause and Illick write. The exclusion of black children
as equal victims of abuse creates the impression that black child abuse is
so common that it does not need to be described, that it “goes without
saying,” or more disturbingly, that such abuse is only “abuse” when it
happens to white children. Such absence of, indeed, negation of black

children from early discourses of American childhood demonstrates a
cultural process of exclusion of the black child from its own history; they
just do not exist within the context of childhood as a socially discursive
category.
The exclusion of blackness from dominant discourses is nothing new.
As colonial theorists Frantz Fanon has pointed out, the West’s literature
and imagery are “put together by white men for little white men … [and]
Savages are always symbolized by Negros or Indians.”20 Fanon argues that
the way whites talk about and represent blacks creates the notion of a
“blackness” within the white mind, a theme Toni Morrison echoes 25
years later in Playing in the Dark, Morrison’s treatise on literary images
of blackness: “The pervasive use of black images and people in expressive
prose … [and] the taken-for-granted assumptions that lie in their usage”21
undergirds the naturalization of the stereotypes that whites believe about
blacks. The same can be said for the way whites create “childhood” in
their own image. So the exclusion of black children within the discourse
about childhood raises some interesting questions about how we perceive
children and who we perceive as a child.
There have been other notable broad histories of the child and child-
hood, such as Colin Heywood’s A History of Childhood: Children and
Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (2001), and Hugh
Cunningham’s Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500
(2005), but most such broad histories have also been located in Western,
predominantly white cultures, continuing the homogenous discourse
about childhood framed with a historical context. Cunningham begins his
study by stating, rightly, that “we need to distinguish between children as
human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas.”22 This is an impor-
tant shift in the discourse of childhood because it moves away from the
earlier assumptions that all childhoods are the same. Cunningham’s astute
observation recognizes that the idea of “the child” is fluid, not static or
singular. Yet, Cunningham locates his study solely in Europe and North
America where he argues that the “patterns of change” experienced by
children in these locations were comparable across both gender and social
class. For Cunningham, these uniformities in experience among children
in the global north are enough to justify the claim that such experiences
encompass all children, despite his earlier awareness that childhood itself
is a “shifting set of ideas.” Neither study acknowledges the different racial
groups that were prominent within European or American societies during
20 D. OLSON
the historical periods Cunningham explores. There is no mention of the

childhood experiences of African Berbers, the Romani, or Arab peoples
that were (and still are) a prominent part of European population. Race
is not considered within these historical discourses about children. Such
deliberate omission of any non-white childhoods has informed and natu-
ralized attitudes about the uniformity of the child experience within stud-
ies of and about children and childhood as a uniquely white experience.
It is the narrow discourse within these studies that reinforces, through
omission, a racial preference for white children as the standard-bearer for
all childhood.
One particularly noteworthy break from previous discourses about the
history of childhood can be found in Peter Stearns’ 2006 Childhood in
World History. As the title suggests, Stearns presents a more comprehen-
sive view of childhood that does not locate it solely in the West and out-
lines some of the problems with the earlier approaches. Stearns explains
that the acknowledgement of a condition called “childhood” is a constant
throughout history and cultures, but how cultures approach dealing with
conditions of childhood varies widely. Stearns insightfully observes “the
history of childhood forces a confrontation between what is ‘natural’ in
the experience of children, and what is constructed by specific historical
forces.”23 Stearns argues that approaches to and ideas about childhood,
particularly the “purpose of childhood,” have transformed during global
cultural shifts: from hunter/gatherer societies to agricultural, from agricul-
tural to industrial, and from industrial to late capitalist consumer society.
Even for those societies still struggling to industrialize, the “imitation of
industrial patterns, like mass schooling” changed the way adults thought
about children and childhood.24 Stearns’ text traces global patterns of
historic change that he argues altered adult views of childhood and, in
turn, conditions of childhood. His study is an important step in recog-
nizing childhood experiences that are not white, bourgeois, American
or European. While invaluable in articulating different cultural forms of
childhood and their corresponding historical moments, Stearns’ history
is somewhat limited by being overly broad. Childhood recognizes the his-
torical processes that lead to different cultural attitudes towards children
across the globe, but the nature of such a broad study necessitates glid-
ing over cultural specificities. And though there are a few scholars today
that interrogate the conditions of other childhoods, such as Wilma King’s
significant work on childhood during American slavery, to date no such
history exists that combines Stearns’ patterns of global societal shifts with
local childhood experiences within a non-Western culture. Such a research

project would be an invaluable addition to current studies in childhood.
US Childhoods
While many general histories of childhood ignore the African child experi-
ence (as well as other marginalized child experiences), the same cannot
be said for histories written about American childhood. Most histories of
American childhood do acknowledge the experiences of black children
during slavery, and there are a few histories specific to the civil rights era.25
But many of these histories marginalize the experiences of black children
by isolating them as if they were not a part of the “real” fabric of American
society, the “real” American childhood, but rather exist as a subculture
outside historical or socio-economic mainstream of US cultural shifts.
When black children do become the focus of historical events, they do so
because they have done, or survived, something “special,” like marching
for civil rights—for example, in de Schweinitz’s compelling study If We
Could Change the World, or Wilma King’s important work on children
in slavery. One notable history, Steven Mintz’s Huck’s Raft: A History
of American Childhood, offers a more inclusive overview of childhood
in America that begins by recognizing, then challenging, the common
myths about childhood, particularly the myth that childhood is the same
for everyone. And while he does devote a chapter to the slave-child experi-
ence, Mintz also includes examples of black children throughout his text
within his discussion of historical moments. A recognition of black child-
hood as a part of the fabric of American childhood, however small, is a
refreshing move towards a more inclusive look at the black child as a par-
ticipant in cultural production, rather than as an outsider. As Mintz states,
“Youth in America has never been a homogenous or monolithic group. It
has always been divided along lines of class, ethnicity, and gender.”26 But
Mintz’s broad history limits African American children’s experiences as a
group within historically (and stereotypically) specific events: slavery, post-
bellum reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the civil rights move-
ment. Mintz’s bracketing of African American childhood from the whole
of American childhood, while a meaningful move towards inclusivity, con-
tinues the trend of discourses about children that function to naturalize
whiteness and white childhood as “normal” while continuing to position
black children as embodiments of “special” or “problem” conditions.27
22 D. OLSON
Jennifer Ritterhouse, in Growing up Jim Crow, explains that children

were the mechanism for instituting and continuing the conceptual frame-
work of “racial etiquette,” a “set of rules, a script, part of a process, the
power-relations process by which a viable relationship between dominant
white and subordinate black—and therefore ‘race’ itself—was renegoti-
ated on a day-to-day basis.”28 For children, the daily reinforcement of
racial codes was “implicitly absorbed from the public sphere, through
watching how others regulated the African Americans around them.”29
Children’s games, toys, and interactions with each other all contained
elements that functioned to reinforce white supremacy and black dehu-
manization.30 Thus, black childhood was invisible from the everyday expe-
rience of American childhood.
The experiences of black children in the United States are not generally
viewed as having any significance to broader historical or cultural trends,
nor to the ways in which parents perceive their children. For example,
Karen Sánchez-Eppler argues that the child was an integral, yet often
silent, part of the construction of American culture. She states that histo-
ries of childhood explain the “gradual and uneven transformation of cul-
tural attitudes toward children”31 and that those transformations elicited
changes in the cultural function of children. But only white children are
the actors within these historical and political changes for Sánchez-Eppler.
She argues that “racial labeling as a task of childhood naturalizes these
distinctions.”32 The label of “child” and its assumed whiteness functioned
to naturalize the distinctions of other childhoods. Much like other racial
discourses, discussions about childhood often assume a white, Western
model for which all other childhoods fall short. For example, changes in
US child labor laws resulted, in part, from the shocking visual images of
white children laboring (from the photographic work of Lewis Hines). As
Sallee explains:
To overcome [the] division among [Northern and Southern] whites, reform-

ers drew on dominant racial ideologies about Anglo-Saxon superiority …
Reformers removed [white] children from categories such as poor whites,
mountain whites, low whites, and crackers—terms that increasingly dubbed
them inferior—and began referring to ‘our pure Anglo-Saxon stock,’ ‘noble
though undeveloped people of the mountains and hills,’ and simply ‘the
unstarted’.33 … African American children were overlooked [and] … efforts
to address black child labor provoked complaints.34
The image of black children performing similar or more physically intensive

work did not contribute to changes in social attitudes or corresponding
changes in child labor laws because black child labor was deemed natural,
a naturalization reinforced by the discourse of the child labor debate.35 As
visual depictions of the innocent white child proliferated, depictions of
the black child elided the notion of innocence altogether and popular dis-
course continued to define black children as “nonchild—‘pickaninny.’”36
As Sánchez-Eppler describes, white children’s images were the discursive
“enforcers of racial identity, pointing, naming, othering.”37 This racial-
ization of the discourse of childhood was a construction that served to
enforce, and naturalize, existing social relations of inequality.
Children and Non-children in the Popular

Imagination
Historically, notions about the child have changed most often as a result
of wider socio-political and/or economic circumstances within a culture.
European childhoods have often been framed as functioning within a
marked space of social utility. Children from all economic classes often
performed many labor-intensive, but “ordinary” domestic chores—fetch-
ing water, watching the domestic animals, gathering firewood, taking out
the trash, and so on. These menial functions allowed a child’s labor to
be absorbed into the family narrative in exchange for food, care, safety,
and the sense of “belonging” that a kinship unit provides. Though white
children were the property of their fathers, such a utilitarian status dur-
ing childhood never questioned the future “personhood” of the child.
Rather, a child’s labor was considered an essential part of becoming a
responsible, independent adult. Even white indentured children were
freed and attained full agency after their period of indenture was over.
Not so for African American slave children, who lived their entire lives
as property, and only achieved agency after the Civil War. But the beliefs
that blacks were not human, and the resulting discourse about blacks at
this time persisted during the reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.38 African
slave children were socially positioned within utilitarian terms as objects
of use. As a result, black children were positioned outside the notion of
a “personhood” that was given/assumed about white European and
American children, including indentured children. From the first meeting
of European whites and African blacks, Europeans ranked black people
24 D. OLSON
as below whites. Under slavery, African children were not persons but
property—livestock—and the visual products of that time reinforced that
notion, as Figs. 2.1 and 2.2 demonstrate.
The white girl in the foreground quietly watching the frenetic activity
in front of her embodies an innocence that was reserved exclusively for
white children. She is positioned in the center of the image as if she were
the purchaser of the African women and children being examined before
her, a subtle projection of white superiority unto the next generation. Her
little hands are clasped behind her back as she peruses the “products” in
front of her.
In contrast to the image in Fig. 2.1, the small black children in Fig. 2.2
are chained together as chattel and to a woman who may or may not be
their mother. They are androgynous, they face each other, and unlike the
small white girl in the above image, these two children are not the focus
Fig. 2.1 Slave auction, Martinique, 1826, image reference NWO308, Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Fig. 2.2 Internal slave trade, c. 1830, image reference NWO336, Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
of the viewer’s attention. They are also positioned directly behind the
horse, equating the “animal” status of the horse with the black children
and woman. The black children are, in fact, relegated to the margins of the
action suggesting their marginality even in their commodification—they
are worth much less alone and so are a “package deal” with the woman.
The above depictions are just two small examples of the plethora of his-
torical imagery showing black children exorcised from cultural notions of
childhood.
These images are emblematic of the long history of visual imagery that
marginalizes and animalizes black children. While visual depictions of
black children have changed since the days of slavery—we do not see black
children portrayed as monkeys or as gator bait—the cultural pattern of
derogatory representation of black children does continue with visual por-
trayals in a variety of mediums today reinforcing that “the western … cul-
ture of the nursery, of children’s stories and songs, toys and games, is still
in many respects that of colonialism,” whereby black children are located
outside the norm, or absent from the landscape of childhood altogether.
26 D. OLSON
Innocence and Modern Visualization of Black

Children
A discussion about the discourse of childhood and cinematic portrayals
of children would not be complete without a close look at the persistent
notion of childhood innocence. Children, as most adults today believe, are
born in a state of prelapsarian innocence that must be treasured and pro-
tected from all the dark aspects of life, including protection from knowl-
edge of adult vice and protected particularly from sexual knowledge. The
articulation of this notion, of what amounts to a “rhetoric of innocence”
among those first scholars writing about childhood suggests a teleological
belief in a child’s natural purity—of body, heart, and mind. Innocence is
assumed ontologically and yet is implemented physically in the way adults
today deal with children and children’s issues. Such an intrinsic belief in
innocence is most often racially coded and does not extend to all chil-
dren. The rhetoric of innocence tends to reaffirm white childhood as the
norm, as we see historically through the many popular representations
of children and childhood. Popular discourse tends to situate childhood,
and innocence, within socio-political, cultural, economic, and historical
intersections all within the frame of whiteness.
As most scholars agree, notions of childhood innocence took cen-
terstage around the mid-seventeenth century during the Romantic and
Industrial Ages. Before this time, children were seen as just small versions
of adults who were constantly in need of correction. Puritan Christians
believed children were filled with original sin that must be disciplined out
of them, sometimes by very harsh means.39 Before the modern age, chil-
dren were considered neither knowing nor innocent—they were just little
people. As Ariés puts it, until the eighteenth century, “nobody thought
that this [childhood] innocence existed.”40
But something happened to childhood during the 1700s—a trans-
formation in the way adults conceived of childhood, spurred on in part
by the publication of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) in which he
lays out educational reform so as to retain all the innate goodness of a
child while they negotiate, and learn about, the society around them. The
timing of this shift in notions of childhood in relation to race is telling.
The concept of childhood innocence appears historically as an integral
part of the emerging scientific discourse in the eighteenth century that
validated notions of white racial purity. As much as such discourses were
about childhood purity, they were also about enforcing racial hierarchies.
As Mary Louise Pratt argues in her seminal work Imperial Eyes, the idea
of differences in innocence is rooted in the early eighteenth-century scien-
tific discourse of classification. As she explains, Linneaus’ classification of
humans—homo sapien—was divided into six different groups. Linneaus’
Systema Naturae (The System of Nature) was widely read during the eigh-
teenth century and set the stage for future scientific study.41 The language
Linneaus used to describe these groups established a standard of represen-
tational discourse that still exists today:
1. Wild Man. Four-footed, mute, hairy.

2. American. Copper-colored, choleric, erect. Hair black, straight,
thick; nostrils wide; face harsh; beard scanty; obstinate, content,
free. Paints himself with fine red lines. Regulated by custom.
3. European. Fair, sanguine, brawny; hair yellow, brown, flowing; eyes
blue, gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments.
Governed by laws.
4. Asiatic. Sooty, melancholic, rigid. Hair black; eyes dark; severe;
haughty, covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by
opinions.
5. African. Black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Hair black, frizzled; skin silky;
nose flat, lips timid; crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with
grease. Governed by caprice.42
Pratt contends that Linneaus’ language set the tone for how his many read-
ers would view non-European peoples, “invoking the image of primordial
innocence” that is born from nature while establishing a “Utopian image
of the European bourgeois subject [as] simultaneously innocent [gentle,
yellow flowing hair] and imperial.”43 Coupled with popular travel litera-
ture’s negative portrayals of Africans, Linneaus’ scientific language seemed
to lend authority to these deleterious depictions of a “savage” innocence.
Innocence, then, developed a dual meaning—European innocence was
utopian, pure, ethereal, while the primitive, “primordial,” innocence of
colored peoples was tied to ignorance, lack of civilization, and a lack of
intelligence. So blacks could be childish, but never children. These two
notions of innocence were reaffirmed through popular novels, magazines,
art, and other popular literary and visual mediums. Significantly, these
colonial notions of competing innocence persisted in the United States,
finding a particular home in the Slave era and Jim Crow South.
28 D. OLSON
As demonstrated by the previous images of slaves, in visual depictions of

children and childhood, white children were positioned as innocent, but
black children were not. Slavery was in full force in the United States dur-
ing the 1700s and into the 1800s so that narratives about innocent chil-
dren became a part of the dominant colonial rhetoric of white supremacy,
a rhetoric that secured notions of the natural difference between whites
and blacks, including children. Such discourses about a natural innocence
in white children were further reinforced by derogatory depictions of
black children. Higgonet argues that Sir Joshua Reynolds’ painting Age of
Innocence (late 1700s, Fig. 2.3) was just such an image that highlighted
and perpetrated innocence as a natural state of being for white children:
At once aggrandized and miniaturized, the child sits quietly close: face,
throat, chubby feet and arms near to us in the picture’s space, creamily
painted, soft peaches and cream unctuously brushed in round shapes—big
eyes, downy cheeks, dimpled hands … The child belongs so comfortably in
nature that she doesn’t need shoes as the picture insists by pointing tiny toes
right at us … Because it looks natural, the image of childhood innocence
looks timeless, because it looks timeless it looks unchangeable.44
Fig. 2.3 “Age of

Innocence.” Sir Joshua
Reynolds 1785 or 1788
Fig. 2.4 Plantation owners visiting slave quarters, c. 1700s. Harpers Weekly,
1876 August 19, p. 677
Reynolds’ painting became the “commercial face of childhood” and has

been reproduced hundreds of times.45 Contrast Reynolds’ romanticized
child with a representative sample of the image of black children from the
same era (published in Harpers Weekly in 1876). In “Plantation Owner’s
Family Visiting Slave Quarters,” circa 1700 (Fig. 2.4), the painting’s light
falls on the white woman and girl, who appear afraid of the black child and
man before them. The child here literally is “turning away” from the black
children, a denial of any similarity between them. The black children have
no distinct facial features, are dressed in rags and are devoid of the soft big
eyes and downy, chubby cheeks so prominent in the Reynolds painting.
In many such pictorial images of black children, particularly during slavery
and the antebellum age, the juxtaposition of “beastly” and “subhuman”
black children against the soft purity of white children was used to rein-
force notions of black otherness. Black children were regularly portrayed
as “pickaninnies,” a derogatory and androgynous term for black children.
As Robin Bernstein argues “white children became constructed as ten-
der angels while black children were libeled as unfeeling, non-innocent
30 D. OLSON
on-children.”46 Such representations of blacks during colonialism, slav-

n
ery, and the Jim Crow era worked to naturalize notions of black inferiority
and beastliness, not innocence.
As Pratt shows, ironically, scientific rhetoric was used to further the
notion of black people as less intelligent and as perpetual children in need
of parental “guidance.” The notion of blacks as children was a main-
stay of colonial rhetoric and worked to solidify Western white power as
benevolent and paternal. In Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial
and Postcolonial Africa, Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin make
the case that “Westerners accumulated a library of knowledge about
Africa, developed ethnological comparisons, and applied their misprisions
of Darwinism to them. As African identities were essentialized in terms
drawn from the growing image-Africa … a science of bodies and races
emerged and became the sourcebook of biological arguments for African
inferiority.”47 Thus the combination of ethnographic observations (such
as in Dudley Kidd’s Savage Childhood) and belief in Darwin’s theory of
evolution contributed to the devaluing of black peoples across Western
cultures. Such devaluing of black peoples, coupled with the dehuman-
izing commodification of black bodies during slavery, has contributed to
a history of portrayals of black children that do not naturalize childhood
innocence, as the images of white children do. Furthermore, the type of
innocence attributed, historically and visually, to black children is neither
a positive innocence nor an innocence born of a pure heart, but is instead
an innocence rooted in ignorance and childishness.
There is a long history of African and African American children being
used negatively in product advertisements. Many of these ads, such as the
one above (Fig. 2.5) for Fairy soap, juxtapose the innocence-smartness of
white children with the ignorance or stupidity-as-innocence image of the
black child. This commercial image of the black child in particular rein-
forced stereotypes about blacks as dirty—the dirt-stained dress, the bare
feet turned inward, head bowed in deference. In contrast, the white girl’s
clean dress, shoes (feet pointed forward), rumpled hair, and the slightly
outstretched hand and uptilt of her head suggest superiority and knowl-
edge, which is reinforced by a tagline that assumes a similar ignorance on
the part of the black child’s mother: “Why doesn’t your momma wash
you with Fairy soap?” According to Jeanette Sky, the “Romantics created
a new myth of original innocence in contrast to the myth of original sin.
The child became the sacrosanct image of innocence opposed to the fallen
adult.”48 The innocent child is often situated in pastoral or natural settings
Fig. 2.5 N.K. Fairbank Co. “Why Doesn’t Your Mama Wash You with Fairy
Soap?” Accessed 15 July 2015, http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=f
ull=3100001~!245130!0
in order to reinforce the notion of innocence as inherent and “closer to

paradise.”49 However, such natural settings are not reserved for all chil-
dren. To this day, black children are often situated or framed in areas
considered impure and decidedly not garden-like, such as inner cities or
jungles (see Chap. 4).
Traditionally, if a black child was pictured in a rural environment, he
or she would be either laboring (like picking cotton) or positioned as ser-
vant to a white person. Black children were often pictured in precarious
positions in relation to the natural environment (such as the long history
of art and merchandise featuring the ‘gator bait’ black baby), or pictured
as starving (as in advertisements for famine support by NGOs).50 Most
commonly, black children were (are) often portrayed existing in nature
as uncivilized, sometimes noble, savages (such as child soldiers, see Chap.
5). The “child as savage” in the (urban) jungle or wilderness rather than
32 D. OLSON
denoting purity of heart, innocence, or closeness to the spirit of nature,

instead “confirms a long western tradition of seeing anyone who isn’t
western as an innocent savage, a savage who remains [into adulthood]
perpetually a dependent child.”51 The Western concept of an innocent
savage is not the same as the innocence attributed to white children, but
is instead ignorance and stupidity based on a lack of knowledge of west-
ern (i.e., civilized) norms. The notion of innocence embraced by white
Europeans and Americans perpetuates the belief of the moral infallibility
of the white West at the expense of those deemed savage or uncivilized.
This discourse of otherness or non-innocence in reference to black chil-
dren works in tandem with corresponding imagery that appears to support
notions of black savagery.
While such beliefs developed over time, Lee D. Baker attributes this
persistent portrayal of black people as childlike savages to the rise in read-
ership of popular illustrated magazines in the late 1800s. According to
Baker, “African Americans were routinely portrayed … by such epithets
as nigger, darky, coon, pickaninny, mammy, buck and yaller hussy … [and]
were made out to be baffoons.”52 The regular depiction of blacks and
black children as savages, or even as non-human, reaffirmed notions of
white supremacy and prohibited black children from being linked to
notions of childlike innocence. This ersatz innocence of the “little savage”
character has been replicated by racist Americanized versions of Helen
Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo,53 George Remi’s Tintin in
the Congo, Enid Blyton’s Noddy series, and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory in which the original portrayal of the Oompa Loompas
was as a tribe of African pygmies that Wonka enslaved to work in his fac-
tory (Dahl later revised the racist portrayal in 1973).54 As we will see in
the following sections, the historical trajectory of representations of the
pastoral innocence of some children, and the primal innocence of others,
establishes a cultural pattern of discourses about childhood that routinely
Others, or omits, African American children from the landscape of both
innocence and American childhood.
Childhood Spaces and Race
One of the ways race is visually articulated is through spatial associa-

tion. The discourse of geographic space, the implications of the space
itself, often work in tandem with visual depictions of Africans and African
Americans. According to David Delaney, “elements of the social (race,
gender, and so on) are not simply reflected in spatial arrangements; rather,
spatialities are regarded as constituting and/or reinforcing aspects of the
social.”55 In the context of innocence and children the physical spaces
of childhood—the nursery, playroom, or playground, for example—are
often visually populated mostly with white children. Historically, black
children were rarely visualized as occupying “childhood” spaces like the
nursery or playroom. Which is not to say black children were not in those
spaces because they were: during slavery, black children were often used
as caretakers to white children who happened to reside in those childhood
spaces. But black children were not children in those spaces (they did
not play there); they were workers—either performing childcare or other
menial tasks. In this way, the ideologically informed, physical childhood
space was reserved for white children. As Wilma King shows in Stolen
Childhood, all slave children worked from the time they learned to walk.
Black slave children began training very early and did such jobs as gather
firewood, fan their master, care for white children, or they helped cook,
do laundry, pull weeds, or take care of animals. Black children, therefore,
did not occupy any of the ideological, physical, or metaphorical spaces of
childhood as children.56
After slavery, and with the rise of print imagery, black children were
still not visualized as occupying spaces reserved for childhood and inno-
cence. Black children were most often visualized occupying spaces of work
on farms (rural) or in factories (urban). Black children were rarely visu-
alized in nurseries or playrooms, or even playgrounds. As middle-class
interpretations of childhood spaces became the norm, playrooms, schools,
playgrounds, and classrooms were most often imaged containing white
children, connecting the physical spaces of childhood with whiteness. For
instance, images of classrooms are a particular cinematic trope used to
delineate between children who fit the “norm” and those who are “differ-
ent,” or “good” (white) children and “bad” (black) children, as explained
in the discussions of The Blackboard Jungle, Precious, and Dangerous
Minds.
Brooke Neely and Michelle Samura argue that “racial and spatial pro-
cesses can be seen as co-constitutive and dialectical in nature. In other
words, racial interactions and processes (e.g. identities, inequalities, con-
flicts and so on) are also about how we collectively make and remake,
over time and through ongoing contestation, the spaces we inhabit”57.
Much like the racial spaces Neely and Samura refer to, the concept of
childhood is also a space that is made and remade “through ongoing
34 D. OLSON
contestation.” Childhood in the United States in particular is intricately

connected to physical spaces. There are “ideal” childhood spaces—such as
parks, suburban playgrounds, fields, pools, ice cream stands, playrooms,
toy aisles—and then there are spaces that are antithetical to childhood:
anything urban, jungles, factories, prisons, and adult spaces like night
clubs, restaurants, offices, courtrooms, and so on.
Notions of innocence, play, culpability, and knowledge are also spa-
tially constructed and reconstructed around the framework of social ideas
about what childhood is or should be. These contested “spaces of child-
hood” often rely on the “othering” of children of color through “spatial
practices”58 that reinforce childhood norms as white. For instance, images
of “traditional” childhood spaces in visual media tend to feature white
children more than other racial groups. Childhood’s imaginary spaces also
tend to feature whiteness; for example, as we see in Hollywood fantasy
films for children which are set in ethereal, beautiful, magical lands but
always feature white child protagonists.59 Such exclusion of black children
from the discourse of childhood spaces suggests that society cannot “dis-
entangle the ideological formations of race from the material production
and practices of space. In fact, spatial manifestations of racial ideas often
serve to naturalize racial inequalities.”60 As we will see in the films under
discussion here, space plays a significant role in establishing the discourse
of childhood that privileges whiteness. All but one of the protagonists in
the selected films (Butter) occupy spaces that do not suggest innocence
and “childhood” as ideologically imagined, but rather, the spaces instead
highlight “the effects of privilege … so [that] whiteness itself takes on
the appearance of normal.” The spaces that frame black children in these
films—the inner city, the jungle, the swamp, Africa—are already tradi-
tionally “raced [as] ‘not white,’”61 and visually coded as territories of the
Other. These geographical ideations of what is viewed as “innocent child-
hood space” become a “significant waymarker in the moral cartographies
of childhood,” waymarkers which are constructed to deny such moral
innocence to black children.62 And so, the spaces in these films inhabited
by black children, instead of suggesting childhood innocence, reinforce
racial and childhood otherness.
The Black Child Image in Modern Popular Culture

Demeaning representations of Africans and African Americans were com-
mon throughout twentieth-century American popular culture. White
depictions of African men, in particular, consistently emphasized a
relationship to animals (usually some type of primate), unrestrained and
aggressive sexuality, childlike ignorance or simple-mindedness, and a pre-
dilection for violent and criminal behavior. In Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,
Mammies, & Bucks, Donald Bogle states “no minority was so relentlessly
and fiercely typed as the black man.” The black “buck” characters, accord-
ing to Bogle, are “always big, baadddd niggers, over-sexed and savage,
violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh.”63 Bogle attributes the first
visual stereotype of the savage buck to D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film The Birth
of a Nation, which depicts the American civil war and a dystopian after-
math where black males take over the government and society crumbles
into chaos, only to be saved by the all-white Ku Klux Klan. However,
the savage buck characterization has its roots much earlier in the first
European encounters with black Africans.
European explorers often categorized the native peoples they encoun-
tered as uncivilized and savage and regularly described them in demeaning
terms. As Lee D. Baker explains, the notion of the savage functioned as
the “antithesis of the ‘civilized man,’” which allowed white colonizers to
“forego any ethical or moral considerations” in their treatment of native
peoples. Black Africans were routinely depicted in eighteenth-century travel
literature, according to J. Robert Constantine, as “naturally depraved.”
While the beauty of Africa’s nature—a “sunlit, golden land”64—and its
varied wildlife was also a “permanent component” of nineteenth-century
travel and adventure literature set in Africa, the romantic fascination with
the beauty of African wildlife and nature was contrasted sharply by the
incessant descriptions of Africans as “uncivilized, conceited, bloodthirsty,
superstitious, and untrustworthy,”65 characterizations in various forms
that continue to haunt representations of Africans and African Americans
today.66
European travel writers also highlighted what they considered black
African’s “brutality” towards their fellow Africans, thereby reinforcing
notions of the inherent violent nature of black men. Constantine rightly
observes that these popular literary images of black Africans as “ignoble
savages” has had a stubborn “vitality and longevity” throughout American
(and European) popular culture.67 As Margaret Hunt explains: “Racist
36 D. OLSON
beliefs about Africans advanced alongside the plundering of West Africa

for ivory, gold, and slaves.” Hunt argues that travel literature helped legiti-
mize colonial domination of African peoples, as well as being a “staple of
jingoistic propaganda,” which solidified the “us versus them” mentality so
prevalent throughout the colonial age. Travel literature’s figurative images
of African males presented them as “cruel and perfidious, lazy, lascivious,
faithless in their engagements, innate thieves, without any notion of reli-
gious duty.”68
Photographic portrayals and literary narratives worked in tandem
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to reinforce the
savage buck stereotype. M. van Wyk Smith traces the representation of
Africa in travel literature and young adult fiction and finds that Africa was
routinely presented as the dystopian opposite of a utopian Europe: “an
imaginary contrast … of all that is monstrous with all that is desirable in
human society.” Smith argues that Victorian-era literature about Africa
allegorically embodied notions of paradise (Europe) contrasted with
a dark wasteland (Africa). Smith points to the widespread influence of
popular writers like Captain Mayne Reid (The Bush Boys [1856], The Vee-
Boers: A Tale of Adventure in Southern Africa [1870]) who seduced their
European and American readers with an “archetypal myth of an embat-
tled, pastoral, utopian white race threatened by savages.”69 Coupled with
the new photographic imagery, European travel writers highlighted what
they considered the black African’s “brutality” towards fellow Africans,
thereby reinforcing notions of his inherently violent nature.70
An example of the contrast between descriptions of Africans and
Europeans can be seen in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but pointed
out and critiqued in Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa.” As Achebe
notes, Conrad’s descriptions of Africans and Europeans are representative
of widely popular literary representations of African peoples juxtaposed
with “civilized” Europeans:
Conrad … when recalling his first encounter with a black person, remem-
bers it thus: “A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my
conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human
animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years after-
wards … A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long
black arms.”71 [In contrast,] at the age of sixteen Conrad encountered his
first Englishman in Europe. He calls him “my unforgettable Englishman”
and describes him in the following manner: “[His] calves exposed to the
public gaze... dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-like

condition and their rich tone of young ivory... The light of a headlong,
exalted satisfaction with the world of men... illumined his face... and tri-
umphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly
gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth... his white calves twinkled sturdily.”72
From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s descriptions of the angelic Eva and the
“savage” Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (discussed in detail in Chap. 3) to
the above descriptions by Conrad, such images have functioned to solidify
and, more importantly, normalize, a race-based discourse within the pop-
ular imaginary. These discourses functioned, and still function to reinforce
dominant white Western power structures and institutions, resulting in a
pervasive “modality of race,” in which race permeates all state institutions
and contributes to the tone of political and economic discourse. It is this
modality of race narrative that continually intersects with broader cultural
practices, such as racial profiling.73
Colonial photography gave these derogatory verbal images a more lit-
eral form. In “The Seen, the Unseen, the Invented: Misrepresentations
of African ‘Otherness’ in the Making of a Colony, Eritrea, 1885–1896,”
Silvana Palma argues that as information became more readily available
to the public through print media, the “illustrated press” incorporated
professional photography as a “referential means of spreading Italian

‘knowledge’ concerning Africa and her people.”74 But much like the
demeaning discourse in travel writing and narrative fiction, nineteenth-
century photography continued the circulation of misinformation and
negative characterizations of Africa and African people. African people
were often juxtaposed against white Europeans in photographs as a way
to highlight the differences between them. African men particularly were
often posed with spears or traditional native dress as a way to exoticize
them, thereby forging implicit connections between otherness, blackness,
and savagery (Figs. 2.6 and 2.7).
The line between images of the black child and adult within these his-
torically rooted beliefs about black males is blurred in American popular
culture. Raced discourses in visual and print media “constructed defini-
tions of race” that worked to “reinforce the ‘truth’ of the constructs.”75
Those discursive constructs that defined black males extended to black
male children as well. As Kelvin Santiago-Valles states in his noteworthy
study “‘Still Longing for de Old Plantation’: The Visual Parodies and
Racial National Imaginary of US Overseas Expansionism, 1898–1903,”
38 D. OLSON
Fig. 2.6 Pygmy natives

posing with European, c.
1921
nineteenth-century depictions of men featured a “direct correlation

between ‘whiteness’ and ‘manhood’: a truly civilized male adult within
Western cultures could not be a man if he was not white—and vice
versa.”76 The white cultural project of emasculating black males in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century was supported and naturalized by
the rising visual media, particularly Hollywood films. The consistent por-
trayal of young black boys as pickaninnies cultivated social coding of black
males that regularly presented them “not as … human being[s] but as …
cliché[s] representing the lowest form of behavior, aspiration, motivation,
and performance,” values and behaviors in direct conflict with the values
and behaviors embraced by white America.77
The most popular pickaninny boy in the early nineteenth century was
Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo (1898), published in the United
States in 1900. Bannerman was born in the United Kingdom but spent
her adult life in India because her husband was an officer in the Indian
Fig. 2.7 Masai warriors, c. 1906. Original images from Collier’s New Encyclopedia,
Volume 1 (1921), opposite page 58, panel B
Medical Service. The majority of Bannerman’s writings feature Indian

children, including Little Black Sambo. Little Black Sambo exemplifies
the transnational circulation of the pickaninny character as it has been in
continuous publication around the world (in French, Spanish, Hebrew,
Danish, Japanese, and Arabic, for example) since 1899, with the latest ver-
sion published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform in 2012.
For example, Little Black Sambo was hugely popular in Japan, according to
Todayama Midori, and was considered “one of the most important books
in the history of children’s literature in English.”78 The fixed discursive
coding and hegemonic function of the pickaninny character hindered the
scripting of any other image of black male children. While the character in
the original text demonstrates great wit by continually outsmarting a wily
tiger, the character’s image evolved to fit American stereotypes of black
children. Indeed, in the American version as time went on, the Sambo
character strayed significantly from its original to an ethnically distorted
pickaninny stereotype. The images of the American versions are crude and
more animalistic than Bannerman’s original Sambo.79
40 D. OLSON
Other pickaninny characters could be found in newspapers and comics.

The New York Herald introduced the first black protagonist of a cartoon
series with R.F. Outcault’s Pore ‘lil Mose (December 1900–August 1902),
a deeply racist, though not unsympathetic, caricature of a young black boy
who takes imaginary adventures. As with most caricatures featuring black
children, ‘lil Mose had the standard exaggerated features of a pickaninny:
large, bulbous eyes, an extra wide smile, and large ears. Such distortions of
a black child’s physical appearance functioned to dehumanize black chil-
dren. The almost adult-sized features on a black child gave visual con-
firmation to notions of the childlike black adult and the adultified black
child.
These caricatures of black children corresponded discursively with the
social narratives of black stupidity and potential violence. The pickaninny’s
wide smile was seen as evidence of the black’s deceptiveness, not inno-
cent happiness. Large bulbous eyes were tantamount to beastliness. The
pickaninny’s large bulbous eyes and large ears mimicked the large eyes
and ears on beasts of burden—cows, horses, camels—which visually reaf-
firmed notions of blacks as “natural” servants. The pickaninny character
is also presented as androgynous so that it is never quite clear if the child
is a girl or a boy. Presenting black children as genderless was a function
of the discourse of white superiority. Colonial discourse often depicted
civilized societies as having a high degree of gendered differentiation while
“savage” societies were depicted as having a low degree of gender differ-
entiation. The lack of clear gender in the pickaninny character merely rein-
forced the non-humanness, non-childness, of the black character. Early
film and print portrayals of African and African American children have
marginalized, othered, exoticized, and consistently positioned black chil-
dren as non-children (Fig. 2.8).
Black Children in American Film Scholarship

While literary and pictorial images of blacks had a significant influence
on the way white America perceived them, it was the new motion picture
medium that solidified black stereotypes in America’s social consciousness.
Motion pictures presented what appeared to be live, moving images that
were thought to be reality and which had a profound influence on how the
white viewing audience thought about blacks, more so than previous artis-
tic or literary imaginings. In 1977, Thomas Cripps published Slow Fade
to Black: The Negro in American Film 1900–1942, the first comprehensive
Fig. 2.8 Gator bait images from “Caricatures of African Americans: The
Pickaninny,” Authentichistory.org, http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/
african/3-coon/7-alligator/, accessed 15 July 2015
42 D. OLSON
history of blacks in American Cinema. What makes Cripps’ study unique is

his detailed look at black images in early silent “attraction cinema”—mov-
ing images that offered no narrative structure and were simply “slice-of-
life” moments using a stationary camera to capture an event. These early
short films mark a significant point in the study of blacks in American
cinema because, according to Cripps, the rudimentary film techniques and
limited camera work “made it difficult to convey [black] stereotypes …
and so visual reality often appeared despite the filmmakers.” For instance,
Thomas Edison’s 1898 A Morning Bath, depicts a young black woman giv-
ing her baby a bath (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIJVgo5PI24)
in front of a camera and The Ninth Negro Cavalry Watering Horses, which
presented to white audiences smartly dressed, armed black soldiers “out-
side their place.”
But as filmmakers experimented with the art of editing in the early
1900s, black stereotypes proliferated, particularly depictions of black chil-
dren. Film became a medium of distortion as white filmmakers controlled
the ways blacks and other groups (Native Americans, for instance) were
depicted. As Cripps explains, a few early silent films such as Edison’s The
Gator and the Pickaninny (1900) and A Scrap in Black and White (1903)
were fairly humanistic portrayals of black children.80 But the rise of new
editing techniques allowed for more narrative control resulting in such
silent shorts like Ten Pickaninnies (1908).81 Ten Pickaninnies was a series of
ten scenes each captioned by a couplet—“Imagine ten pickaninnies turned
loose and on mischief bent. Farmer catches one leaving but nine”—that,
according to Frank Woods, who wrote the screenplay for Griffith’s Birth
of a Nation, was a “clever idea.”82 Shorts like Ten Pickaninnies and the
numerous versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that followed positioned black
children within the narrow confines of old-style racial stereotypes, reflect-
ing what Cripps argues was a “continuing inability of filmmakers to render
controversial, evolutionary, topical issues on film.”83
One of the first works to look at the black child stereotype in film is
Donald Bogle’s 1973 Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks. Bogle
offers a brief analysis of the representation of black children as pickaninnies,
black children who were “harmless, little screwball creation[s] whose eyes
popped, whose hair stood on end with the least excitement, and whose
antics were pleasant and diverting.” He discusses the development of the
Our Gang shorts (1922–1944), renamed The Little Rascals in 1951, and
details the film’s pickaninny characters. While Bogle does acknowledge the
racist dialect of the black child characters—lots of “I is’s, you is’s, and we
was’s”—he points out that “for the most part the approach to the rela-
tionship of the black children with the whites was almost as if there were
no such thing as race at all,” an innovative approach for the Jim Crow
era.84 In From Sambo to Superspade, Daniel J. Leab makes no distinction
between black adult actors and black child actors, and extends Bogle’s
look at the Our Gang shorts by focusing on industry specifics, such as
salaries: “‘Sunshine Sammy in the early 1920s was paid $250 a week by
producers … at a time when equally popular white child actors earned five
times as much.”85 The salary disparity between black and white child stars
exemplifies the industry’s non-recognition of the “star” status of black
child actors. Christopher P. Lehman looks at black images in early 1900s
short animation films in The Colored Cartoon. In animation, the “Sambo”
black child became a stock character in comedy shorts. According to
Lehman, “Sambo proved a geographically adaptable character, sometimes
depicted as an African boy and at other times as an African American boy.”
The Sambo child was a “dimwitted, gullible, helpless African American
boy … who falls for the pranks of white neighborhood boys.” Lehman
also notes that the “proper ‘place’ of African Americans in these cartoons
remained in the rural South,” a location which we will see shift to the
urban “jungle” in later cinematic depictions of black children.86
What these scholars of early cinema demonstrate is that the black
child has been present in American film since its beginning, but has not
been the focus of specific theoretical or aesthetic attention. Black chil-
dren were often used as “props” in cinema, even the cinema of the first
black director, Oscar Micheaux.87 In the foundational works on black
film, such as Manthia Diawara’s Black American Cinema, Thomas Cripps’
Making Movies Black, Ed Guerrero’s Framing Blackness, Mark A. Read’s
Redefining Black Film and Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American
Film Now, James Snead’s White Screens, Black Images, Valerie Smith’s
Representing Blackness, and Gladstone L. Yearwood’s Black Film as a
Signifying Practice, scholars rightly examine the long legacy of racism in
Hollywood film production, distribution, consumption, and aesthetics,
but none looks at the black child character as an artifact of rich cultural
meaning within any of those contexts.88 It is the richness and cultural sig-
nificance of the black child image to the broader landscape of American
cinema that this study seeks to examine.
44 D. OLSON
The Black Child in American Film

The pickaninny character was the most common cinematic image of a
black child. The pickaninny character ideologically implicates black chil-
dren as lacking “civilized” tendencies such as manners, proper speech, and
intelligence. As Santiago-Valles describes, the pickaninny “insinuate[s] an
arrested development … the psycho-biological disorder of backwardness,”
an aesthetic cultural production in which black children are visualized as
blackward, biologically and intellectually inferior to white children.89 In
1922, the short film series Our Gang, produced by Hal Roach Studios
(recreated for television as The Little Rascals in 1955), exemplified the cul-
tural image of the pickaninny character on the big screen. The Our Gang
shorts were widely popular in the early twentieth century; the Our Gang
one-reel film Bored of Education was even nominated for an Academy
Award in 1936, suggesting the film’s wide audience appeal.
The Our Gang films featured a rascally group of children who get into
scrapes and constantly skip school. Within the group, and over the length
of the series, there were five black child characters who embodied the
pickaninny stereotype: Sunshine Sammy or Pickaninny Sammy (the very
first black child star, played by Frederick Ernest Morrison and, ironically,
the least stereotypical image), Pineapple (Eugene “Gene” Jackson—
billed as Farina’s older brother, Pineapple only starred in six silent shorts
in 1922–1923), Farina (Allan Hoskins), Stymie (Matthew Beard), and
Buckwheat (Billie Thomas). All five children were classic pickaninny char-
acters, though, according to Heather A. Weaver, Stymie was the only one
who “diverges” slightly from the pickaninny traits of Sunshine Sammy,
Pineapple, Farina and Buckwheat. Stymie “is the kid who outsmarts
those around him, the one who puts in the last word … Stymie is a child-
evocation of Zip Coon, the city-slick minstrel character.”90 But while the
Our Gang black child characters were visually constructed as pickaninny
stereotypes, they were also the first black child characters who were not
treated differently by their white counterparts, subverting Jim Crow norms
and calling into question the separate-but-equal doctrine. The children
did everything together. As Daniel Leab argues “[the black children] were
members of the group, sharing in its adventures and misadventures.”91
The Our Gang films of the 1920s were not the only popular pickaninny
images. In the 1930s–1940s George Pal created a very popular animation
series called Puppetoons, that featured the Jasper series, starring a black
pickaninny boy and a cast of characters including Professor Scarecrow,
Jim Dandy, and Inky-poo. The Jasper puppet is a classic pickaninny image
of a “little black boy who gets into all sorts of trouble.”92 As the Our
Gang children and the Jasper character illustrates, the pickaninny image
elided gender from very young black children and presented them as cari-
catures of “real” children: “black-lined bug-eyes resembling a raccoon’s,
the enormous lips of a fish, a grotesquely riotous grin, and the dark, small
build, and wild behavior of monkeys and chimps.”93 In the case of Jasper,
his pink and yellow shirt (often considered feminine colors in the modern
age) cast doubt on his gender, or at the very least suggest a feminine boy,
exemplifying the genderlessness of the pickaninny character.
The pickaninny image, most often set in rural or suburban America,
was the staple image of black children throughout the decades leading up
to the late 1950s and into the 1960s, when a shift in black child imag-
ery occurred. The civil rights era saw a transition from the mostly harm-
less pickaninny youngster to a more disturbing depiction of the violent,
criminal, urban black male youth, which quickly became the stock image
for black boys. Not since Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) had black
male characters been portrayed in cinema as such a significant threat to
whites. Culturally converging forces of the civil rights movement, the rise
of the women’s movement, Vietnam War protests, and widespread youth
resistance against and disillusionment with normative white middle-class
values were reflected and interrogated by Hollywood films of that time.
Donald Bogle explains:
In the 1960s, in rejecting the black bourgeoisie that had aided and abetted
white America through its attempts at cultural assimilation, the new rising
militant black classes came to identify blackness with the degrading condi-
tions imposed on black America by white America. In reaction to this, they
sought to glamorize poverty and the ghetto. To be really black one had to
suffer, suffer, suffer. No longer was it despicable that human beings had to
live in tenements with rats, roaches, and filth. Instead, such an existence was
viewed as ‘ennobling’.94
The Blackboard Jungle (1955), directed by Richard Brooks, is a Hollywood

film that helped normalize the notion of the “savage urban jungle” in the
popular imagination. As Dan Leopard observes, the film’s trailer describes
the story as “torn from big city savagery” and the youth as “teenage terror
in the schools.”95 The film stars Glenn Ford as Rick Dadier, a teacher with
a mission to connect with the school’s working-class students, and Sidney
46 D. OLSON
Fig. 2.9 The Blackboard Jungle. Directed by Richard Brooks. Los Angeles:
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955. frame grab
Poitier as Gregory Miller, the black student with a chip on his shoul-
der, who in the end, saves Dadier from an attack by the other students.
The style is pure classic Hollywood: clean camera lines, clear narrative
structure, conventional editing. The first shot of the school grounds in
Blackboard Jungle sets the tone of us versus them and the “otherness” of
poor and working-class children. The shot of Dadier arriving at the school
is claustrophobic—a long shot of a city street flanked by tall buildings and
filled with children running half-naked through the hydrant water; behind
Dadier we see an iron fence topped with sharply pointed bars. Dadier
turns and walks towards the fence where a diverse group of teen boys is
dancing to “Rock Around the Clock,” drinking soda, smoking, loitering
(Fig. 2.9).
The camera follows Dadier as he makes his way through the dancing
youth, up the steps and into the building. The bars around the schoolyard
suggest containment or prison. Indeed, the “connection” Dadier hopes
to make is to “contain” their behavior, their difference, in order to guide
the students to conform to acceptable social norms, to accept their educa-
tion into middle-class, bourgeois values. The film was lauded as affirm-
ing the “moral panic about youth deviance in the postwar era,”96 but
it also established a pattern of portraying urban poor and working-class
neighborhoods as jungles and people of color (despite The Blackboard

Jungle featuring a diverse cast, and despite Poitier’s character protecting
Dadier) as the savages that inhabit it. As Philip Cohen points out “urban
jungles, concrete jungles, even blackboard jungles, where mobs of youth
rampaged, and decent citizens feared to tread, were headline features of
the popular press throughout the 1960s.”97 And as Adam Golub astutely
shows, The Blackboard Jungle was hotly debated and disavowed among
educators as a fabrication and not like “real schools,” and yet was hugely
influential in forming public opinion about the “animal” nature of inner-
city black youth, even beyond US borders (Fig. 2.10).98
In contrast to the film’s opening shot, in the scene when Dadier goes
back to his college to ask his professors for help, the film visually reinforces
the urban/rural differences in youth, particularly notions of innocence:
the opening shot of the college is of a beautifully manicured lawn dotted
with full trees, well-dressed white students milling around. The shot sug-
gests openness and freedom—no bars—in direct contrast to the opening
shot of North Manual High School. The pastoral setting plays on estab-
lished notions of the carnal knowledge of city dwellers (of color) against
the purity and innocence of nature (gardens) associated with whiteness
(Fig. 2.11).99
Tellingly, when Dadier is walking with his professor, the camera is
slightly elevated and behind them is a group of white teens playing bas-
Fig. 2.10 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab

48 D. OLSON
ketball behind a chain-link fence—a fence that connotes a less volatile

containment. In fact, the chain-link in this scene suggests containment of
youth from the dangers without, while the North Manual High barred
fence suggests protection of those without from the dangerous youth
within. The dialogue in this scene contributes to the othering of the inner-
city youth:
Dadier: With these kind of students, why bother?

Professor: In this country, all children are entitled to an education.
Dadier: I’m not prepared for my job! You were my professor in college,
you should have taught me how to stop a fight in a classroom,
how to deal with an IQ of 66, how to quiet a class of screaming
animals. Oh why bother about them; they’ll survive on their
own.
Professor: But who wants wild animals on the street?
Dadier: If I’m going to be a lion tamer, I should teach with a chair and
a whip!
This exchange firmly characterizes the inner-city youth as animals in

contrast to the earlier university classroom scenes of white students qui-
etly studying and sitting calmly in class. The one concession the film does
make, however, is the auditorium scene where all the students stand to
sing God Bless America—there is one lone, black student, upper screen
right, whose face is partially obscured, singing along within the sea of
white youth, suggesting that “proper” behavior in black youth can only
be achieved when they are “surrounded” by whiteness. But that lone black
student’s image is overshadowed by what Golub argues is the “unreal
Blackboard Jungle” depiction of out-of-control black and brown youth,
which, unfortunately, became the standard image for many Hollywood
urban youth films to follow (Fig. 2.12).100
In contrast to The Blackboard Jungle, an independent filmmaker named
Shirley Clarke left an indelible mark on American cinema history with
her semi-documentary vision of black youth in The Cool World (1963).
Thomas F. Cohen states that Clarke has earned a “revered place in the
history of cinema” and her unique style became recognized by later film
scholars as “essential works of the New American Cinema.”101 While The
Cool World was not a Hollywood production, it is one of the first urban
black films and influenced other filmmakers and the ways in which they
portrayed black youth in later films, which is why I include it here.
The Cool World is a filmic anomaly within the canon of Hollywood urban
black imagery, a socially conscious look at a lived space (black ghetto) that
is often defined solely by its otherness to white suburbia. Although the
film was not widely seen at the time of its release, in terms of childhood
images, The Cool World marked a specific shift in the way black male youth
were constructed in later mainstream films. Though an independent film,
The Cool World combines Hollywood style with the cinema verité tradition
50 D. OLSON
of Italian neorealism that Paula J. Massood suggests is a “convergence of

texts and aesthetics from the time.”102 Its independent status allowed the
film to be experimental, sympathetic, and crushing compared to the typical
Hollywood fare that came before or after. Clarke’s use of documentary-
style camera movements lent verisimilitude to the urban jungle myth—an
erratic, wandering handheld camera that captures garbage blowing along
the street, a dog crossing in and out of the frame, quick pans, numerous
brief close-ups of people on the street, no extra-diegetic soundtrack, and
the lack of clear narrative structure all foreground a departure from the
“civilization” of classic Hollywood and suggests disorder, animality, and
an “other” worldliness that highlights the inner city as distinctly different.
Clarke’s camera style seems more intimate and spontaneous, and hence,
more “realistic,” when compared to The Blackboard Jungle’s classic antici-
pated pans, tilts, and shot-countershots.
Cool World’s aesthetic features function in what Ella Shohat and Robert
Stam describe as “anthropomorphic moralising,” in which complex socio-
political issues are treated as if they were individual failings, rather than
resulting from a broader cultural power dynamic.103 The film’s aesthetic
features suggest disorder, chaos, and being out of control, ideals that both
challenge and reinforce earlier filmic representations of inner-city black
life. Unlike The Blackboard Jungle, which is shot in the classic Hollywood
style of continuity editing, Ms. Clarke’s film follows the tradition of Italian
neorealist filmmaking: all of the exterior shots were on location in Harlem
in an abandoned apartment building and all the set pieces were authen-
tic, which Ms. Clarke scrounged from the tenement; the children are all
played by non-actors chosen from residents of the nearby streets where
Clarke shot the film; and the only actual actors in the film are the adults.
The Cool World is based on the 1959 novel by Warren Miller and released
in 1964, is one of the first urban, black youth films that presented the
“horrors of ghetto life” and the struggle of black youth to find an accept-
able masculinity that is separate from white expectation and approval.
The Cool World takes a significant step away from Richard Brooks’ 1955
Hollywood-styled The Blackboard Jungle. But Cool World, which opens
with a shot of an elevated train like The Blackboard Jungle, employs an air
of authenticity through its documentary-like production elements. Barry
Keith Grant argues that The Cool World is an “honest attempt”104 to pres-
ent the crossing boundaries of capitalism, white middle-class ideals, tradi-
tional gender roles, and socialized racism with black male coming-of-age.
The film follows 14-year-old Duke Custis (Hampton Clanton) in his pur-
Fig. 2.13 Duke Custis

(Hampton Clampton) in
The Cool World; directed
by Shirley Clarke.
Wiseman Film
Productions, 1963.
frame grab (The film is
not available on DVD,
but can be viewed here:
accessed 15 July 2015,
http://vdownload.eu/
watch/13039405-the-
cool-world-1963-by-
shirley-clarke.html)
suit of a gun—a Colt—with which he can then demonstrate his burgeon-

ing manhood: “Man, a piece [gun] is the key. It’s the screwdriver. You get
yourself a piece, why, then, everything opens up for you!” The significance
of his name as a referent to the John Wayne—“the Duke”—cowboy image
is a comment on the cultural production of white masculinity that func-
tions as the social marker for acceptable manhood, which has been histori-
cally denied to black males (Fig. 2.13).
Duke is a much grittier, less redeemable character than Sidney Poitier’s
Gregory Miller in Blackboard Jungle. Hampton Clampton plays Duke, a
14-year-old boy who is president of a street gang. Duke desires a gun so
that he can “prove” himself. Much like Michael (Sean Nelson) in Fresh
(discussed in Chap. 4), Duke’s desire for a gun suggests the complicated
relationality of circumstances beyond the boys’ control. Both Michael and
Duke “become the reality for us … the ‘real’ actor, merging with that of
the fictional boy of the story, and the fact that his soft, wide-lipped face is
not that of the ‘cool killer’ that he [Duke] wishes to be [and that Michael
actually becomes], makes [them] all the more credible and poignant.”
Aesthetically, Ms. Clarke’s handheld camera and numerous jump cuts—
“long random scenes of street life, faces, feet walking, lights at night”—
suggest reality.105 The seeming authenticity of the film masquerades
as truth to the social and cultural context of the film. And unlike The
Blackboard Jungle, and somewhat in Fresh as we will see, there is no “happy
ending” for Duke in The Cool World, as the cops lead Duke away to prison
52 D. OLSON
in the final scene of the film, satisfying the film’s underlying sense of the
“predetermined destiny” of failure and criminality for the black child. The
Cool World and its moralizing aesthetic functions as a precursor to later
Hollywood urban ghetto films that portrayed (and still do portray) urban
black youth as criminals.
The long history of portraying black children as non-children and/or
not innocent has carried over from literature and print images to cinema
and television. Many of the first short animated films were racist portrayals,
as we saw with George Pal’s Jasper and the Watermelons (1943) (Pal went
on to create 17 shorts of the then popular Jasper character). There are
many representations of black girls, for instance, that detail the differences
between the white child Little Eva and the black child Topsy from Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, which I will explore further in Chap. 3.106 Today the exclu-
sion of black children from the landscape and framework of what consti-
tutes childhood within print media and early cinema has shifted from the
blatant racism of such characters as Sambo and Topsy to modern portrayals
of black children that, while on the surface suggest autonomy and integra-
tion, nevertheless hint at the old stereotypes. As we will see, such practices
continue in films like Warriors (1979), Colors (1988), Boyz in the Hood
(1991), Menace II Society (1993), 187 (1997), and Training Day (2001).
Black childhood in contemporary cinema is almost exclusively portrayed
within urban settings and in particularly non-child-like (non-innocent)
circumstances—crime, drugs, violence, domestic upheaval, death—and far
removed from pastoral portrayals of childhood innocence.
As Julian Agyeman and Rachel Spooner argue, “for white people, the
‘inner city’ has become a coded term for the imagined deviance of people
of colour … In the white imagination, people of colour … [represent] an
urban, ‘alien’ environment, and the white landscape of rurality is aligned
with nativeness and the absence of evil or danger.”107 The following chap-
ters will interrogate the black child image in contemporary films. As I
began my inquiry into the representation of black children in cinema, I
found that many of the old stereotypes and characterizations were gender
specific, and so too were their modern counterparts within Hollywood
films.
The myth of white superiority, described as a “transcendental norm,”
remains a constant within the semiotic field of culturally raced identi-
ties.108 By exaggerating and then denigrating physical differences, whites
are able to construct an ordered universe that privileges whiteness (espe-
cially European whiteness) over any other ethnicity.109 In Western culture,
all ethnicities are defined by their relation to whiteness. This definition

is often gendered in the sense that, while blackness itself is socially con-
structed as the Other to whiteness, blacks are often Othered according to
their race and gender. W.E.B. du Bois introduced the notion of “double
consciousness” in which blacks know themselves through a “twoness,” a
doubling of their identity that frames their (personal) identity through the
“revelation” or (social) lens of the “other [white] world.”110 But added
to that double consciousness is also an othering by gender: the isolation
of specific race and gender differences, which have become stereotypes
and beliefs about the inherent nature of black genders, images that are
continually replicated via visual media. Though the rejection of blackness
itself is at the core of white racism, gender distinctions within blackness
reify and naturalize racial stereotypes. According to popular media images,
to be black and female is to exist in a space of negation of all that whites
consider feminine. As Patricia Hill Collins explains, black women are por-
trayed as “overly aggressive, unfeminine women … who emasculate their
lovers and husbands.”111 To be black and male is to be identified through
the white gaze as inherently criminal, beastly, and hypersexed.
In Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, Donald Bogle outlines
the many different stereotypes about African Americans that have been
replicated throughout American popular culture. As Bogle explains these
stereotypes functioned, not just to entertain whites, but to reinforce and
“[stress] Negro inferiority. Fun was poked at the American Negro by pre-
senting him as either a nitwit or a childlike lackey.”112 As I’ve suggested,
the “childlike” qualities that were attributed to African Americans were
not the endearing qualities normally associated with children: innocence,
purity, and perpetual wonder. Instead, in African American stereotypes,
innocence was characterized as ignorance, purity was either non-existent
or presented as a type of savagery, and notions of childlike wonder in
the African American stereotype were instead presented as perpetual—and
inherent—dumbness. In Chaps. 3 and 4, I will take a close look at popular
Hollywood films and their representation of African American children.
My discussion of the films will be organized by gender as there are signifi-
cant differences in how black girls and black boys are visually constructed,
geographically located, and politically positioned within Hollywood films.
While African American children populate many Hollywood films, they
are rarely the star or protagonist. When they do assume the atypical pro-
tagonist role, these children are often portrayed as the other, as an out-
sider, and in the context of Western notions of childhood, as existing in a
54 D. OLSON
space that is neither innocent nor pure; instead, they are often presented
as “victims in the making,” for the paternalistic white gaze.113 As I will
show, these children are positioned within a discursive framework that
renders their images as modern reworkings of some very old and persis-
tent stereotypes. Chapter 3 explores the images of black girls in cinema,
Chaps. 4 and 5 interrogate images of black male youth, and the conclu-
sion takes a brief look at the star power of Jaden Smith, son of academy
award-winning black actor Will Smith, who is the most well-known black
child in the world.
Notes
1. Lloyd deMause, History of Childhood (1974, rep. Northvale, NJ:
Jason Aronson, 1995), 1.
2. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York:
Vintage books, 1978).
3. Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Malden, MA:
Polity, 1992), 100.
4. Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, 137.
5. Adrian Wilson, “The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An
Appraisal of Philippe Ariès,” History and Theory 10, no. 2 (1980):
132–153. For other critiques of Ariès, see Lawrence Stone, “The
Massacre of the Innocents,” New York Review of Books 21.18 (Nov.
14, 1974): 27; and Harry Hendrick, Children and Childhood in
English Society, 1880–1990 (Cambridge UP, 1997).
6. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family
Life (Toronto: Jonathan Cape, LTD, 1962), 15.
7. Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhoods: A Study of Kafir Children
(London: Adam and Charles Black, 1906), 10–11.
8. Johannes Fabian, Time & the Other: How Anthropology Makes its
Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), ix–x.
9. Fabian, 30–34; see also Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without
a History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
10. Aries, Centuries, 414–415.
11. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1957),
100.
12. UNESCO Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989. http://
www.unesco.org/education/pdf/CHILD_E.PDF; also see Kriste
Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: The US Children’s Bureau
and Child Welfare, 1912–46 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,

1997).
13. The erasure of African history through colonialism has been well
documented. See William B. Cohen and James D. Le Sueur, The
French Encounter with Africans (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
UP, 2003); A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987); General History
of Africa (UNESCO, 1990); Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for
Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent (New York:
Avon books, 1991); Femi J. Kolapo and Kwabena O. Akurang-
Parry, African Agency and European Colonialism (Lanham,
Maryland: University Press of America, 2007).
14. Ariès, Centuries, 37.
15. Ariès, Centuries, 130–131.
16. Punch photo archive available at http://punch.photoshelter.com/
gallery/John-Leech-Cartoons/G0000Cba0BhAM_Ks/
17. Lloyd deMause, History of Childhood (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1974), 3.
18. Julius A. Elias, “The History of Childhood,” Rev. of The History of
Childhood by Lloyd deMause, Children’s Literature 5 (1976): 247.
19. Foucault, History of Sexuality vol.1, 146–147.
20. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press,
1967), 146.
21. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage, 1992), x.
22. Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society
Since 1500 (New York: Longman, 2005), 2.
23. Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 3–4.
24. Stearns, Children in World History, 6.
25. See Ellen Levin, Freedom’s Children (New York: Penguin (Putnam),
1993); Robert H. Mayer, When the Children Marched: The
Birmingham Civil Rights Movement (New York: Enslow Publishers,
2008); Melba Pattilo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry: Searing Memoir of
the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High School (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1995).
26. Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 350.
27. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); and
56 D. OLSON
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race,

Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 2010).
28. Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White
Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006), 5–6.
29. Christina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White
Children in the Jim Crow South (Louisville: University Press of
Kentucky, 2011), 24.
30. DuRocher, Raising Racists, 76–78.
31. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent State: The Child’s Part in
Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), xvii.
32. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, 43.
35. The process of racializing factory work by children is explained in
detail in Sallee.
36. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing African American
Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York
University Press, 2011), 34.
37. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, 43.
38. For more on indentured servitude, see Don Jordan and Michael
Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves
in America (New York: NYU Press, 2008) or David Northrup,
Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
39. Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1998), 8.
40. Ariés, Centuries, 106.
41. Carl Linneaus (1707–1778), a Swedish botanist, was the first to
classify plants, laying the groundwork for the modern biological
naming system in Systema Naturae 1758.
42.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 32.
Linneaus’ sixth category was the monstrous, which included
dwarfs, giants and others deemed not “normal.”
43. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 32–33.
44. Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence, 15.
45. Martin Postle, “‘The Age of Innocence’ Child Portraiture in

Georgian Art and Society,” in Pictures of Innocence: Portraits of
Children from Hogarth to Lawrence (Bath: Holburne Museum of
Art, 2005), 7–8.
46. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 33.
47. Martin Postle, “‘The Age of Innocence’” Child Portraiture in

Georgian Art and Society”, in Pictures of Innocence: Portraits of
Children from Hogarth to Lawrence, (Bath: Holburne Museum of
Art, 2005), 7–8.
48. Jeanette Sky, “Myths of Innocence and Imagination: The Case of
the Fairy Tale,” Literature & Theology 16, no. 4 (2002): 363.
49. Sky, “Myths of Innocence,” 369.
50. “The Coon Character: Coons as Alligator Bait,” AuthenticHistory.
com, accessed 15 July 2015, http://www.authentichistory.com/
diversity/african/3-coon/7-alligator/index.html
51. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and

Blacks in Western Popular Culture (Amsterdam: Pictures: Cosmic
Illusion Pictures Foundation, 1992), 170; Higgonet, Pictures of
Innocence, 120.
52. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 74.
53. Bannerman’s original Sambo character was not a racist portrayal
and is in fact, an uplifting and positive portrayal of childhood won-
der and adventure. But later American versions of the story
embraced the prevailing Jim Crow visual rhetoric in the portrayal
of Little Sambo. For detailed imagery, including film clips, of the
pickaninny and Sambo character see Authentichistory.com,
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/
2-pickaninny/
54. Helen Bannerman, The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899, repr.
New York: HarperCollins, 1922), George Remi, Tintin in the
Congo (1930, repr. Egmont Books, 2013), Enid Blyton, Noddy
goes to Toyland (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Lt.,1949),
and Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (New York:
Alfred A. Knopff, 1964, 1973).
55. David Delaney, “The Space that Race Makes,” The Professional
Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 7.
56. Wilma King, Stolen Childhoods: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century
America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 76–80.
58 D. OLSON
57. Brooke Neely and Michelle Samura, “Social Geographies of Race:

Connecting Race and Space,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 11
(2011): 1932.
58. McCann, Eugene J. “Race, Protest, and Public Space: Contextualizing
Lefebvre in the U.S. City.” Antipode 31, no. 2 (1999): 163–184.
59. See Debbie Olson, “Last in Space: The “Black” Hole in Children’s
Science Fiction Films,” The Galaxy is Rated G: Essays on Children’s
Science Fiction Film and Television, ed. Ryan Neighbors (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2011), 64–82.
60. Neely and Samura 1944.
61. Delaney 11.
62. Paul Cloke and Owain Jones, “‘Unclaimed Territory’: Childhood
and Disordered Space(s).” Social and Cultural Geography 6, no. 3
(2005): 326.
63. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (New
York: The Viking Press, 1973), 13.
64. Baker, From Savage to Negro, 12; J. Robert Constantine, “The
Ignoble Savage, An Eighteenth Century Literary Stereotype.”
Phylon 27, no. 2 (1966): 171–179; M. van Wyk Smith, “The
Origins of Some Victorian Images of Africa.” English in Africa 6,
no. 1 (1979): 16; see also William Beinart and Katie McKeown,
“Wildlife Media and Representations of Africa, 1950s–1970s.”
Environmental History 14 (2009): 429–452.
65. M. van Wyk Smith, “The Origins,” 25. This description is by Mrs.
J. Marcet in 1830 during the British march against the Ashante.
66. For a list of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel literature, see
the special collections page of Bryn Mawr College: http://www.
brynmawr.edu/library/speccoll/guides/travel/africa.html
67. Constantine, “The Ignoble Savage,” 173, 179. See also Amy

J. Staples, “Safari Adventure: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in
Africa.” Film History 18, no. 4 (2006): 392–411.
68. Margaret Hunt, “Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler’s Gaze in
Eighteenth-Century England.” Journal of British Studies 32, no. 4
(1993): 339, 345.
69. M. van Wyk Smith, “The Origins of Some,” 13, 15.
70. Constantine, “The Ignoble Savage,” 173, 179. See also Amy

J. Staples, “Safari Adventure: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in
Africa.” Film History 18, no. 4 (2006): 392–411.
71. Achebe, Chinua, “An Image of Africa.” Massachusetts Review 18,
no. 4 (1977): 798.
2. Achebe, “An Image of,” 790.

7
73. Baker, From Savage to Negro, 4.
74.
Silvana Palma, “The Seen, the Unseen, the Invented:
Misrepresentations of African ‘Otherness’ in the Making of a
Colony, Eritrea, 1985–1896.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines XLV
(1), no. 177 (2005): 39.
75. Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5.
76. Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “‘Still Longing for de Old Plantation’: The
Visual Parodies and Racial National Imaginary of US Overseas
Expansionism, 1898–1903.” American Studies International 37,
no. 3 (1999): 22.
77. Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in
Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), 39.
78. Midori, Todayama, “Revival of an Old Image: The Story of Little
Black Sambo in Japan.” Bookbird 45.1 (2007): 23–30, 24. For
more on Little Black Sambo see Sanjay Sircar, “Little Brown Sanjay
and Little Black Sambo: Childhood Reading, Adult Rereading;
Colonial Text and Post-Colonial Reception.” The Lion and the
Unicorn 48, no. 1 (2004): 131–156; Elizabeth Hay, Sambo Sahib:
The Story of Little Black Sambo and Helen Bannerman (Edinburgh:
Paul Harris Publishing, 1981); “Caricatures of African Americans:
The Pickaninny,” Authentichistory.com, accessed 15 July 2015,
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/
2-pickaninny/
79. The original illustrated Little Black Sambo by Bannerman can be
viewed at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/storyoflittle-
blabanner. An American version that distorts Bannerman’s Sambo
can be viewed at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/
LittleBlackSambo1935UbIwerks-ComicolorCartoon
80. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American film
1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 8, 12,
14–15.
81. The complete caption that accompanied the release of Ten

Pickaninnies reads: “Imagine ten pickaninnies turned loose and on
mischief bent. Farmer catches one leaving but Nine. Nine Happy
Snowballs on a Swing gate. One gets knocked out then there are
Eight. Eight Black Cherubs, swimming at “Eleven,” Mammy
catches “Rastus,” that leaves Seven. Seven Jolly Coons on a Tramp
60 D. OLSON
play tricks. Tramp wakes up and nabs one vamoose the Six. Six Bad
“Chillun” fooling ‘round a Hive, Bees get busy now there’s only
Five. Five Inky Kids crawl thro’ a hencoop door, Farmer scares one
away that leaves Four. Four Smoky Kids hunting up a Tree. Gun
explodes, whiz! “Skiddo” the Three. Three Black Lambs nothing
else to do. Investigate a deep Well now there’s Two. Two Cute
Ebonites with Auntie having fun. “Mandy” gets a ducking all gone
but One. One Chubby Coonlet with a toy Pop-gun. Monkeyed
‘round a gaitor now there’s None’” (Ten Pickaninnies, Internet
Movie Database, accessed 15 July 2015, http://www.imdb.com/
title/tt0139642/). The short is a comedy that includes shooting,
hitting, frightening, severely stinging, and “feeding” a black child
to an alligator, a testament to early notions of black children as
vermin.
82. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the
Edison Manufacturing Company (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1991), 422.
83. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 19.
84. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 7, 23.
85. Leab, Sambo to Superspade, 54.
86. Christopher P. Lehman, The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation
in American Animated Short Films, 1907–1954 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 9–11.
87. See Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds. Oscar
Micheaux & His Circle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2001); Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself into
History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
88. Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge,
1993); Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993); Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Mark A. Read,
Redefining Black Film (University of California Press, 1993) and
Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); James Snead, White Screens,
Black Images (New York: Routledge, 1994); Valerie Smith, ed.,
Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Brunswick:
Rutgers, The State University, 1997); Gladstone L. Yearwood,
Black Film as a Signifying Practice (Trenton, NJ: Africa World

Press, 2000).
89. Santiago-Valles, “Still Longing for de Ole Plantation,” 30.
90. Heather A. Weaver, “Together but Unequal: Race and Education
in Our Gang.” The Journal of American Culture 34, no. 4 (2011):
340.
91. Leab, Sambo to Superspade, 48.
92. Many of the Puppetoons are available on YouTube or at the para-
mount archives: https://archive.org/details/George.Pal.
Puppetoon..Jasper.and.the.Beanstalk..Paramount.1945
93. Richard Neupert, “Trouble in Watermelon Land: George Pal and
the Little Jasper Cartoons.” Film Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2001): 21,
30.
94. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 234–35.
95. Dan Leopard, “Blackboard Jungle: The Ethnographic Narratives
of Education on Film.” Cinema Journal 46, no. 4 (2007): 27.
96. Adam Golub, “They Turned a School into a Jungle!: How The
Blackboard Jungle Redefined the Educational Crisis in Postwar
America.” Film & History 39, no. 1 (2009): 21.
97. Philip Cohen, “Tarzan and the Jungle Bunnies.” New Formation
5, no. 1 (1988): 26.
98. Adam Golub, “A Transnational Tale of Terror: The Blackboard
Jungle in Global Perspective.” Red Feather Journal 3, no. 1 (2012):
1–10.
99. See David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reakion Books,

2000).
100. Golub, “They Turned,” 29.
101. Thomas F. Cohen, “After the New American Cinema: Shirley

Clarke’s Video Work as Performance and Document.” Journal of
Film and Video 64, no. 1–2 (2012): 57–58.
102. Paula J. Massood, “The Cool World.” Quarterly Review of Film
and Video 27, no. 5 (2010): 434.
103. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (New

York: Routledge, 1994), 201.
104. Barry Keith Grant, “When Worlds Collide: The Cool World.” Film/
Literature Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1990): 186.
105. Harriet Polt, Review of “The Cool World by Shirley Clarke: Fred
Wiseman.” Film Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1963–1964): 34–35.
62 D. OLSON
106. Some of the more famous versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are by
directors Edwin S. Porter, 1903, and Harry A. Pollard, 1927.
According to Donald Bogle, it was Porter’s 12 minute portrayal of
Uncle Tom (played by a white man in blackface) that introduced
black characters to the silver screen. Pollard’s 1927 version was the
first film to cast a black actor, James B. Lowe, in the role of Uncle
Tom. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 3–4.
107. Julian Agyeman and Rachel Spooner, “Ethnicity and the Rural
Environment,” Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness,
Marginalization, and Rurality, Paul Coke and Jo Little, eds.
(London: Routledge, 1997), 199.
108. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 3.
109. Mary Douglass, Purity and Danger (1966, repr. New York:
Routledge, 2002), 5.
110. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People.” Atlantic Monthly
August 1897. From The Souls of Black Folk, Project Gutenberg,
accessed 15 July 2015, http://www.gutenberg.org/
files/408/408-h/408-h.htm
111.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 268.
112. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (New
York: The Viking Press, 1973), 4.
113. Anna Mae Duane, Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence,
Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2011), 127.
CHAPTER 3
African American Girls in Hollywood

Cinema
In 1810, ship surgeon Alexander Dunlop returned to England from South

Africa bearing numerous curiosities from the Dark Continent. One of
these specimens was a San woman named Saartjie Baartman, who would
later be known throughout Europe as the “Hottentot Venus.” Dunlop
sold Baartman to Hendrick Cezar, a showman in London, who promptly
set Baartman up as a cultural “oddity” because of her unusually large but-
tocks (steatopygia) and, as was advertised, her “primitive” genitalia—an
elongated labia.1 The practice of putting people from different cultures
on display for white visual consumption has a long history in Europe.
According to Lindfors, “Live Eskimos [were] being exhibited in Bristol as
early as 1501 … Brazilian Indians building their own village in Rouen in
the 1550s … ‘Virginians’ on the Thames in 1603, and … numerous other
native human specimens from the New World, Africa, Asia, Australia, and
the Pacific Islands were conveyed to European cities and towns as biologi-
cal curiosities.” During the years of heightened colonialism (seventeenth
to the mid-nineteenth centuries), such ethnographic displays were com-
mon throughout Europe and America. Saartjie Baartman’s humiliating
display of her large buttocks and extended labia, however, functioned to
establish and reinforce cultural notions of the superior beauty (milk-white
skin; straight, flowing hair; small nose and lips; “delicate” facial features)
and femininity (weakness, modesty, self-control, compassion, sensitivity,
tolerance, fragility, submissiveness, and graceful movements) of white
women, and helped establish perceptions of black women as the “mon-
strous” opposite to the white female model (Fig. 3.1).

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_3
64 D. OLSON
Fig. 3.1 Popular representation of Saartjie Baartman, Dec 31, 1809, Library of
Congress, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
item/2007680266/
Saartjie Baartman’s experience, and particularly her visual depictions,

her “on-display-ness,” underscores the way the black body has been sys-
tematically linked to notions of abnormality in relation to the white body
(Fig. 3.1). George Yancy, in his compelling book Black Bodies, White
Gazes, describes the way the black body is ritually defined in relation to
whiteness: “From the perspective of whiteness, the black body is criminal-
ity itself. It is the monstrous; it is that which is to be feared and yet desired,
AFRICAN AMERICAN GIRLS IN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA 65
sought out in forbidden white sexual adventures and fantasies; it is con-

structed as a source of white despair and anguish, an anomaly of nature,
the essence of vulgarity and immorality.”2
As Yancy points out, “Black existence constitutes a threat,” and the
demonization of the black body by whites has persisted throughout his-
tory. Yancy argues the black body is a discursive entity, bound to the inter-
stices of “social semiotics” where the black body is “less of a thing or
being, than a shifting or changing historical meaning that is subject to
cultural configuration and reconfiguration.” And although cultural con-
figurations are constantly in flux, the way the black body is discursively
juxtaposed against the white body—“Momma, See the Negro! I’m fright-
ened!”—continues the Western myth of white superiority.3
Mammy and Jezebel
The stereotype of black females as oversexed, asexual, or animalistic not
only applies to adult females but also to black female children. And while
the most historically common stereotype of the black child is the picka-
ninny character—an unkempt, ragamuffin black child normally with bulg-
ing eyes and a cacophony of ponytails that stick up all around the child’s
head—many of the general stereotypes about black adults are also recre-
ated in portrayals of black children.
In Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and
Visual Culture, Carol E. Henderson argues that black women are placed
“outside the ‘acceptable’ conceptualizations of womanhood that have his-
torically made black women the monstrous Other, and white women the
emblems of virtue and beauty.” Black women have been historically por-
trayed as either the oversexed Jezebel character—in such films as Birth of
a Nation (1916), Pam Greer’s (in)famous Foxy Brown (1974) and Halle
Berry’s role in Monster’s Ball (2001), (Angela Bassett was first offered the
role, but refused specifically because it was a stereotypical Jezebel role)
or the passive and non-sexual mammy character—such as in Birth of a
Nation, Gone with the Wind (1934), Pinky (1949), Whoopie Goldberg’s
role in Corina, Corina (1999), and more recently, perhaps arguably, Tyler
Perry’s Medea character. This duality is a variation of the “Madonna/
Whore” construct in which many women, of all races, are depicted in
popular culture as either angelic with limited sexual needs, subservient,
and in need of protection, or independent, sexually deviant, and deserving
of punishment. Carol E. Henderson states that when the black female was
66 D. OLSON
depicted visually it was either as a “sexualized mythology or a neutered

anomaly, defined by her sexuality, or her lack of it.”4 A woman who enjoys
sex, who is active in pursuing sex, is (still) viewed culturally as less feminine
than a woman who is subservient to men and sexually non-aggressive. As
victims of white oppression and slavery, black women have historically
had to fight the racism battle on two fronts: their humanity and their
femininity.
Similar to the historical white strategy of emasculating black men, and
thereby subjugating the black male, white slave-masters had to de-feminize
the black female in order to rationalize their systematic rape of her. Black
slave women were also defeminized as a strategy to raise the status of white
womanhood. If black women were not “real” women, then they cannot
be raped. In her compelling study Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the
Era of Suffrage and Segregation, Estelle B. Freedman describes the south-
ern beliefs about rape that “strongly shaped definitions of rape through-
out the nation: first, that black women could not be raped, and second,
that black men threatened white women’s virtue.” During slavery, because
black women were possessions with no rights of citizenship, their sexual
violation did not constitute rape. And the persistent depiction of black
woman as “sexually lascivious provided an excuse for imagining that they
always consented.”5 These notions about black women’s sexuality have
persisted within cultural discourse since colonial times and still form part
of the way modern black women are presented. As Henderson suggests
there is an “inextricable link between idea and subject formation and the
historic conditions that shape our perspectives of flesh and bone.”6 Such
discursive notions about black lasciviousness during colonialism and slav-
ery gave life to beliefs (that still persist today) that black women were
somehow not feminine, not “real” women, particularly when contrasted
with the “virtuous” white woman image.
In his discussion of the mammy character, David Pilgrim writes: “The
mammy caricature was deliberately constructed to suggest ugliness.
Mammy was portrayed as dark-skinned, often pitch black, in a society that
regarded black skin as ugly, tainted. She was obese, sometimes morbidly
overweight. Moreover, she was often portrayed as old, or at least middle-
aged. The attempt was to desexualize mammy.”7 The mammy caricature
functioned as a discursive counter to the sexually permissive black woman.
As Norma Manatu argues, from the first encounter with white people,
black African women were not viewed as women, but as lesser than white
women because of their “perceived absence of femininity,”8 a myth that
has been, and still is, perpetuated through visual images of the black
mammy figure in American popular culture. In Black Feminist Thought,
Patricia Hill Collins describes the mammy stereotype as:
the faithful, obedient domestic servant. Created to justify the economic

exploitation of house slaves and sustained to explain Black women’s long-
standing restriction to domestic service, the mammy image represents the
normative yard-stick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior. By loving,
nurturing, and caring for her white children and “family” better than her
own, the mammy symbolizes the dominant group’s perception of the ideal
Black female relationship to elite white male power. Even though she may
be well loved and may wield considerable authority in her white “family,”
the mammy still knows her “place” as obedient servant. She has accepted
her subordination.9
The polar opposite of the mammy figure, however, is the Jezebel char-
acter, who, as a stereotype rooted in old European notions of the “lusty
Moor,”10 depicts strong black women or autonomous black women
(deemed “aggressive”) as oversexed. Manatu suggests that “no matter
how virtuous the black woman, no matter how feminine, she is more
likely than not to be viewed as hypersexed because black women’s virtue
has had no place in the ‘feminine’ mythos of US culture.”11 Whites have
historically put forth the notion that blacks were “intellectually inferior,
culturally stunted, morally underdeveloped, and [express] animal-like sex-
ually.”12 Black women are regularly portrayed in cinema as animalistic,
overly sexual, and aggressive. As Sander Gilman argues, the “Hottentot
remained representative of the essence of the black, especially the black
female.”13 David Pilgrim describes the Jezebel stereotype:
The Jezebel images which defame African women may be viewed in two
broad categories: pathetic others and exotic others. Pathetic others include
those depictions of African women as physically unattractive, unintelligent,
and uncivilized. These images suggest that African women in particular and
black women in general possess aberrant physical, social, and cultural traits.
The African woman’s features are distorted—her lips are exaggerated, her
breasts sag, she is often inebriated. The pathetic other, like the Mammy
caricature before her, is drawn to refute the claim that white men find black
women sexually appealing. Yet, this depiction of the African woman has an
obvious sexual component: she is often placed in a sexual setting, naked or
near naked, inebriated or holding a drink, her eyes suggesting a sexual long-
ing. She is a sexual being, but not one that white men would consider.14
68 D. OLSON
Today the Jezebel stereotype is regularly splashed across television—par-

ticularly music videos, cinema, and the Internet. The image of the Jezebel
provides a “framing of the black female experience” for the audience,
who are gratified at “witnessing” what they have long believed about the
hypersexed black woman.15
Both of these stereotypes are classic iconography for black women. But
both stereotypes are also part of the way young black girls are also pre-
sented in contemporary cinema. Today, it is common for black teen girls
to be portrayed as Jezebels across all media platforms: “Jezebel images
also [reveal] that black female children are sexually objectified. Black girls,
with the faces of pre-teenagers, are [portrayed] with adult sized buttocks,
which are exposed. They are naked, scantily clad, or hiding seductively
behind towels, blankets, trees, or other objects … [which] suggests that
black females are sexually active and sexually irresponsible even as small
children.”16 The sexualized images of black girls often lack an element of
romance—they are fully object, desired for momentary physical satisfac-
tion and hence are portrayed as raw, pure sexual energy. White girls, in
contrast, are sexualized as inherently innocent (the “little girl” appeal),
exploring their sexuality (as opposed to owning it) and needing the “help”
of the white male to achieve knowledge of her sexuality. Historically, white
girls in popular imagery are the desirable romantic partner, while black
girls are rarely the desirable romantic partner. Instead, black girls are often
positioned as the le fruit interdit, or the exotic dark temptress, the Jezebel.
Jezebel characters are found in such popular films as Waiting to Exhale
(1995), Bring it On (2000), Coyote Ugly (2000), and Monster’s Ball (2001)
for which Halle Berry won an Oscar for Best Actress. Numerous rap/hip-
hop artists feature Jezebel characters in their music videos: “Respect” by
Notorious B.I.G., “Pause for Porno” by Dr. Dre, Cali Swag District, and
most Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne videos, as well as numerous oth-
ers. The below image, from “Twerkit” by Busta Rhymes (2013) is one
example of the ways in which young black women are portrayed as the
overtly sexual Jezebel figure, their worth equated with their bottom size.
The video features rapper Nicki Minaj, (who was judge on season 12 of
mainstream hit TV show American Idol [Fox 2013]) whose derrière is the
sole focus of the men with her. And while dancing itself can be a positive
expression of sexuality, the sole purpose of the majority of women in these
types of music videos is to expose their bottoms for male visual pleasure
(Fig. 3.2).
Fig. 3.2 Busta Rhymes “Twerkit,” frame grab, accessed 15 July 2015, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j47MYli8pj4
And there is a growing body of scholarship on the overtly sexual-

ized images of black girls in music videos. According to a study by
Shani H. Peterson, et al., “Closer examinations of rap music videos have
shown that African American women are often portrayed as hypersexual,
materialistic, and amoral. Further, their depiction often overemphasizes
their sexualized, physical appearance and places them as decorative objects
rather than active agents.”17 Even with the growing social awareness of
70 D. OLSON
the sexualization of young black women, images such as the above persist
in rap and hip hop, as well as Hollywood cinema. Though slavery is well
in the past, these are not new stereotypes or characterizations; rather, they
are very old beliefs repackaged and represented within new frameworks.
Today, teen black girls are routinely depicted in reality television shows
and music videos as hypersexual and aggressive. Such images, in contrast
to white teen girl images, which most often emphasize innocence and
purity, instead suggest “the overt sexuality of the black child,” and espe-
cially poor black girls, drawing attention to the power of white discourse
to frame cultural notions of childhood.18
The consistent Hollywood portrayal, both discursively and visually, of
black children as both savage and sexual in relation to white children and
Western notions of childhood, constitute a juxtaposition that helps rein-
force the “larger cultural politics of innocence” from which the black child
is ritually excluded.19 Early depictions of black children were of a harmless,
though ignorant savagery (uncivilized, uncultured, animalistic), such as the
portrayal of Sunshine Sammy, Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat of the Little
Rascals/Our Gang series discussed in Chap. 2.20 For instance, Sunshine
Sammy as the uncivilized pickaninny was often juxtaposed against a “civi-
lized” white child like in the silent episode “Donkey Delivery Company”
(1922) where a mother faints at the shock of finding Sunshine Sammy in
her white son’s clothing. In the Little Rascal’s episode “Little Daddy”
(1931) Stymie and Farina discuss why “daddy’s in jail” and in “A Lad an’
a Lamp” (1932) Stymie asks the lamp for some “chicken” and to “get
his daddy outta jail”: his requests both historically rooted and are persis-
tent stereotypes about blacks. This type of savagery was presented within
the context of culturally dominant beliefs about inherent black stupidity,
and amid prevalent fears of black (mostly male) aggression, particularly
sexual aggression. Hill Collins states that poor and working-class black
children are often portrayed in the media as “aggressive, undisciplined,
unruly, and unsuitable playmates for white children of any social class.”21
Such widespread portrayal of black children as renegade and undisciplined
has evolved to more positive portrayals in a very few Hollywood films, for
instance the recent After Earth (M. Night Shayamalan, 2013) co-starring
Jaden Smith, son of Will Smith (also co-starring) and Jada Pinkett-Smith.
Jaden’s character is much improved from the clownish youth portrayal of
Sunshine Sammy or Buckwheat, and he is intelligent and not portrayed
in any way as a pickaninny. But, as I will discuss in Chap. 6, Jaden’s char-
acter is still not equal to a white child hero. And Jaden Smith is quite the
exception to the rule: After Earth was not the anticipated box-office hit,
coming in third at its opening, almost unheard of for a Will Smith action
film. And both Jaden’s parents are producers of the film and so have influ-
ence in Jaden’s casting.22 While After Earth breaks new ground as the first
Hollywood science fiction film to star a young black male child, its depic-
tion of the child hero is much less groundbreaking.
As I will show in the following discussion, black female children are
often portrayed in cinema today within the framework of historically
informed stereotypes. Finding popular films that star a black child is rare
indeed. The films I will discuss all feature a black child protagonist, with
Precious and Beasts of the Southern Wild garnering multiple Academy
Award nominations.23 Both of these films were widely viewed by domestic
and international audiences; though both were not Hollywood produced,
they became a part of the Hollywood production machine as their popu-
larity grew. Being honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences lends weight to the argument that popular films that present ste-
reotypical images of blacks tend to reinforce beliefs in the validity of the
stereotype. The last film choice, Butter, was not a hit by any means, gross-
ing only $176,706 world wide, but is an example of the ways even small-
budget, contemporary Hollywood films tend to position black children
as outsiders to American childhood. And in the case of Butter, the extra-
diegetic race discourse surrounding the film’s promotion provides another
critical aspect to the ways in which black children are either stereotyped or
absented from mainstream cinema.
Monstrous Mammies in Lee Daniels’ Precious

Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniels,
and produced by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, was released in 2009
to wide critical acclaim. It is the story of a morbidly obese black teenage
girl named Clarice Precious Jones who suffers horrendous abuse at the
hands of both her mother and her father. She is raped multiple times by
her father (and has two children by him), beaten by her mother (who
hates Precious for “stealing my man”) and is bullied at school by the other
teens. The film was praised by some reviewers as a “must see,” a rare cin-
ematic experience that “exhibit[s] the courage and perseverance that gives
us all hope.”24 Teresa Wiltz, of The Root, claims Precious is a film that will
make the viewer “feel with her, through her,”25 while David Hennessee
argues that Precious is “singular, moving, and disturbing,” with a narrative
72 D. OLSON
that suggests we “feel good about a character’s struggles because they are
ultimately overcome.”26 Yet not all the critical response to Precious has
been so uplifting. Ed Gonzales, of Slant magazine (slantmagazine.com),
describes the film as an “impeccably acted piece of trash—an exploita-
tion film that shamelessly strokes its audience’s sense of righteous indig-
nation” and a film “For The Stuff White People Like” genre. Gonzalez
opines that the film “simplifies” Precious’ longing for escape and for a
loving, secure family.27 Armond White, writing for NYPress, character-
izes the film as “ghetto tragedy,” a “post hip-hop freak show” in which
the film’s star, Gabourey Sidibe, is “so obese her face seems bloated into
a permanent pout.” White states that “not since Birth of a Nation has a
mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as
Precious.”28 Body shaming aside, the range of responses to the film either
romanticizes Precious’ childhood and struggle, or critiques the depiction
as a stereotype.
Black children and black childhood are often ostracized from the land-
scape of the culturally normative ideal of childhood. Even issues such as
child abuse are often visually linked to blackness. Black children (mostly
boys) are often portrayed as unsupervised waifs, hungry, abused by their
irresponsible or addict parent, and never innocent but always street smart.
What Precious does do is provide a context for Precious’ childhood strug-
gle, but within the framework of black stereotypes like Welfare queen,
lazy, uneducated, unambitious. But Precious, I will argue, forces to the
surface the notion of the “monstrous feminine,”29 which Barbara Creed
describes as “constructed within/by a patriarchal phallocentric ideology
[and] is related intimately to the problem of sexual difference and castra-
tion.” For Creed, who draws on Freudian-based psychoanalytic theories,
the monstrousness of the female is in what she represents to the male,
that is, difference and the (fear of) loss of power.30 In Precious, this dif-
ference is realized in the “monstrous black child” through what David
Hevey terms “enfreakment,” a cultural process by which bodily differ-
ences are skillfully embellished and foregrounded while at the same time
they are degraded and marginalized—that is, freaked. Though this process
elicits only a conditional sympathy for Precious—a sympathy that oscil-
lates between compassion and revulsion—it essentially reinforces comfort-
ing white racist beliefs about the Otherness of African Americans and the
monstrousness—not innocence—of black children.
Adam Phillips, in The Beast in the Nursery, observes that “in the old,
modern fable of civilization and its discontents, either the child or the
culture is demonized.” Such is the case in Precious, which showcases
many of society’s ills—welfare, poverty, isolation, drugs, and abuse.

On the film’s surface, Precious, beautifully played by Gaborey Sidibe,
is constructed as an object of pity and sympathy; we cringe when she
is verbally abused by her mother, yet the film’s subtext sends a very
different message. It presents the dark cultural spaces where Precious
resides, along with her children born of incest, framed by all that civili-
zation abhors (poverty, filth, disorder, welfare, blackness, etc.). Though
centuries away from the distasteful ethnographic zoos and the carni-
val displays of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century freak shows
of Saartjie Baartman’s time, Precious nevertheless does replicate what
Rosemarie Garland Thompson calls the “discourse of the anomalous
body” through the film’s exaggerated visual presentation of difference.31
What is most disturbing about the aesthetic geography of Precious is
its validation—indeed, its naturalization—of the monstrousness of black
female mothers and their children: Precious’ abusive mother, Precious
and her daughter (by her own father) whom she calls “Mongo,” slang
for Mongoloid. (The child has Down Syndrome.) This trilogy of black
females suggests a generational aberration. The film, while not a tradi-
tional horror film in the sense of the supernatural or of slasher elements,
presents instead the “horror” of race, of the black underclass that threat-
ens to spill out into white middle-class America (which Precious longs
to be a part of); a horror that is reinforced throughout the film by the
portrayal of the monstrous feminine, or, in the case of Precious Jones,
the monstrous mammy.
The film opens with Precious dressed in a beautiful ballroom-style blue
gown, happy and smiling. She is morbidly obese, yet this opening scene
does not foreground her bodily difference; rather, it is her happy demeanor
that captures the scene. She is approached by a tall, slim, regal-looking
older black woman, wearing an orange princess gown, with an African
style headress. The smiling woman anoints Precious with a red-orange,
flame-colored, or blood-colored, scarf by laying it on Precious’ shoulder,
a symbolic passing of a “torch.” They look into each other’s eyes with a
sense of understanding. This opening scene visually connects Precious to
a fairy godmother character who alludes to traditional African philosophi-
cal beliefs in the deep spiritual connectedness between the living and the
ancestors. This important filmic nod to African women, African spiritual-
ity, and connection to the ancestors will ultimately be reinforced as the
film progresses. That the film opens with this scene is significant, as I will
show, because so many of the scenes in Precious suggest notions of a gen-
erational monstrousness.
74 D. OLSON
The first few scenes in Precious present a young teen girl in school
who daydreams about being on the cover of a magazine, about her white
teacher being in love with her, about finding a light-skinned boyfriend,
and hoping she will someday live in the suburbs—all things that any
typical American teenage girl dreams about. The classroom, however, is
exactly what white America imagines an inner-city classroom to look like
(and what Hollywood typically portrays): white male teacher in front of a
wild and out-of-control room full of disrespectful children of color. The
landscape of this classroom is oft repeated in such films as Blackboard
Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955), Dangerous Minds (John N. Smith, 1995)
and Freedom Writers (Richard LaGravenese, 2007) that reinforce viewer
familiarity with “those” kinds of classrooms and “those” kinds of kids; for
the white viewer, this stereotypical classroom lends an air of authenticity,
of truthfulness to an inner-city “condition” that belies the film’s actual
scriptedness, which emphasizes the “otherness” of black children who
“cannot act right” in a classroom, despite the falseness of that notion. The
black boys are particularly unruly and their behavior is foregrounded sig-
nificantly—the way they tease Precious is by making animal noises (bark-
ing), a long-held stereotype of the “animalistic” nature of black children,
especially males. The barking noises also begin a trope that lasts through-
out the film: equating Precious with a dog.
Throughout the film, Precious is cast as unfeminine: she is morbidly
obese and is displayed as vulgar, both of which are considered types of cul-
tural deviancy and decidedly not feminine. At home, Precious is a servant
to her mother—a mammy in all senses of the word. In the classroom, she
forcefully hits a boy upside his head because he would not be quiet while
the teacher was speaking. Black women are often portrayed as violent,
dominating, and castrating, and this scene naturalizes such stereotypes.
Her voice-over discusses how she has “Mr. Wicher’s back,” also a part of
the mammy character—protection of the white master (in this case, the
teacher). Precious’ aggressive act is also repeated in the Each One, Teach
One classroom, where one of the girls calls her fat, and she quietly walks
by, then quickly turns around and strikes the girl. Yet, oddly, when a group
of boys verbally assault Precious as she walks home, she does not lash out
at them physically as she did to the students in both classrooms, but is
pounced on from behind and knocked face-first to the ground, a violent
act that sends her into one of her out-of-body escape fantasies.
The notion of physical violence committed by the monstrous child is
complicated where Precious is concerned. On the one hand, in the class-
room she demonstrates aggression and even violence, but outside the
classroom, and most particularly at home, she is passive and vulnerable and
is physically and emotionally abused. This oscillation between aggression
and vulnerability is a part of the film’s practice of enfreaking Precious. Her
large frame and her occasional acts of lashing out physically seem to sug-
gest an adult power and an underlying ruthlessness, an uncontrollability,
perceptions rooted in a culture that equates power with size (short men
are seen as less powerful than tall men, for instance) and blackness with
aggression. In the mythos of female obesity, the belief that a large woman
is physically strong is common and as a result the viewer is not really sur-
prised when Precious strikes her adversaries; yet the film interrogates this
notion of an obese woman’s mannish strength when we witness Precious’
large body as vulnerable when her mother, Mary, beats her. Precious’ posi-
tion as mammy is also interrogated in the scene when her father rapes her.
At that point, she also becomes, symbolically, the Jezebel, as her mother
blames Precious—“you fuckin ‘ho, stole my man!”—throughout the film
for stealing her man away. This duality of identity is replicated in the many
dualities within Precious’ character—pretty/ugly, love/hate, skinny/fat,
ignorance/knowledge, and abuser/abused.
Precious’ vulnerability in this scene works in tandem with the ensuing
fantasy, in which she is dancing provocatively with a light-skinned man, to
assert that in the “real” world, obese black girls do not get light-skinned
boys. As she imagines the young light-skinned man nibbling lovingly on
her ear, she reluctantly fades back to reality to discover, as she lays face
down in the street, it is a dog licking her ear, a gesture in which resides
Precious’ desire for loving kisses, and her marginalization as undeserving
of them from a man, particularly a light-skinned man. She is literally at
ground level with the dog, and the film suggests, deserves dog kisses.
In Suffering Childhood in Early America, Anna Mae Duanne examines
the “complex relationship between vulnerability and violence that [Little
Eva from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)] helped artic-
ulate in early America.” The little white child Eva, in contrast to the wild,
uncivilized black girl-slave Topsy, became a defining icon for American
childhood itself—the site of “vulnerability, suffering, and v ictimhood” that
is still in use today. Conversely from Stowe’s novel, the slave child Topsy
became the blueprint for the pickaninny character. Though Precious is no
pickaninny character, she does represent a “traumatized slave child”32 in
the sense that, as Riché Richardson argues, she is “essentially her mother’s
servant,” a child-mammy who has been “dehumanized and devalued …
76 D. OLSON
treated like an animal”33 by her peers and in her own home by the one per-
son who should be protecting her. Precious’ vulnerability in some cases,
such as when her mother abuses her and when her father rapes her, elicits
sympathy. And yet, her aggressiveness cancels out that same sympathy,
reminding the viewer that black children are abject, a term Julia Kristeva
in part defines as the human reaction to a threatened breakdown of mean-
ing between the subject and object, or between self and other. Kristeva
argues that the abject is “radically excluded” from the norm. Here Kristeva
uses the term abject to suggest the primitive effort in memory to separate
human from animal: “By way of abjection, primitive societies have marked
out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threaten-
ing world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives
of sex and murder.”34 Here, too, we see Precious resist being labeled as
animal while, at the same time, the film sexualizes her through the animal
aggression of her father, and connects her numerous times to the dog. As
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles argues, “While the film draws the audience
by soliciting a particular type of affective response, it simultaneously per-
forms a critique of the structures of looking that inform the spectacle of
sexual violence.”35 Extending Jean-Charles’ argument, I believe the film
forces the traditionally non-sexualized mammy into a sexualized position,
contesting long-held beliefs about the sexuality of black women and chil-
dren, obese females, and the mammy character.
In some ways, Precious’ size itself becomes the catalyst for the continual
oscillation between sympathy for her and the belief in her own complic-
ity. In the field of Attribution Studies, Robert T. Muller, et al., explains
that for people who believe the world in general is ordered, just and fair,
the “victim-blame” phenomenon results when people try to justify good
things happening to people who they feel do not deserve it, and conversely,
when bad things happen to good people (like themselves). Muller argues
that “individuals respond to such inequities by altering their perception of
the victim, [particularly] the victim’s behavior, so that the victim is deval-
ued and blamed for [their own] misfortune.”36 The intersection of sympa-
thy and blame contribute to Precious’ monstrousness—her abject sexuality
as a child-victim of rape, which garners sympathy, and of her obesity, which
does not. For instance, the monstrousness of her obese body is reinforced
in the scene where she steals and eats an entire bucket of chicken. The film
implies that Precious was in some way complicit in both of these condi-
tions—her rape and her obesity. As Michelle Jarman notes, “Sidibe’s non-
normative body is often situated as the primary problem of the film …
critical fixation on her weight trumps the abuse, literacy, and economic
issues faced by the protagonist.”37 Yet Precious’ size perhaps functions as a
visual framework that also underscores her lost childhood. Her most poi-
gnant scenes occur when she is viewing her body, which reveals both a
black girl and a fat girl who, much like Toni Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove,
believes she is ugly and desires to be thin, white, and loved.
It would be hard to deny the resemblance of Clarice Precious Jones
to Toni Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye: “Long hours she
sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness,
the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and
classmates alike.”38 There are quite a few parallels to the two girls: Both
were raped by their fathers and became pregnant, both were abused by
their mothers (though Pecola was not sexually abused by her mother like
Precious was), both girls escaped abuse through dissociative means, both
girls see themselves as ugly, and both hate and blame their blackness as the
cause of their condition. Pecola’s meditations on her physical appearance
mirror Precious’ self-contemplation in the bedroom scene, one of the few
scenes in the film that remind us that Precious is still a child.
The scene opens with Precious in the shower, getting ready for her day
at Each One, Teach One, then cuts to her mother masturbating in bed.
The juxtaposition of both scenes suggests Precious’ desire to wash the
stain of incest away (a common trope in rape narratives), and a “point of
transfer of power”39 in which Precious’ bathing signifies renewal of both
her desire to learn (taking pains with her appearance for the alternative
school) and rejection of her mother’s (and father’s) sexual abuse. The
camera next does a slow pan of Precious’ bedroom: posters of skinny,
beautiful pop singers and light-skinned male hunks line her wall. Precious
then appears in frame and steps to the mirror. Instead of her own reflec-
tion she sees a thin, blonde girl looking back at her, a “visualization and
reinvention” of herself while simultaneously rejecting her own identity
and body.40 Precious here “imagines conforming to the hegemonic dis-
course of beauty she’s absorbed from white society” as the way to love
and security. As Mask describes her, “Precious’s learned self-devaluation
[is] the convergence of abuse, internalized racism (or more specifically,
colorism), and weight discrimination.”41 Much like Pecola Breedlove
imagined that having blue eyes would help her escape abuse and despair,
Precious believes that being socially acceptable and deserving of a better
life requires being thin and having lighter skin. Unlike Pecola, however,
Precious’ journey is not into insanity, but rather, away from it. She is not
78 D. OLSON
the silent victim that Pecola was and takes tentative, but stubborn, steps
towards her own salvation, such as attending Each One, Teach One. As
those few steps garner significant progress (like reading and having friends
for the first time), Precious finds the strength to reject abuse, to leave
her mother’s home, and to strike out on her own with little Abdul and
Mongo. But in the final scene, when Mary has confessed to years of abus-
ing Precious, Precious turns to Ms. Weiss and says, “I like you too, but
you can’t handle me. You can’t handle none of this,” confirming the great
division between white “establishment” and her life. As Precious leaves
with her children, the film cuts to a low angle shot of the building, its
name clearly visible—Citizens Advice Bureau, inferring the “white advice
for black assimilation” Bureau. Though Precious and her children move
to a half-way house and do make progress, in this last scene, the film
implies that her rejection of Ms. Weiss’ assistance, rejection of her “citi-
zen’s advice,” will ultimately doom Precious to perpetuate in some way
the “dysfunctional black family.”
Confirmation of the belief in the dysfunction of the black family is pre-
sented in the film as intergenerational, beginning with the very first scene
where the older woman passes the orange scarf to Precious. In the scene of
the welfare worker’s visit, Precious visually suggests deep familial corruption
by showcasing four generations of black female monstrous others: the inef-
fective grandmother (perhaps a victim of abuse herself), Mary (Precious’
mother), Precious, and her daughter Mongo. In this scene, the façade of a
functioning family unit is presented to the welfare worker (and us) by Mary,
who puts on a wig, lipstick, and holds a squirming Mongo in a falsely lov-
ing embrace. Mary’s voice is soft and humble as she works to convince the
welfare worker that she has been looking for work and caring for Precious
and Mongo. But as soon as the welfare worker leaves, Mary pushes Mongo
off her lap, calls her a “goddamn animal” and proceeds to berate Precious’
“stupidity” for somehow being the “cause” of the welfare worker’s scrutiny.
Precious here is positioned squarely as a child, yet only as a means to her
mother’s welfare check, and only in front of the worker. The moment the
welfare worker leaves, Mary begins to treat Precious as a servant, a mammy,
while the silent grandmother looks on. The i ntergenerational nature of both
physical and sexual abuse is suggested by the grandmother’s extreme passiv-
ity, and her obvious fear of her own daughter, Mary. In Mary’s aggression
toward, and verbal abuse of, little Mongo, one may infer (particularly in
light of a later scene where Mary intentionally drops newborn baby Abdul
to the floor) that until the child was placed with the grandmother, she may
have also been the victim of Mary’s wrath.
All the people in the film who are positive influences, who are kind and
help Precious, are light-skinned: Ms. Weiss (a welfare worker), Ms. Rain
(her teacher) and her lesbian partner, and Nurse John. The only mean-
ingful support that is offered Precious comes from these light-skinned
people, reifying whiteness as the savior, as the answer to Precious’ (and
by inference “The Hood’s”) problems. Such a message elides the very
real socio-economic and political processes and matrices that often con-
verge in urban poor areas that create real obstacles for those who wish
to improve their lives. The film’s rhetorical strategy renders “happiness,
safety, and security [as] particularly synonymous with a white suburban
configuration of the American Dream,” leaving no other avenue open for
success.42 Even Precious’ own grandmother, Toosie, who is dark-skinned
like Precious, does not, will not, or cannot help. Toosie’s lack of involve-
ment in preventing her own daughter Mary from abusing Precious (and
perhaps Mongo) seems to reiterate the intergenerational impotence and
dysfunction of the black family.
The welfare worker’s visit echoes the most disturbing and racist opinions
of the notoriously paternalistic 1965 Moynihan Report, which concluded
that the “negro family” is disintegrating because of the predominance of
single mothers (i.e., Jezebel behavior), their dependence (generationally)
on public assistance, residing in urban ghettos, and a lack of “strong father
figure[s]” who have the freedom to “strut” like all “male animals.”43
The stereotypes about crumbling African American families inherent in
the Moynihan Report unfortunately remain today and have influenced
both public policy shifts (i.e., welfare reform under the Clinton adminis-
tration—a media-inspired, moral panic response to the demonized, and
mythical, black “Welfare Queen”) and persistent processes of institutional
racism in such areas as medical care and schools. While, narratively, the
film appears to transcend the notion of the dysfunctional black family, it
visually affirms these persistent notions about the flawed black family by
positioning Precious’ escape as a move towards the white suburbia she has
desired all along, but can never achieve—not as a redemption of the black
family.
One of the recurring allusions in Precious is to the notion of the ani-
malistic black female. Throughout the film, at key moments, dogs appear
as visual metaphors that suggest the animalistic nature of Precious and
her family. The little brown and white Jack Russell terrier first appears
when the boys knock Precious to the ground. As I stated earlier, in her
fantasy she is being kissed by her light-skinned prince, but she wakes to
find the dog licking her face. She is face down on the street, on the same
80 D. OLSON
level as the dog. A short time later, we see Precious steal, then, like a
starving animal, devour an entire bucket of chicken, a scene in which the
character performs the most racist of stereotypes about black people and
fried chicken, complete with chicken pieces and grease around her mouth.
When Precious is in the hospital, her grandmother berates Precious that
“not even a dog would drop a baby then leave, not even a dog.” Most
significant, however, is the scene when a bloody and disheveled Precious,
cradling the newborn Abdul, escaping from her mother’s vicious assault,
hears music and stops in front of a church. As she listens to the church
choir, she slides into one of her dissociative excursions and imagines herself
singing with them. Next to her fantasy self is her light-skinned b oyfriend
holding the little Jack Russell terrier. That the dog becomes an ambient
character in her dreams is indicative of her struggle to redefine her iden-
tity, to escape the framework of “ghetto tragedy,” to escape the echo of
the barking and grunting noises the boys in her public school class made
towards her, and to resist the label of animal that has defined her life until
Ms. Rain and the Each One, Teach One school.44 But in this choir scene,
the dog is contained by the fantasy boyfriend rather than sharing the street
space with Precious, a suggestion of her reclamation of identity that reso-
nates with her new liminality (Fig. 3.3).
Fig. 3.3 Precious. Directed by Lee Daniels. Los Angeles: Lionsgate, 2009, frame
grab
And while the fantasy choir scene shows a smiling and singing Precious,
under the loving gaze of the light-skinned boyfriend (and the dog), the
street scene instead positions a giant billboard above Precious that reminds
the viewer of her and her children’s (and her family’s) monstrousness.
The billboard sign recommends people “spay and neuter” their pets (for
a “Healthy, Happy Animal”) and is juxtaposed with an abused Precious,
protectively cradling her child (of incest) outside the church which has the
slogan “Thy will be done” over the door. The billboard message, which
hovers over Precious, is the literal discursive framing of Precious as abject:
the moment when her body, her sexuality, and her progeny are fully mon-
strous, and that monstrosity threatens to spill over into the suburbs she
dreams of inhabiting—that dream is the film’s “horror”—so blackness
must therefore be “neutered” as the sign recommends. The triangulation
of the billboard, Precious and Abdul, and the church presents the viewer
with a “trinity of judgment;” an intersection in which the church (moral
authority) and the sign (representing the dominant culture) also play to
historical theories of eugenics.
Eugenics is the science of selective breeding in order to improve the
human race. Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, coined the term in
the early 1900s. In the 1930s, eugenics took hold of the popular imagina-
tion and was “widely embraced on both scientific and popular levels” in
both America and Europe, and by Germany’s Adolf Hitler, with devastat-
ing and horrific results. Eugenicists believed that human selective breeding
would end all “social ills by encouraging the birth of children with good,
healthy, beautiful traits.” According to Harriet A. Washington, the science
of eugenics added to the prevalent racial discourse that devalued black
lives and was used to reinforce “physiological evidence of black inferiority
… [and label] black women as sexually indiscriminate and as bad mothers
who were constrained by biology to give birth to defective children.”45
Eugenicist discourse discouraged the poor (of all races) from breeding and
in some cases sterilized those with mental or physical handicaps to prevent
procreation.
Eugenics was a dominant discourse throughout the 1930s and 1940s
as it was considered the apex of scientific thought. Eugenics discourse was
prominent in discussions about fixing social ills, including poverty and
crime. In 1929, Margaret Sanger instituted The Negro Project, in which
she recruited NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois to support her push for
widespread birth control for poor African American women so they would
stop “breeding.” Du Bois, an unlikely supporter, had stated at the time
82 D. OLSON
that “the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously,
so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among
whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and
least able to rear their children properly,” a sentiment Sanger repeated
often in her quest to “[reduce] the black population.”46 As Gail Bederman
states: “Scientific theories [like eugenics] corroborated [the] belief that
racial difference [and] civilization … all advanced together.” Millennialist
discourse at the time embraced the notion of achieving a “perfect society”
where “superior races outsurvive[d] inferior races.” The science of eugen-
ics fit perfectly with the cultural momentum at the time to “bring about
the perfect civilization” through selective breeding.47 Sanger pushed for
government-sponsored clinics that gave out free birth control to poor
black women.48 Du Bois’ statement “least intelligent and [least] fit”
reaches out from history to marginalize Precious Jones, who is portrayed
as both. The billboard message to “spay and neuter” positioned above
Precious and her child of incest, coupled with the many references to her
as an animal, underscore the historic connection to the eugenics ideology
of limiting poor black women and girls from “breeding” in order to keep
the horrors of aberrant black sexuality and its monstrous femininity out
of middle-class, white America, a sentiment that is fully realized in this
image.
Despite the film’s explicit message of uplift through education and self-
love, the subtext of Precious resides with old notions of whiteness, slim-
ness, and middle-class suburbs as the paths to happiness. Though Precious
finds freedom from her mother’s tyranny and discovers what it is like to be
loved and have friends, she holds on to the model of whiteness, and white
childhood, as her ideal goal (the bedroom scene in front of her mirror,
her desire to be thin and blonde, her fantasy about her white teacher and
living in the suburbs, her desire for a “light”-skinned boyfriend). The film
does a respectable job of leaving Precious in the interstitial space between
child and adult, but it is the juxtaposition of adult knowledge (particularly
sexual) with the childlike fantasies (being a star, a princess, being desired
by a “white” light-skinned young man) that highlight Precious’ exclusion
from notions of childhood itself. For Precious, who wants to be a child in
the idealized sense, her fantasies of a loving mother, adoration by fans, and
the love of a light-skinned man frame her forced position of adulthood,
her desire for knowledge, and her determination to be the loving mother
to Abdul that she never had. The film disavows innocence for Precious. In
fact, all the black children in the film are portrayed as knowing and adult-
like, reaffirming the notion of black childhood as abject and other. In

Precious, black girls, indeed, poor black females of any age—“i.e. just some
black girl”—are continually othered by the cultural apparatus in place that
partitions black childhood from notions of innocence and purity.
Pickaninnies of the Southern Wild

One of the most common, and stubbornly enduring, portrayals of a
black child is as the “pickaninny,” a coon character that is often devoid of
human characteristics, is animalistic, untamed, genderless, with wide eyes,
hair sticking up all around the child’s head, and often “stuffing their wide
mouths with watermelon or chicken.”49 The most (in)famous pickaninny
character is, of course, Topsy, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery
novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s depiction of Topsy (blackest of her
race, shrewd, cunning, wooly-headed, filthy, solemn, ragged) became the
basis for the popular pickaninny caricature.50 Robin Bernstein, in Racial
Innocence, explains the pickaninny is often depicted:
Outdoors, merrily accepting or even inviting, violence … Characteristics

of the pickaninny include dark or sometimes jet-black skin, exaggerated
eyes and mouth, the action of gorging (especially on watermelon), and the
state of being threatened or attacked by animals (especially alligators, geese,
dogs, pigs, or tigers). Pickaninnies often wear ragged clothes (which suggest
parental neglect) and are sometimes partially or fully naked. Genitals or but-
tocks are often exposed, and not infrequently targeted by animals. In some
of the most degrading constructions, pickaninnies shit or piss in public …
Some pickaninnies are constructed as clean, well-dressed, and engaged in
domestic chores … Some pickaninny figures are nonindividuated and dolt-
ish as cows, but others are clever as monkeys. When threatened, pickaninny
characters might ignore danger or quake in exaggerated fear; when attacked,
they might laugh or yelp, but in either case, they never experience or express
pain or sustain wounds in a remotely realistic way … the pickaninny may be
animalistic or adorable, ragged or neat, frightened or happy, American or
British, but the figure is always juvenile, always of color, and always resistant
if not immune to pain.51
Bernstein succinctly captures the varied nature of the pickaninny stereo-

type. Not all pickaninnies have every characteristic, but the most common
image of a pickaninny had woolly hair in little ponytails sticking up around
the head, bulging or large eyes, exaggerated lips, usually ragged or no
84 D. OLSON
clothes, and they were often portrayed in rural areas or in nature, or in fear
of being eaten by an animal. Many pickaninny characters were also gen-
derless in that they were portrayed as either male or female depending on
the clothing they wore. Most tellingly, Bernstein argues that “whereas the
white child manifested innocence, the pickaninny deflected it: the picka-
ninny made not itself, but its violent context appear innocent.”52
The pickaninny character was a workhorse image—it was everywhere in
American society: on products, posters, postcards, greeting cards, adver-
tisements for a multitude of products (particularly soaps), in early film and
television, and even as a consumable food (Licorice Babies—sometimes
called “nigger babies”—a popular candy of the 1950s and still sold today).
Kyla Wazana Tompkins explains that the image of the black child as food
was quite common until the 1960s and was rooted in the “violent intima-
cies of the slave economy.” As she notes, such imagery of blacks and food
is still found today on such products as Aunt Jemima pancake mixes and
syrups, Uncle Ben’s rice, and the Little Black Sambo books that are still
in print (in which little Sambo is continually in fear of being eaten by a
tiger).53
Being dirty is a prevailing stereotype about Africans and black or brown
people. Early American advertising used black children to advertise soaps as
a way of reinforcing notions that blackness itself is somehow “dirty” while
reinforcing whiteness as “clean.” Pieterse explains that “socio-cognitive”
notions of “‘clean, white, fair, light, good’ go together as the foundation
of aesthetics and civilization.” Soap and hygiene became a “symbol and
yardstick of civilization.”54 The idea of blackness as “dirt” became a com-
mon American motif that sparked products like whitening cream or skin
bleaches. So the equation of blacks with dirt and poverty, often repre-
sented by the pickaninny, has a long history in US racial politics.
Pickaninny characters have all but disappeared across the board since
their early twentieth-century heyday; however, they have occasionally
made an appearance in popular media, particularly television, most nota-
bly Jaleel White’s character Steve Urkel in the long-running ABC/CBS
sitcom Family Matters (1989–1998). While he was always well-dressed,
kind, and showed glimpses of intellect, Urkel was the reconfiguration
of the pickaninny caricature: high-steppin’ (in Urkel’s case, it was high
pants), singin’, dancin’, and with overly exaggerated mannerisms—par-
ticularly facial expressions—Urkel merely continued the images of black
children as different and marginal. Other modern pickaninny characters
include Arnold (Gary Coleman) in Diff’rent Strokes—large eyes, exagger-
ated emotional states—(NBC/ABC 1978–1986), and Emmanuel Lewis

as the “endearing black child”55 on Webster (ABC 1983–1989),56 both
of whom are, according to Jared Sexton, “deemed cute by the dominant
vantage.”57 In cinema, however, the pickaninny character has been for the
most part absent in recent years, until the 2012 release of director Behn
Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a heart-wrenching story about an abused
and neglected black girl named Hushpuppy. She lives with her alcoholic
father, Wink, near a collection of misfits who live in a Louisiana swamp
area called The Bathtub, an ironic name as the characters live and rejoice
in filth. The film is a tour de force of the darker side of childhood. One
could go so far as to imagine young Hushpuppy’s experience as very simi-
lar to that of Clarice Precious Jones (Precious) but for the setting—abject
poverty in a rural, rather than urban, jungle. Beasts is an independent film,
with a budget of just over a million dollars. Although it was not produced
under the Hollywood machine, it quickly became a part of the Hollywood
distribution matrix as the film became popular. Many of the actors in the
film are local people hired from Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, where the
film was shot (incidentally, the same parish in which A&E’s hit reality
show Cajun Justice was filmed in 2012). Beasts was an instant hit when it
made its debut at the Sundance film festival. It received Academy Award
nominations for best film of the year, best director, best actress (the
youngest nominee ever for Quvenzhané Wallis’ memorable performance
as Hushpuppy), and best-adapted screenplay. It won the AFI award for
Film of the Year, the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, the FIPRESCI prize at
Cannes, an Image Award for outstanding independent film, and, surpris-
ingly, the Black Reel award for best film of the year. The film was based
on white writer Lucy Alibar’s play, Juicy and Delicious, about an 11-year-
old white boy in southern Georgia whose world is turned upside down
because his father is dying. With so very few black children as protagonists
in films, it is worth interrogating Zeitlin’s choice to cast a young black girl
in the protagonist role and to set the story in a Louisiana swamp.
Some of the reviews of Beasts of the Southern Wild describe the film as
celebrating America’s enduring spirit of freedom. Christy Lemire described
Beasts as “sheer poetry on screen; an explosion of joy in the midst of star-
tling squalor and one of the most visceral, original films to come along in
a while.”58 A.O. Scott, of the New York Times describes Hushpuppy as an
“untrained sprite” who “allow[s] us, vicariously, to assert our innocence
and to accept our inevitable disillusionment when the world falls short
86 D. OLSON
of our ideals and expectations.”59 Perhaps the most interesting praise of

the film comes from Mike Scott of the New Orleans Picayune: “Every
great culture has its towering icons of mythology … and, now, there’s
Hushpuppy.” But Scott’s praise of the film disturbingly elides many of its
real problems. Scott describes the images of extreme poverty as “bayou
steampunk”; the Bathtub residents of alcoholics, drug addicts, and abus-
ers with little to no basic education Scott admires as “fighters … a wizened
brand of survivors who are willing to fight all day for their right to eat
and drink, sing and stumble all night long.” And most troubling of all,
Scott describes Hushpuppy’s abusive father as a “sinewy nurturer and a
firm believer in tough, even gruff, love.”60 The positive reviews of the film
tend to focus on the cinematography, which is both gritty and ethereal
(shot with a shallow depth of field), and the “pleasure” of viewing a small
black child who is whimsical, poetic, spirited, and who, as Sexton observes
about the Webster and Arnold characters, recreates the “endearing black
child” as a pickaninny character.61
Vince Mancini, in his caustic review of the film, asks “I thought we
weren’t supposed to fall for the Magic Negro and the Noble Savage any-
more?” and yet Beasts presents young Hushpuppy as just that. Though
traditionally, pickaninnies were not portrayed as “magical negroes,” Beasts
effectively unites these two stereotypes into one little girl: Hushpuppy.
Magical negroes “use their powers to help the white characters” and they
“offer a type of ‘folk wisdom’ … to resolve the character’s dilemma,”62 in
this case to help the Bathtub residents after the flood, and to make sense
of her father’s abuse, and his impending death. It must be noted that a
film told from a young black child’s point of view is an unusual occur-
rence in Hollywood, and while Beasts’ production elements classify it as an
independent film, the film’s popularity grew when it was picked up by Fox
Searchlight (a division of Fox Entertainment group) for distribution, and
ultimately benefitted from wide theatrical and DVD releases.63 Such wide
distribution and promotion means a very large audience viewed this film,
which underscores my argument that the general public often only sees,
and enjoys, such limiting images of black children. And while a young
black girl protagonist is a valuable step in the right direction, the accoutre-
ment of the film merely repackages old stereotypes for a modern audience.
The film’s first image of Hushpuppy shows her kneeling in the dirt,
making a mud pie and holding a (black) baby chick as she listens to its
heartbeat. She is dressed in a dirty and torn girl’s undershirt, and what
appears to be boy’s orange underwear. As I will discuss in detail below,
Hushpuppy’s gender identity is under constant assault from her father,

and the boy underwear paired with the girl undershirt is a sartorial indica-
tion of the child’s struggle for a gender identity. Pickaninny characters are
often portrayed as gender neutral, and such is the case with Hushpuppy.
Hushpuppy narrates the film in voice-over, but her phrases and simplistic
wisdom are delivered in an almost depression-era, stereotypically “black”
dialect style: “All the time, everywhere, everythin’s hearts are beatin’ and
squirtin’, and talkin’ to each other the ways I can’t understand. Most of
the time they pro’ly be sayin’: I’m hungry, or I gotta poop. But some-
times they be talkin’ in codes.” In fact, as Mancini states “watching po’
black characters deliberately misuse words and grammar in folksy phrases
written by white people … feels hokey at best and offensive at worst,”64
and while many of the characters speak in an exaggerated “Cajun” twang,
Hushpuppy and her father (when he is not screaming abuse at her) both
speak as Jim Crow-era whites imagined po’ black folks to sound (Figs. 3.4
and 3.5).
It has long been an American idiosyncrasy to equate nature with spiri-
tuality and Hushpuppy spouts an Emersonian transcendentalism through-
out the film that belies her young years: “I see that I am a little piece of
a big, big universe, and that makes it right.” What is most disturbing
about the nature = spirit message in Beasts is that it is used to justify and
Fig. 3.4 Billy Thomas

as “Buckwheat.” The
Little Rascals, “Bear
Facts.” Hal Roach
Studios, 1938, frame
grab
88 D. OLSON
Fig. 3.5 Quvenzhané Wallis as “Hushpuppy.” Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Directed by Behn Zeitlin. Cinereach, 2012, frame grab
romanticize the notion that these poor people were just “born this way.”
Hushpuppy accepts the abject poverty and filth as “natural,” a “piece in a
wider universe.” Her acceptance leads her to view with suspicion the “oth-
ers” across the levy, an interesting twist on othering that works to justify
the Bathtub resident’s abhorrence of the city and modernity, of cleanliness
and sobriety. But what this reverse othering does is naturalize the Bathtub
resident’s animalistic behavior. It comforts the spectator that “these
people” are not going to invade their space (opposite the fear of blacks
moving to the suburbs established in Precious). Yet this film is not about
spirituality at all; in fact, the only “spirit” that dominates throughout the
film comes from a bottle. Everyone is drunk; everyone celebrates beer and
the “right” to stay drunk day and night. The film instead celebrates the
“beauty” of a marginalized group whose members embrace, with all their
being, the notion that “ignorance is bliss,” and poverty equals spirituality
or closeness to nature. They choose to stay marginalized, something white
middle- and upper-class audiences can take comfort in.
The notion of poverty as spiritual is rooted in the United States’ Puritan
past, in which sparse living was considered to be closer to God. The tran-
scendental power and beauty of nature was also championed by such white
literary giants as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
solidified the notion of nature as spiritually pure. Beasts does not offer a
pristine, orderly nature of the sort Transcendentalists dreamed of. Rather,
it presents nature as disordered and dirty, and associates the residents of

the Bathtub with savagery and ignorance. This racial separation of urban
and rural, however, becomes entangled with the historical white fear of
nature in the form of the unknowable and the dark jungles of Africa (or
South America, or any place populated with people of color), the subject
of much nineteenth-century travel narratives. In Beasts, the trope of blacks
as dirty animals and nature as “magical” or spiritual is represented, how-
ever poetically, by a harsh and corrupting landscape.
While many critics have argued that the film does an interesting job of
presenting the residents of the Bathtub as living in a “racist-free” zone—
both black and white co-mingle amicably and help each other after the
flood—particularly amidst all the dialogue references to “animals” living
together in nature and knowing their place (even Hushpuppy at one point
recognizes that without her abusive father to take care of her, she would
end up as some animal’s food), the film’s aesthetics suggest racial differ-
ences through the visual metaphor of dirt and filth. Though none of the
other characters live in pristine conditions, they are never shown as physi-
cally dirty or living in as filthy a condition as Wink and Hushpuppy—who
only wears underclothes in the Bathtub. In an early scene, the camera
follows Wink into his garbage-strewn trailer, he opens an ice chest and
uses a meat fork to spear a raw chicken and then place it onto a make-
shift grill outside. But the camera also captures this raw chicken, sitting
bare (not wrapped or separated) on top of watery-ice in which Wink’s
beer bottles are also floating. Raw chicken has the potential to carry the
deadly Salmonella bacteria and the ice in which Wink’s beer floats may also
carry blood and fluids from the dead chicken, raising the chances of being
infected with such a virus. This is a significant visual image of unclean-
ness, as Wink later is diagnosed with a disease of the blood, something
killing him from inside. The suggestion that the filth of their existence,
and Wink’s non-stop alcohol abuse, is a probable cause of the disease is
inferred from this first scene’s commingling of beer, ice, and raw chicken.
Beer, and alcohol in general, functions as a uniting element among the
Bathtub’s residents that sets them apart from the “across the levy” folks.
The film establishes an “us vs. them” attitude during the first scenes when
Wink and Hushpuppy are out in their makeshift boat. They are looking
over the levy at the nearby cityscape and Wink tells Hushpuppy it is “ugly”
over there and “beautiful” where they are. At first Hushpuppy looks
doubtful, but to please her father, she concurs. One subtext in the film is
the notion of civilization as confining and bad. Order is portrayed as the
90 D. OLSON
enemy of the residents of the Bathtub. But as mentioned earlier, freedom

in the Bathtub is a crude race toward self-destruction. During the opening
party scene (in voice-over, Hushpuppy explains that in the Bathtub they
have more festivals than anywhere), Wink is riding on a ramshackle float
drinking from a bottle and shouting at passersby. The camera next cuts to
little Hushpuppy, who is holding a bottle of water. She watches her father
and raises the bottle to drink in similar fashion—inferring that the pat-
tern of alcoholism is born. Hushpuppy tries desperately throughout the
film to win the love of her father, and near the end, after the storm, Wink
offers her a drink, and she accepts; the scene ends with them drinking
alcohol together amicably. This rare moment of father–daughter bonding
is positioned within a popular social narrative that posits black poverty and
alcohol or drug use as both a racial and generational defect as well as a
rejection of (white) “civilization.” While poverty abounds in the Bathtub
for both white and black, Hushpuppy and her father are highlighted as
more animalistic and savage than their white counterparts, as we will see
in the crab-eating scene.
It is only ever Wink and Hushpuppy who are shown traipsing through
the bayou mud, or living in a garbage-strewn space. When the film shows
Hushpuppy eating the aforementioned chicken, she is seated on the floor
in Wink’s trailer surrounded by garbage, with half a chicken in her hands,
which she has difficulty maneuvering. Hushpuppy’s difficulty in handling
the dead chicken is a marked contrast to her earlier skill at holding the live
black chick to her ear as she listened to its heartbeat. Here she fumbles
and struggles to hold onto the “dead” chicken, prefiguring her struggle
to “hold on” to her father when he later dies. Her face is covered in
grease and bits of chicken, suggesting animal-like “feeding” rather than
eating—a trope that is repeated in the “beast it” scene. (This scene is
also similar to the chicken scene in Precious when she also “feeds” on a
bucket of chicken, her face covered in grease and chicken pieces, before
she vomits it up. One of the age-old trope, or “social codes,” for blacks
is their penchant for fried chicken, which is evident in both films.) No
plates or utensils are ever used, except Wink’s meat fork, suggesting a rural
backwardness. In the crab-eating scene, when her white “Uncle John” is
showing Hushpuppy how to use a knife (representative of civilization) to
crack open a crab, her father flies into a rage and begins screaming at her
to “beast it”—to open it with her hands, not use a utensil—to “beast” it,
like an animal (Fig. 3.6). The others are shocked at his rage at first, but
then they begin chanting at Hushpuppy to “Beast it!”
Fig. 3.6 “Beast it.”

Beasts of the Southern
Wild, frame grab
The consistent message her father badgers her with throughout the
film is to be an animal (and to be male); do not rely on any kind of human
mechanization or tools, however helpful. What follows is, for Hushpuppy,
a rejection of modernity in the sense that Wink forces her to learn to live as
the animals do—without tools. And while there is value in Wink teaching
Hushpuppy to rely only on her hands, it is also limiting in that she later
views the trappings of modernity and (white) society with suspicion, as we
will see in the flood scenes. This message unites the major black characters
in the film with dirt, animals, and a willful ignorance. In particular, Wink’s
rejection of cleanliness, sobriety, and anything modern or urban results in
his early death and his daughter being orphaned, left to the mercy of the
Bathtub residents, including the “teacher,” Bathsheba.
The film romanticizes the folk wisdom of Bathsheba, the Bathtub’s
white “teacher.” But the information she teaches is a mixture of fact,
myth, and superstition. As Bathsheba tells the children the tale of
the extinct Aurochs, the music is light and playful while the camera
dances around her as she in turn animatedly dances around the chil-
dren while telling the story. The camera holds Bathsheba with close-ups
and medium shots, suggesting the story is quaint and delightful, even
childlike in its innocence. Bathsheba’s animated telling of the Auroch
story cuts between close-up and medium shots, the camera moving
fluidly as Bathsheba moves, adding to the film’s fairy-tale aesthetic, as
the captivated children watch her. The accompanying musical score is
high-pitched, light and playful, underscoring the childlike quality of
Bathsheba’s “teachings.” The type of wisdom that Bathsheba imparts,
the fable-masquerading-as-fact, suggests notions of pagan belief systems
that are often viewed by white society as uncivilized. Beasts foregrounds
superstition as somehow ethereal and philosophical, even pastoral, and
when Bathsheba “predicts the apocalyptic arrival of the Aurochs, an
extinct species of cattle,”65 the children listen wide-eyed and accepting.
92 D. OLSON
Bathsheba’s tale of the Auroch’s return from extinction becomes the

basis for Hushpuppy’s beasts, whom she imagines threatening her at key
moments throughout the film.
The film’s embrace of magical realism66 in the form of the Aurochs
contributes to the whimsical and romantic portrayal of filth and abuse.
Within the menagerie of Wink’s and Hushpuppy’s “pets,” there are
numerous shots of a large pig laying in the dirt, or rooting through the
mud as Hushpuppy plays or philosophizes nearby. That pig, however, is
transformed into the fantasy beasts, the Aurochs, Hushpuppy’s version of
the animals that she imagines are constantly trying to get her. When we
first witness Hushpuppy’s magical imagining of the Aurochs, they are not
cattle as Bathsheba described, but her own pig complete with long horns
and more hair. In popular culture, pigs are often portrayed as dirty animals
(in reality they are no dirtier than any other farm animal; they wallow in
the mud as a way to cool off as they do not have sweat glands). That the
“beasts” that pursue Hushpuppy are pigs suggest a number of symbolic
meanings. Pigs are content to lie around in the muck and eat, similar to
the lives of Wink and Hushpuppy. The pig also represents the Bathtub
and its residents and their contentment with poverty. These magical pigs
appear to chase and threaten Hushpuppy at key moments in the film, par-
ticularly when she is being chased or abused by her father, or feels threat-
ened by him in some way. Indeed, the Auroch pigs threaten Hushpuppy
throughout the first part of the film, just as she is threatened by Wink,
her environment, the storm, and later, the forced evacuation. It is not
uncommon for abused children to create a fantasy world in which their
abuser is imagined as something other than their loved one. In this case,
the Aurochs can be seen as symbolic of her father, his violence toward her,
the filth of their existence, and finally his death (extinction) which leaves
her all alone.
But the Aurochs are also an “interpenetration of irreconcilable
worlds”67—the make-believe world of a little six-year-old girl who secretly
hopes her mother is out there somewhere—and the terrifying world of
abuse that she inhabits. It is this fusion of terror (of her father) and hope
(for a mother—and femininity) that the Aurochs come to represent, as we
see when Hushpuppy visits the bar, Elysian Fields. Indeed, the diner-cum-
bordello is filmed as a magical space, with ethereal dots of pastel lights,
swaying half-clothed women, and singing and dancing patrons. As Agnes
Woolley astutely observes:
Arriving at a low-lit floating Bordello—emblazoned with the legend “girls,

girls, girls”—the children are immediately seduced by a group of cooing, cos-
seting women in varying states of undress. Each child slow dances with their
surrogate mother watched over by the adult male punters, whose presence
intimates the provisionality of the encounter. Shot in womb-like ambient
reds and warm oranges, the scene is clearly designed to evoke those maternal
qualities of comfort, security and tactility of which they are deprived in the
Bathtub. Following her own symbolic mother into the kitchen, Hushpuppy
is given a dish of carefully prepared delicacies to eat with cutlery in place
of the whole barbecued chickens she is forced to chew off the bone in the
Bathtub … [By] situating the domesticated female kitchen firmly in the
realm of fantasy, the film demonstrates the inadequacy of [but no less desir-
able] stereotypical feminine qualities for survival in the ‘wild’.68
This magical scene is contrasted with the terrifying vision of the Aurochs
that stalk, then chase, Hushpuppy and the children when they return to
the Bathtub.
The Auroch apparitions also mark a point of convergence of
Hushpuppy’s childhood imagination, her struggle to survive in extreme
conditions, and her persistent belief that her life matters in some way—a
child’s rationalization of her father’s abusive treatment of her. The Auroch
fantasy allows her a semblance of agency in a world where she continu-
ally faces threats and abuse. For Hushpuppy, the Aurochs become a “link
to a precarious but necessary past”69 where her missing mother resides.
Hushpuppy’s imaginary relationship with the mother who abandoned her
connects the magical realism of the Aurochs—an extinct species—to her
fantasy about a different (better?) life. For Hushpuppy, the magical real-
ism of the Aurochs, their reappearance despite their extinction, functions
to “recuperate the real, that is, to reconstruct histories that have been
obscured, or erased.”70 In other words, if the Aurochs still exist, so might
her mother.
The Aurochs appear for the final time when Hushpuppy and the girls
return from seeing their imaginary “mothers” at the bar. The Aurochs
chase the girls, as they get closer to Wink’s shack. All of the girls look
back, scream, then run ahead, leaving Hushpuppy alone with the Aurochs
[implying that the other children also see the Aurochs]. Significantly, as
she crosses a small bridge to her father’s shack, she turns and faces the ter-
rifying Aurochs. A shot/reverse shot series of close-ups of the Auroch’s
and Hushpuppy’s eyes ensues, and then the camera pulls back to a medium
94 D. OLSON
shot as Hushpuppy says “I guess your kinda my friend”—the Aurochs then

all kneel down to her, yielding to her newfound mastery over fear. This
epiphany occurs while she stands on a “bridge”—the visual space between
fear and courage, between child and adult, between life and death. In
this scene, the fearful and the magical—the harshness of life and the false
dream of a mother’s love—is simultaneously confronted and let go, as
Hushpuppy is freed of her father’s abuse (through his death), but sadly
realizes her mother will never return. Significantly, Wink dies while hold-
ing Hushpuppy, his arm around her as she lays on his chest. She listens to
his heart slow, then stop—alluding to the opening scene when she listened
to the chick’s heart and philosophized about her place in the universe.
What is particularly disturbing in Beasts of the Southern Wild is its play-
ful, poetic, and even whimsical depiction of child abuse. As bell hooks
describes: “All the vibrancy in this film is generated by a crude pornogra-
phy of violence. At the center of this spectacle is the continuous physical
and emotional violation of the body and being of a small six year old girl
called Hushpuppy … while she is portrayed as continuously resisting and
refusing to be a victim, she is victimized. Subject to both romanticization
as a modern primitive and eroticization, her plight is presented as comically
farcical.”71 Critics have described Wink as a “rough father,” “neglectful,”
“a sinewy nurturer who believes in tough love,” and “non-traditional”72
rather than describing him as alcoholic and abusive. Yet, as hooks asserts,
it is the “mythic focus [of the film] that enchants. And yet it is precisely
this mythic focus that deflects attention away from egregious sub-textual
narratives present in the film,”73 most particularly the (impossible) nature
of black childhood and the black child experience. The many instances of
child abuse that occur in Beasts, are, according to King, “part of a behav-
ioral script that defines suffering in silence as a course of dignity, courage,
and ennoblement.”74 Hushpuppy, through Wink’s abuse, is schooled in
holding back her emotions, which, as hooks argues, turns Hushpuppy into
the stereotypical strong black Jezebel figure as it simultaneously masculin-
izes her.75 Wink’s frightening outbursts in which he insists that Hushpuppy
not cry function as just such ennoblement, which many of the film’s critics
seemed to find endearing. American social mythology prizes an internal
self-control of emotion, a “manning up” of internal strength, but while
the film celebrates that masculine, no-emotion ideal, it ignores the terror
the child feels at her father’s rages and physical abuse; it ignores the hor-
ror of the process of achieving that internal self-control. It is Hushpuppy’s
negotiation with that terror that the camera compellingly targets.
It is worth noting how expressive young Hushpuppy’s face is. In every

scene with her father, Hushpuppy adopts a closed-off, defiant look. As
soon as her father appears in the scene, her face changes. Her little mouth
tightens in a semblance of the “manliness” he requires of her, and her
eyes are both defiant and watchful because she never knows when she will
have to run from his abusive rages. For Hushpuppy, staying silent—“not
crying”—is a survival mechanism; it is a lesson in self-control in order to
survive Wink’s abuse. Wink’s instances of physical abuse (he slaps her,
hits her, chases her, screams at her, and gives her alcohol), would suggest
that there would be severe consequences to her small black body if she
were to cry or show emotion in front of her father. Her father also rains
down a constant stream of emotional abuse on his young daughter: “I
got to worry about you all the damn time! You’re killing me! You’re kill-
ing me!” These are unfortunately prophetic words, and they condition
Hushpuppy to later feel responsible for her father’s death. And it is that
abusive discourse, coupled with his raging alcoholism and physical abuse
of Hushpuppy that also positions Wink as the stereotypical black brute.
What many viewers found enchanting about little Hushpuppy’s
“strength and fortitude,” instead calls attention to the ways in which
black childhood is regularly positioned as tragic. She is starved for kind-
ness, love, and compassion. As Bernstein argues, white childhood is
“laminated to the idea of innocence,” but black children are still por-
trayed as the “nonsuffering black pickaninnies [that] emptied black
childhood of innocence.”76 Wink’s emotional detachment from his child
is heartbreakingly reinforced when Hushpuppy and her friends are at the
riverboat bar. She tells the woman in the kitchen that she can “count on
two fingers how many times she’s been lifted [picked up the in air and
hugged].” The woman hugs her even tighter, swaying side to side, rock-
ing her m omentarily as a mother would. We see Hushpuppy close her
eyes at the profoundly sad, yet emotionally delightful feeling of being
hugged, but only briefly as she tells the woman she has to go home
now. For the viewer, this moment underscores a wholesomeness nor-
mally associated with childhood, but that is often missing in cinematic
images of black children and black childhood. This lack of emotional
connectedness and kindness is in some ways brought to the fore by so
many reviews of the film that ignore the abuse, or worse, romanticize it,
in favor of Beasts’ technical aesthetic wonders (similarly, Disney’s Song
of the South was also aesthetically whimsical—bright, happy pastels and
cheerfully singing animals—and romanticized historical notions of the
96 D. OLSON
“happy slave”). King points out that “the image of black bodies mal-
treated and in pain carries within it meanings that, even when absolutely
horrible, are accepted, categorized, and forgotten almost at once,”77
and, in the case of Beasts, abuse and neglect are not so much forgot-
ten as made philosophic, magical, even spiritual by a camera that glides
softly over Hushpuppy’s sad, yet defiant face. That the cinematography
of Beasts is beautiful, even ethereal in places, cannot be denied, but its
presentation of the black child and black childhood within such filth-as-
beauty is a recurring motif throughout the film, naturalizing the notion
of black childhood as tragic. Black and brown children are often used to
voyeuristically enjoy what David Walker has dubbed “squalor porn.”78
As King states, “the pain-free, white American body exists easily in the
cultural imagination and cultural productions of social agents within the
United States … [but the] historical and everyday (or commonplace)
sign of suffering, the wounded black body, is walled off” and separated,
exoticized and romanticized to such an extent, and very effectively in
Beasts, that the multiple materialities and cultural spaces of black children
are reduced on film to stereotypes and caricatures that merely present to
us old pickaninnies with new faces.79
Rather than disparaging the restraint of modern life, as do other parts
of the film’s narrative, the scene in which Hushpuppy and her compan-
ions have been taken to the shelter after the flood offers a feeble critique
of her (and their) choice to remain in the Bathtub. The camera pans
slowly to reveal Hushpuppy all cleaned up, in a blue dress complete with
white lace collar, and with her wild uncontrolled hair neatly, and beauti-
fully, brushed and coiffed. Hushpuppy’s expression for a brief moment
reveals the wonder at her own reflection—is this really me?—particularly
in light of the suppression of her very girl-ness and femininity by her over-
bearing father. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, in order to be considered
feminine, black women must avoid “so-called male characteristics.” The
film does underscore Hushpuppy’s femininity; for instance, through the
camera’s soft, ethereal close-ups of her gentle, even maternal, handling
of the chick. But her outward expression of traditional feminine traits is
continually challenged by Wink’s demand she suppress them. And so,
while momentarily awed at the beauty of her own reflection, she then
interprets the blue dress as a restraint on her freedom, rather than as an
opportunity to be a girl. Hushpuppy’s resistance to the makeover works
as a visual cue to ally the viewer with her desire to return to the decep-
tive “freedom” of the Bathtub. Her resistance to the feminizing dress
also naturalizes the historical belief that “label[ed] Black women unfemi-
nine and too strong.”80 But what that one glimpse of a clean and dressed
Hushpuppy suggests instead, is the potential of Hushpuppy if only she
would abandon the false idea of a freedom that is a veritable prison of
poverty and ignorance. The scene is rich in sartorial symbolism of the
blue dress (civilization) as stifling constraint and her usual outfit of dirty
underclothes (nature) as freedom.
At the film’s end, Wink lies dying and stares at his daughter as she
feeds him the fried alligator from the woman at the whorehouse. The
alligator becomes symbolic of the family-that-never-was, as Wink always
told her stories of her mother killing, then frying, an alligator (apt con-
sidering the “beasts” metaphor throughout the film). Even at this last,
Hushpuppy attempts to please her father by providing him with one last
manifestation—that is, memory—of the woman he lost. In this final scene,
the black dysfunctional family is complete: missing mom, drunk and dying
father, emotionally and physically abused and unloved child. And at this
last moment, Wink withholds from her that which will make her whole:
he does not say he loves her, does not comfort her, but gruffly tells her
not to cry—to “man up”—his last instruction to her is to deny her gender.
She places her head on his chest (a recurring image throughout the film as
Hushpuppy listens to different animal’s heartbeats) and the sound of his
heartbeat is heard, slowing until it stops.
The ending is poignant—Wink is crying as he tells Hushpuppy not to
cry, violating his own “man-up” rule. However, the final scene is unsatis-
factory as Hushpuppy, after lighting the makeshift funeral pyre and push-
ing it out into the bay, leads the sorry band of drunkards, the “beasts” of
the Southern wild, up the Bathtub road in defiance of the storm, civiliza-
tion, progress, hope, and love. While this last scene suggests Hushpuppy
has full agency, the film has framed her decision to stay in the Bathtub
as the only natural place for an uneducated, emotionally damaged black
child to be. That she leads the “parade” of misfits and drunkards after
her father’s funeral merely highlights her acceptance of her place in the
universe as natural—that is, in nature (the swamp) and in the social hier-
archy—rather than transcend it—which was the film’s project all along.
In that sense, the film ends in such a way as to reproduce cultural notions
about black childhood and the Magical Pickaninny—the presentation of
blacks as animalistic or magical continues the cultural circulation of long-
held beliefs about black people that are still very much a part of dominant
cultural discourses.81
98 D. OLSON
“Just Some Black Girl’s” Butter

Precious and Beasts of the Southern Wild both present images of black chil-
dren that are rooted in historical attitudes about, and early images of,
black children. Both films reinterpret these old stereotypes and represent
them to spectators within new discursive frameworks that perform child-
hood—where the trappings of childhood, that is, innocence and bour-
geois accoutrement, are played out in film to the expectations of the adult
audience. The performance of childhood also is a performance of white-
ness in that social expectations about childhood are articulated through
expectations of whiteness. As Robin Bernstein argues, “childhood inno-
cence—itself raced white, itself characterized by the ability to retain racial
meanings but hide them under claims of holy obliviousness—secured the
unmarked status of whiteness” in Western society.
Harvey Weinstein’s 2011 political satire film Butter, directed by Jim
Field Smith, is a comical jab at the 2008 Presidential election (Hilary
Clinton versus Barack Obama for the democratic nomination) and the
antics of the fundamentalist political group called The Tea Party. The film
is set in Iowa, the [media endorsed] center of white American election
politics, and contains a collection of wacky, overly neurotic white charac-
ters. The plot revolves around a couple that maintains a position of local
royalty and influence as the “butter carving” champions of the state. Along
comes a young black girl, Destiny (beautifully played by Yara Shahidi),
who has been shuffled from foster family to foster family (all of whom are
white and featured in a charming but sad montage of the zany families she
has lived with) and ends up with Jill (Alicia Silverstone) and Ethan (Rod
Corddry) Emmitt, the film’s Perfect White Couple. (Destiny’s voice-over
claims they are the “whitest people I’d ever met.”) While the film’s project
is undeniably satire, the use of the black child as a satirical image merely
reinforces my argument that Hollywood cinema views “real” childhood as
white. It is a satire because black children in film are rarely portrayed as the
norm for childhood.
In Precious and Beasts of the Southern Wild, the spectator witnesses
“the production of racial memory through the performance of forgetting
[it],”82 so that the films both present what appear to be “new” discursive
relations for black children that instead work to re-define already estab-
lished racial differences, or in Stuart Hall’s words, the “preferred readings”
of what childhood is and should be that in turn supports the “institu-
tional/political/ideological/ order”83 of childhood as white. And so it is
a common thing to not see black children in starring roles in Hollywood

cinema productions. Butter, however, presents a little black girl very dif-
ferently from the other films: she is clean, well-dressed, intelligent, and,
though a ward of the state, not living in abject poverty, that is, not posi-
tioned in a slum, a swamp, a jungle, or an urban environment like most
portrayals of black children. But what struck me about Butter, and one of
the reasons I include it here, is its denial of the black child protagonist in
both the film’s climax and in its extra-diegetic promotion. Unlike Beasts
and Precious, Butter is useful because it draws attention, self-consciously,
to the historical erasure of black female individuality and agency. Only
after “fixing” the white crisis does the child then find her own place—but
in an all-white world.
There are some beautiful, but atypical, images of Destiny in the film:
riding her bike on a dirt road flanked by tall, green corn fields; riding her
bike around a bright and happy (all white) pure Americana country fair;
eating cotton candy as she strolls around the fair; in her room, which is
quite large and very pink; eating dinner with her new family—bathed in
Norman Rockwell pastels; at school surrounded by happy, smiling white
children; and carving her first butter sculpture inside a display window at
the county fair to the applause of the (all-white) audience. Ultimately, the
film is a satire and can be interpreted on at least two levels: as a reenact-
ment of black (and white) stereotypes, and as a critique of such canned
stereotypes. Butter presents an ambiguous portrayal of the “typical” black
child in crisis that, in essence, challenges that very stereotype. For the
most part, Butter presents Destiny as a typical ten-year-old girl who seeks
to be a part of a typical middle-class family, with the exception that she
is the only black face throughout the entire film. But for all of Butter’s
unique and positive portrayal of an African American child, its use of ste-
reotypical framing of that child’s situation—foster child, drug-addicted
mother—allies it with the problematic portrayals of black children found
in both Precious and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Instead, within the frame-
work of satire, the film rearticulates old notions of blackness as “other”
and reaffirms white childhood as the norm (Fig. 3.7).
While much of the film’s race references are firmly rooted in its satire,
Destiny’s negotiation of her new surroundings is framed by common ste-
reotypes about black children. Destiny is, of course, an orphan. She is a
ward of the state, a foster child, who dreams of her mother “coming back
for me any day now.” The film never mentions the child’s father and thus,
the typical “black dysfunctional family” with the “absent father” provides
100 D. OLSON
Fig. 3.7 Butter. Directed by John Field Smith. Los Angeles: Michael de Luca
Productions, 2011. frame grab
the background for Destiny’s character. In the first school scene, her
teacher notices her artistic talents and says “we expect great things from
you,” which results in a slow pan of all the children staring at her with fixed
(fake) smiles on their faces, resembling the creepy-white and robotic per-
fection of the women from The Stepford Wives (Brian Forbes, 1975). The
class’s overexaggerated social “acceptance” of Destiny functions instead
to set her apart as Other. One young blond boy even tells her he “thinks
black people are really cool.” In this scene, as in others throughout the
film, Destiny’s presence, her blackness among the whiteness, highlights
both her difference and her role as the “representative” black person—her
individuality discursively removed by the boy’s “black people are really
cool” comment. That she is an outsider who is welcomed is not the same
as being accepted—rather, the young boy’s comment reduces Destiny to
the stereotype of “coolness” and the expectations white’s have about black
people. The reference to coolness hints at the phenomenon in which white
youth idolize and fetishize black cultural artifacts, something Yvonne
Bynoe argues “is really more of a projection of [white] beliefs about Black
people rather than a true understanding about the humanity of African-
Americans.”84 The only way the white child knew how to relate to a black
girl was through racially essentialized, and culturally learned discourses
about blackness as “cool.” As Anna Beatrice Scott argues, Destiny’s other-
ness has “simply created” for the white boy “another white fantasy [that
is] … vindicated by blackness itself.”85 The white boy’s “knowledge” of
blackness both elevates and excuses him of any racial insensitivity. Similarly,
the filmmaker’s assumptions about what blackness is allows him to satirize

a culturally constructed notion of blackness.
In Butter, Destiny’s function is the role of the Magical Negro. But
unlike Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild, Destiny is both educated
and street smart, wise beyond her young years, with her butter-carving
ability highlighted as an unusual, and therefore threatening, talent. Her
position as a foster child—“no family, no money, and no connections”—
implies social invisibility, and lends a socially determined “authenticity” to
her character. Destiny is marginalized, similar to Hushpuppy and Precious
Jones, but Butter both erases blackness while at the same time relying on
its redemptive power to “fix” the whites around her.
There are numerous white redemption scenes between Destiny and the
white characters: when Jill first sees Destiny’s carvings of her original fam-
ily; Destiny’s moving speech about her first butter competition carving;
and when Ethan reveals he was afraid to adopt a baby and that is why they
wanted an older child, Destiny places her hand on his arm and tells him it’s
alright to be afraid. Destiny’s wise insights throughout the film function to
assist the white characters to come to terms with their internal dilemmas,
reassure them if they are unsure of an action or feeling, and to help the
white characters achieve a higher understanding, all of which are actions
of the classic “magic negro.”86 In terms of childhood, however, Destiny is
not portrayed as innocent and instead demonstrates a wisdom far beyond
her young years. Though her non-innocence itself is not threatening in
Butter (the opposite of what we will see in Chaps. 4 and 5 with black
boys), it does place her outside of culturally informed notions of child-
hood—children are not supposed to have enough life experience to be
wise: while Destiny can be the Magical Negro; she cannot at the same time
be an innocent child.
Throughout the film, Destiny is the epitome of calm detachment as she
helps the whites around her with quiet and confident reasoning and subtle
wit. But these moments only highlight the centrality of the white crises
in the narrative while marginalizing Destiny to her role as Magic Negro.
Destiny’s internal crisis, her search for a loving family, her insecurity, (She
does not even unpack her suitcase.) are all subordinate to the conflict/
crisis among the white characters. Destiny’s talent is where her story and
the white crisis intersect. Black children are rarely portrayed in film as hav-
ing talents other than the stereotypical dancing, singing, rapping, and so
on. But in Butter Destiny is a master at carving and creates beautiful but-
102 D. OLSON
ter sculptures; indeed, it is her phenomenal talent that threatens Laura’s

elevated social position.
As the patient and long-suffering Magical Negro character, Destiny
selflessly agrees to a rematch after her sculpture’s authenticity is ques-
tioned (reminiscent of African American poet Phillis Wheatley, who, in
order to have her first poetry volume published (1773), had 17 white
Boston men vouch for the book’s authenticity) during the competition.
After the rematch confrontation, a social worker shows up at the Emmitt
household with information about Destiny’s real mother, who they sadly
learn is deceased. But the social worker gives Destiny a picture of her real
mother laughing and holding her as a baby. That photo, which represents
everything Destiny has desired throughout the film, becomes her butter
sculpture in the final showdown between her and Laura (Fig. 3.8).
During the competition, both Laura and Destiny carve in front of the
judges and a live audience. But during the night, Laura’s boyfriend breaks
into the hall to sabotage Destiny’s carving. Significantly, out of all the
sculpture’s parts he could have chosen, he melts away the baby’s face in an
attempt to help Laura win. When the participants arrive the next morning
and see the damaged sculpture, Destiny’s behavior solidifies her Magical
Negro status: she is nonplussed at the setback, does not cry or rant, merely
tells her friend that “it’s over, I’ve lost.” She stoically and gracefully con-
cedes defeat to the white woman, Laura (Fig. 3.9).
Yet the significance of the sabotage cannot be lost on Destiny, or the
viewer. The “nameless” orphan who does not even know who she is, hav-
ing just found her mother (deceased), who is placeless, is symbolically
removed from her mother again by the melting away of her butter-baby
face. Such an erasure suggests a broader “facelessness” of black children,
the “just some black girl” sentiment of the Hunger Games blogger who
Fig. 3.8 Butter, frame grab

was so offended by the sight of a black girl playing the role of an “inno-
cent” child. As Debra Walker King states: “Both the discomforting visual
image of black bodies in pain and the more soothing image of pain-free
white bodies amass value on a field of racial hierarchy. This field of struggle
is where contesting images and power relations are in constant play. If
struggle is denied or rendered invalid by some implied or imposed judg-
ment, the images are sustained as normalized paradigms of human worth.
They maintain their assigned worth only as long as their functions within
various social processes remain unacknowledged or invisible.”87 The strug-
gle here for Destiny, has been “rendered invalid” by the judges as they do
not see the baby’s melted face as a flaw in the sculpture; on the contrary,
they assumed that it was an intentional obliteration of the child’s identity.
Through the violent act of erasure, the visual text of Destiny’s sculpture is
transformed from a loving mother/daughter moment to an image of a[ny]
black woman holding a faceless, nameless baby—“just some black girl.”
The sculpture’s faceless black baby echoes the cultural absence of black
female children from the landscape of childhood, particularly because its
very absence is considered normal.
Not surprisingly, Destiny’s sculpture wins the competition anyway—
the judges describe it as: “True art … so tragic, so touching … and to be
touched yourself, you merely have to look at the sad, melted face of this
unloved child.” And in one final, magical moment, Destiny, surrounded
by her adoring new white family and the cheering white crowd, quietly
walks over to a visibly distraught Laura and tells her “this isn’t all you
have.” Destiny wraps her thin, brown arms around the lost and broken
white woman in a last act of (magical) healing. Laura softens and hugs the
child in return—spirit restored; or, as Hughey describes it, “the anguish
and cruelty endured by the [magical Negro’s] sacrifice labors to transform
104 D. OLSON
the white character into a morally improved person.”88 We are left with the
knowledge that Laura has changed and become a better person. (In the
film’s last image of Laura she is campaigning for governor.)
And it is in the act of redeeming the white couple—who by the film’s
end have permanently adopted her—that Destiny finally finds her very
own permanent family. Although the film’s satirical intent pokes fun at
Iowa and its politics, on a meta level the racial dynamic also suggests that
there are no “good” black families with which to place Destiny. And, as
we learn near the film’s end, her biological mother has died of a (typical)
drug overdose, further relying on notions of the troubled black family to
solidify the satire. Destiny’s voice-over marks the film’s final scene, as she
unpacks her old, battered suitcase for the last time, marveling at her good
fortune to be loved by such a Perfect White Family. (The film also infers
the couple’s good fortune in acquiring a magic negro.)
As I mentioned earlier, one of the more disturbing aspects of Butter
is not only that it relies on the Magic Negro stereotype, but that the
promotion of the film, like the destruction of the sculpture baby’s face,
also denies the black child. None of the film’s cover art or posters include
Yara Shahidi. The list of stars on the cover art for the DVD does not
include her name or image, and yet she is one of the two main protago-
nists. While the official trailer for the film does feature Shahidi in select
montage scenes, she is not listed as one of the stars when the actor’s
names all pop up on screen. The trailer for the film announces Shahidi’s
character only as “THE ORPHAN.”89 The film is marketed as if the main
story revolves around Laura only, when the film’s dual narrative is shared
equally by Destiny and her impressions of, and negotiations with, white
people (Fig. 3.10).
According to Butter’s screenwriter, Jason Micallef,90 the role of Destiny
was the only part they actually had to cast as the other actors were already
chosen or had volunteered. Butter is Shahidi’s fourth feature film. (She
had previous roles in Imagine That [2009], Unthinkable [2010], and Salt
[2011]). Shahidi also has had numerous television appearances, including
the popular sitcom Entourage (HBO 2007) and a recurring role in In the
Motherhood (ABC 2009) as Esther, and currently plays the oldest daugh-
ter, Zoe, on ABC’s hit comedy Blackish, so she is not a newcomer to the
screen. Yet, the lack of Shahidi’s name or, more importantly, her image in
the film’s promotion perhaps suggests the producer’s belief that the film
Fig. 3.10 The official poster for the film and the Blu-ray cover
106 D. OLSON
Fig. 3.10. continued.
would have wider appeal if audiences believed it were an all-white cast,

even though Shahidi is in the trailer. As King reiterates, black children
“maintain their assigned worth only as long as their functions within vari-
ous social processes remain unacknowledged or invisible,”91 and although
without Destiny and her noble wisdom the white character’s crises would
not have been resolved, nor experience redemption, there is no formal

acknowledgment of a black child’s role in that white redemption in the
promotional materials. Indeed, it is Destiny’s act of compassion for Laura
that underscores her Magical Negro role and her vital part in the narrative
logic of the film.
The visual rhetoric of the competition scene showcases the Magic Negro
child by positioning Destiny screen-right facing screen-left, her small fig-
ure in scale larger than either Laura or Bob, and her head “haloed” with
light—which is also literally “haloed” by her hair band. The black child
here functions as the knowing [but not innocent] angel that redeems the
white woman. As Thomas Cripps states: “Historically, if a black person
is thrust into a white universe, it is inevitable that the white person will
become a better person.”92 And in the promotion of Butter, it is Laura’s
story that outshines Destiny’s: “The White characters’ dilemma, not the
Black characters’ gifts or spirituality, serve as the primary focus in these
films.”93 It is a significant discursive practice to elide the black child char-
acter from public advertisement for the film, an institutional discourse
of exclusion of black children from major Hollywood works that is not
applied when white children star in Hollywood films. For instance, there
is a long list of young white child stars who were prominently featured
on the promotional material for their most famous films: Andy Rooney,
Judy Garland, Shirley Temple, young Drew Barrymore, Ricky Shroder,
Macaulay Culkin, and Corey Feldman, to name a few. Except for Jaden
Smith, who I discuss in detail in the next chapters, black children rarely
hold a prominent place in the advertising of a Hollywood film (including
a lack of starring roles) (Fig. 3.11).
But the absence of the black child from film and popular discourses
about childhood is not limited to cinema as the recent Hollywood remake
of Annie (2014) demonstrates. It was a bold move for writer/director
Will Gluck94 to cast the traditionally white, iconic redheaded Annie as
a young black girl, played by Beasts’ Quvenzhené Wallis, and there has
been a large public backlash to the casting of a black girl in such an iconic
white-child role. The film has garnered considerable backlash for its non-
traditional casting. Virginia Pelley of The Daily Banter historicizes and
contextualizes the Annie character:
Annie’s race had nothing to do with her character, but it has been argued
that her hair color did. Negative stereotypes from the 19th century still
lingered in the early part of the 20th century that red hair was undesir-
108 D. OLSON
able (likely because it was associated with the Irish, who begun flooding
U.S. cities in the mid-1800s and were roundly unwelcomed and despised).
Redheads were associated with fiery tempers and “wickedness.” Therefore,
Annie’s red hair served to marginalize her in a way that made her more vul-
nerable as a character in 1924 but would be anachronistic today.95
Much of the criticism of casting a black Annie alludes to Annie as a sig-

nificant childhood cultural marker. One commenter, Me-me, stated that
she just did “not like seeing a black girl in a role I grew up with … I hate
seeing black people take over and in my eyes ruin childhood memories
I adore.”96 Me-me’s cultural notion of a childhood that cannot include
black children is one example of the discursive nature of the concept of
childhood in American culture. The casting of a black girl in such a cul-
turally significant representation of childhood would suggest in some
ways a movement towards more equitable imaging of black children from
Hollywood filmmakers. Not surprisingly, the racist outrage at casting
Wallis as Annie was fully unleashed online through Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, and Instagram. Interestingly, this image (including the offen-
sive rant) was posted on Twitter97 (Fig. 3.12):
Fig. 3.12 Twitter, frame grab
This image is the modern equivalent to the Topsy-Eva comparison

from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and as such, it denotes
the historical persistence of beliefs about black children as inherently
pickaninnies who are “parasites” that “infect” the “freckled-face” inno-
cence, not just of the original Annie character, but of American childhood
itself.
Despite the not so surprising amount of public backlash against the
casting of Quvenzhené Wallis as Annie, the culturally discursive practice
of denying black children the status of child is evident in ways beyond the
film itself. In particular, the popular retailer Target has been (ironically)
the target of heavy criticism for their clothing line based on the new Annie
film: similar to the film posters for Butter, none of the clothing line’s post-
ers contain images of Quvenzhené Wallis as Annie. Instead, a white girl
110 D. OLSON
Fig. 3.13 Annie collection poster, Target.com
with long flowing hair covers most of the in-store posters, particularly one
featuring the iconic Annie-red jumper outfit. In some cases, these are the
only posters in select stores (Fig. 3.13):
To be fair, in some of the other clothing line ads, there ARE girls from a
variety of ethnicities, though all are very light skinned, but it was the white
girl in the replica of Annie’s classic outfit that caused a modest amount
of public outrage. (I say modest because the outrage over the erasure of
Wallis pales in comparison to the amount of racist commentary against her
casting.)98 In response to the online petition demanding the removal of
the offensive Target Annie ads, the company stated (Fig. 3.14):
With regard to the marketing of the collection, girls from a variety of back-
grounds were featured within the campaign, reflecting that anyone can
embody the spirit and character of Annie.
As for the involvement of Quvenzhané Wallis, we had conversations with
her team about being in the campaign, but ultimately it did not come to
fruition. Fortunately, we had the pleasure of working with Ms. Wallis a num-
ber of times, including appearances at Target’s sales meeting in September
and a launch event in New York City in November. We had a great experi-
ence working with Ms. Wallis and appreciate her efforts in promoting this
collection.99
But the negative attention on the store ad’s “white-washing” of Annie

resulted in the clothing line being pulled out from Target stores. The
Target ads and the Butter promotion demonstrate the culturally discur-
Fig. 3.14 Annie clothing line, Target.com

112 D. OLSON
sive practice of presenting American childhood as white and works in tan-

dem with a variety of other methods of cultural production that function
to reinforce messages of what and who should embody childhood and
innocence. The erasure of Butter’s Yara Shahidi and Annie’s Quvenzhené
Wallis from the film’s promotional material exhibit the unconscious cul-
tural myths about who should represent American childhood.
Conclusion
While having black characters in film is not a rare thing anymore, and
in general African Americans are represented in much more diverse ways
throughout visual media than at any time in America’s history, there are
still areas in cinema where black representation is severely lacking, par-
ticularly images of black children. As I have argued, there is a need for
more diverse images of black children and childhood, images that diverge
significantly from old notions of the pickaninny or savage. The discourse
of childhood and cinematic imagery both would benefit from more inclu-
siveness of all types of children. All three of these films—Precious, Beasts
of the Southern Wild, and Butter—are rare because they feature young
black female protagonists. Yet they are not so rare in their depiction of
those young black girls: the mammy, the pickaninny, the Jezebel, and the
Magic Negro. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains, stereotypes function in
a unique circular manner: “Social reality seems to endorse the stereotype.
Social representation echoes social realities which are in turn modeled
upon social representation.”100 More importantly, our cultural discourse
about childhood, innocence, and who should or should not be considered
a “child,” continues to frame how cinema depicts both white and black
girls, as well as boys, which we will see in Chap. 4. And so we are left with
very old racial discourses that are re-visualized and re-contextualized for
modern audiences whose cinematic experience of young black girls is all
too often tied to those re-productions of the West’s racial discourse.
Notes
1. Bernth Lindfors, “Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the
Dark Continent,” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary
Body, Rosemarie Garland Thompson, ed. (New York: NYU, 1996),
208–209. See also Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Sadiah

Qureshi “Displaying Sara Baartman, The Hottentot Venus.”
History of Science 42, no. 136 (2004): 233–257.
2. George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes (Lanham, Maryland:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), xvi, xx, xxii.
3. Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” Black Skin White Masks
(London: Pluto Press, 1986), 84. Full text available at http://
www.abahlali.org/files/__Black_Skin__White_Masks__Pluto_
Classics_.pdf
4. Carol E. Henderson, ed. Imagining the Black Female Body:
Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 3, 29.
5. Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of
Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013), 27–28.
6. Henderson, Imagining the Black Female Body, 5.
7. David Pilgrim, “The Mammy Caricature,” The Jim Crow Museum,
accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/
mammies/
8. Norma Manatu, African American Women and Sexuality in the
Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2003), 18.
9. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 266–267.
10. Pilgrim, “Jezebel,” accessed 15 July 2015, http://www.ferris.

edu/jimcrow/jezebel.htm
11. Manatu, African American Women and Sexuality in the Cinema,
19.

13. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an

Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art,
Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 206.

15. Maria del Guadelupe Davidson, “You … You Remind Me of….”:
A Black Feminist’s Rejection of the White Imagination,” In
Imagining the Black Female Body, Carol E. Henderson, ed. (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 199.
114 D. OLSON

17. Shani H. Peterson, Gina M. Wingood, et al., “Images of Sexual
Stereotypes in Rap Videos and the Health of African American
Female Adolescents,” Journal of Women’s Health, 16, no. 8 (2007):
1158. See also, Eric L. Sprankle, Christian M. End, et al., “Sexually
Degrading Music Videos and Lyrics: Their effects on males’
aggression and endorsement of rape myths and sexual stereotypes.”
Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications,
24, no. 1 (2012): 31–39; Zoe Spencer, Murda, Misogyny, and
Mayhem: Hip-Hop and the Culture of Abnormality in the Urban
Community (New York: University Press of America, 2011).
18. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an

Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art,
Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 212.
19. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 171.
20. See Christopher P. Lehman, The Colored Cartoon: Black

Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907–1954
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Richard Neupert
“Trouble in Watermelon Land: George Pal and the Little Jasper
Cartoons,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2001): 14–26; and Kelvin
Santiago-Valles “‘Still Longing for de Old Plantation’: The Visual
Parodies and Racial National Imaginary of US Overseas
Expansionism, 1898–1903,” American Studies International 37,
no. 3 (1999): 18–43.
21. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans,
Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 138.
22. Jaden Smith’s first feature-length film, Karate Kid (Howard

Zwart, 2010) was a box-office hit at its release, grossing 55 million
dollars at its opening, but dropped to second the following week,
then fourth, and by the end of June the film was ranked sixth. But
this film was also produced by his father, Will Smith, which begs
the question of whether or not young Jaden would have been
offered the role if his father had not been Will Smith and the pro-
ducer. See “Karate Kid,” BoxOfficeMojo.com, accessed 15 July
2015, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend
&id=karatekid2010.htm
23. Precious had nominations for Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Gabourey Sidibe),
Best Achievement in Directing (Lee Daniels), and Best Achievement

in Film Editing (Joe Klotz). The film won awards for Best
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Mo’Nique) and
Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher). Beasts of the
Southern Wild had nominations for Best Motion Picture of the
Year, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role,
(Quvenzhané Wallis, who at nine years, was the youngest person
ever nominated for Best Actress.) Best Achievement in Directing,
and Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.
24. Monica Sweeney, “A Precious and Painful Life,” The Lancet, 375
(2010): 189–190.
25. Teresa Wiltz, “Oprah is Wrong about Precious,” The Root, 6

November 2009. NP.
26. David Hennessee, “Some Thoughts on Precious: Based on the Novel
Push by Sapphire,” Moebius 8, no. 1 (2010): 155–160. Web.
27. Ed Gonzalez, “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire,”
Slant Magazine, 9 October 2009. NP. Web.
28. Armond White, “Pride and Precious.” NYPress.com, 4 November
2009.
29. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism,
Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), 67.
30. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 2.
31. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of
the Extraordinary Body (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 2.
32. Anna Mae Duane, Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence,
Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2011), 3, 146.
33. Riché Richardson, “Push, Precious, and New Narratives of Slavery
in Harlem,” Black Camera 4, no. 1 (2012): 165.
34. Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon
S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. 10,
12–13.
35. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, “‘I think I was Rape’: Black Feminist
Readings of Affect and Incest in Precious,” Black Camera 4, no. 1
(2012): 153–154.
36. Robert T. Muller, Robert A. Caldwell, and John E. Hunter, “Child
Provocativeness and Gender as Factors Contributing to the
Blaming of Victims of Physical Child Abuse,” Child Abuse and
Neglect 17 (1993): 249.
116 D. OLSON
37. Michelle Jarman, “Cultural Consumption and Rejection of

Precious Jones: Pushing Disability into the Discussion of Sapphire’s
Push and Lee Daniels’ Precious,” Feminist Formations 24, no. 2
(2012): 168.
38. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993),
45.
39. Jean-Charles, “‘I think I was Rape,’” 154.
40. Richardson, “Push, Precious, and New Narratives of Slavery,” 171.
41. Mia Mask, “The Precarious Politics of Precious: A Close Reading
of a Cinematic Text,” Black Camera: An International Film
Journal 4, no. 1 (2012): 99.
42. Mask, “The Precarious Politics of Precious,” 99.
43. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National
Action, Presented to the US Department of Labor, 1965. http://
www.blackpast.org/primary/moynihan-report-1965. For more
on the black family, see James Q. Wilson “Slavery and the Black
Family.” Public Interest 147 (2002): 3–23; Hans Massaquoi “The
Black Family Nobody Knows.” Ebony 48, no. 10 (1993): 28–31;
Robert Staples, ed. The Black Family (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
1999).
44. White, “Pride and Precious,” np.
45. Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of
Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times
to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 191.
46. Washington, Medical Apartheid, 196.
47. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of
Gender and Race in the United States 1880–1917 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 26–27.
48. Washington Medical Apartheid, 195–198.
49.
“Caricatures of the African American: The Picakninny,”
AuthenticHistory.com, accessed 15 July 2015, http://www.
authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/2-pickaninny/.
50. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins, eds. The Annotated
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Norton,
2007), 249. For more on discussions of Topsy, see Thomas
E. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas:
Southern Methodist UP, 1986); Mason I. Lowance, Jr., Ellen
E. Westbrook, and R.C. De Prospo, eds., The Stowe Debate:
Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: U of
Massachusetts Press, 1996); Linda Williams, Playing the Race

Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to
O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
University Press, 2011), 34–35.
53. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the
19th Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 90–91.
54. Jan Nederveen Peiterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and

Blacks in Western Popular Culture (Amsterdam: Pictures: Cosmic
Illusion Pictures Foundation, 1992), 196.
55. J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: African Americans in
television since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1983),
Chapter 19. Available at http://jfredmacdonald.com/bawtv/
bawtv19.htm, accessed 15 July 2015.
56. Stephanie Greco Larson, Media and Minorities: The Politics of Race
in News and Entertainment (New York: Roman and Littlefield,
2006), 28.
57. Jared Sexton, “More Serious than Money: On Our Gang, Diff’rent
Strokes, and Webster,” African Americans on Television: Race-ing
for Ratings, eds. David J. Leonard and Lisa Guerrero (Santa
Barbara: Praeger, 2013), 91.
58. Christy Lemire, “Review: Beautiful ‘Beasts’ is One of Year’s Best,”
AP, 28 June 2012.
59. A.O. Scott, “She’s the Man of This Swamp,” New York Times, 26
June 2012. Web.
60. Mike Scott, The Times Picayune, 3 July 2012. NOLA.com.
61. Sexton, “More Serious than Money,” 91.
62. Cerise L. Glen and Landra J. Cunningham, “The Power of Black
Magic: The Magical Negro and White Salvation Film,” Journal of
Black Studies 40, no. 2 (2009): 138.
63. The film to date has made $12.8 million domestically with a world-
wide total of $21 million. “Beasts of the Southern Wild,”
BoxOfficeMojo.com, accessed 15 July 2015, http://www.boxof-
ficemojo.com/movies/?id=beastsofthesouthernwild.htm
64. Vince Mancini, “The Case Against Beasts of the Southern Wild,”
Filmdrunk.com 3 December 2012.
118 D. OLSON
65. Richard Corliss, “Beasts of the Southern Wild: A Child’s Garden of

Wonders,” Time 26 June 2012.
66. Magical realism is a literary movement in which the real and fantas-
tical are combined so that “the marvelous seems to grow organi-
cally within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them.”
Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the
Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2004), 1.
67. Jon Thiem, “The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist
Fiction,” Magical Realsim: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995), 244.
68. Agnes Woolley, “The Politics of Myth Making: Beasts of the

Southern Wild,” Open Democracy: Free Thinking for the Open
World, 29 October 2012, https://www.opendemocracy.
net/5050/agnes-w oolley/politics-of-myth-making-beasts-
of-southern-wild
69. P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Past-on Stories: History and the Magically
Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” Magical Realsim: Theory,
History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy
B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 287.
70. Parkinson Zamora, Lois and Wendy B. Faris, eds. “Introduction.”
Magical Realsim: Theory, History, Community (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995), 9.
71. bell hooks, “Beasts of the Southern Wild: Old Stereotypes,” The
Root, 10 September 2012. http://www.theroot.com/articles/
culture/2012/09/beasts_of_the_southern_wild_old_stereotypes.
html
72. See Corliss, Scott, and Lemire.
73. bell hooks, “No Love in the Wild,” Newblackman.blogspot, 5

September 2012. http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2012/09/
bell-hooks-no-love-in-wild.html.
74. Debra Walker King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 93.
75. hooks, “No Love in the Wild.”
76. Bernstien, Racial Innocence, 63–64.
77. Debra Walker King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain,
30; See also Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New
York: Picador, 2003).
78. Another such squalor porn film with black/brown children is

Slumdog Millionaire (2008), a film which sparked a new type of
tourism in India—poverty tours—where wealthy white visitors
take narrated tours through slums. And though some might point
out the success of the A&E network’s squalor porn series Honey
Boo Boo, which positions an overweight, Southern child (and an
all-white cast) in extreme poverty, I would offer that Honey Boo
Boo is never abused; she is never shown without love or kindness,
and even in their poverty, gluttony, and filth, the child is never
portrayed as animalistic like Hushpuppy is.
79. Debra Walker King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain, 5.
80. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge,
2000), 76–77.
81. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding.” Culture, Media, Language,
edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul
Willis (New York: Routledge, 1980), 128.
83. Hall, Culture Media Language, 134.
84. Yvonne Bynoe, “The White Boy Shuffle.” Politicallyblack.com, 16
January 2001. See also Bakari Kitwana, White Kids Love Hip Hop:
Wanksters, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in
America (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005).
85. Anna Beatrice Scott, “Superpower vs. Supernatural: Black

Superheroes and the Quest for Mutant Reality,” Journal of Visual
Culture 5, no. 3 (2006): 299.
86. Hughey, “Cinethetic Racism,” 556–558.
88. Hughey, “Cinethetic Racism,” 564.
89. Fresh Movie Trailers, “Butter Trailer,” YouTube, 5 September

2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KE5PRNeems
90. Jason Micallef’s script Butter won the 2008 Nicholl Fellowship
with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2008.
He was then approached by Jennifer Garner, whose production
company, Vandalia Films, wanted to film it. The other characters
were already cast by Garner’s company except the role of Destiny.
Interview can be accessed at http://www.kcet.org/arts/cinema_
series/podcasts/audio-qa-butter-with-writer-jason-micallef.html
120 D. OLSON
92. Thomas Cripps, qtd in Rita Kempley “Too Too Divine, Movies’
‘Magic Negro’ Saves the Day, but at the Cost of his Soul,” The
Washington Post, 7 June 2003. Web.
93. Glenn and Cunningham, “The Power of Black Magic,” 138.
94. Gluck’s other films include Fired Up (2009), Easy A (2010),

Friends with Benefits (2011)
95. Virginia Pelly, “Moronic Racists’ Appalling Reaction to Black

Actress Starring in ‘Annie’ Remake,” The Daily Banter 14 March
2014, http://thedailybanter.com/2014/03/moronic-racists-
appalling-reaction-to-black-actress-starring-in-annie-remake/
96. http://www.crushable.com/2014/03/12/entertainment/
annie-is-black-remake-racist-comments-ignorant/
97. http://aattp.org/watch-the-not-racist-crowd-react-to-annies-blackness-
in-remake-screenshots/
98. Annabel Fenwick Elliot, “Target Under Fire for Promoting its
Annie Clothing Range With White Models—When the New Lead
Actress Is Black,” Daily Mail, 30 December 2014. Accessed 1
August 2015. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-
2891375/Target-customers-call-store-apologize-black-actress-
Quvenzhan-Wallis-malicious-use-white-models-advertise-Annie-
inspired-clothing-range.html
99. “Is Target Racist? Deleware Mother Starts Petition Over Store’s
Annie Line.” Inquisitor.com, 31 December 2014. http://www.
inquisitr.com/1717412/is-target-racist-delaware-mother-starts-
petition-over-stor es-annie-clothing-line/#6EDOijyDIl
H7z104.99
100. Pieterse, White on Black, 11.
CHAPTER 4
Boys in Black and the Urban Ghetto Child
The trajectory of representation of black children in American cinema has

evolved somewhat since the colonial and Jim Crow eras. As discussed in
Chap. 2, images of black children were often utilized in popular imagery
to justify racist beliefs about blacks or to denigrate and animalize black
children in order to sanctify whiteness.1 While the modern age has seen
improvement in the production of less overt racist imagery, visual media
has instead relied much more on Stuart Hall’s notion of articulation in
which language and images are discursively connected in order to affect
a particular response or belief. Hall’s theory of articulation is even more
valuable in a contemporary context, as we saw in Chap. 3 with Butter
and Annie, because of the globalization of the production/consumption
circulation through the Internet. Images and discourses are disseminated
now on a global scale so that production/consumption circuits interweave
exponentially and much farther afield than at any time in world history.
So Hollywood images of black children, as well as their absence, from cin-
ematic discourse tend to emerge in other forms, such as the Twitter com-
ments about Hunger Games and Annie as “violations” of “traditional”
notions of childhood. According to Jonathan Gray, these circulating
images and discourses, called paratexts, “flow between the gaps of textual
exhibition” like films and other visual media, and work to validate and
legitimate historically rooted racial hierarchies.2
Images of black males are particularly articulated as the “face” of crime
and drug use in American society, despite the fact that whites make up

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_4
122 D. OLSON
the majority of criminals and drug users.3 Black male youth are depicted
in Hollywood cinema almost exclusively within an urban crime context,
reinforcing notions of the inherent criminality of black males. The black
urban film as a trope began in earnest with The Cool World, continued in
different forms with the Blaxploitation films of the late 1960s and early
1970s, and culminated in the “hood” films of the 1980s and 1990s. These
images of the “cool” black gangster or “thug” persist in today’s media,
particularly in popular rap and hip hop music videos, but with unfortu-
nate real-world consequences—black male children are most often viewed
by dominant society as naturally criminal, as in the 2014 shooting of
12-year-old Tamir Rice by Cleveland police who interpreted the black
child, who had a toy gun, as a threat.4 The cases discussed below exemplify
the continued historical trajectory of the black beast or black brute stereo-
type. Black male children are automatically, naturally, suspect. As I will
show, the history of media discourse linking blackness, youth, and crimi-
nality—a history visually underscored through crime reporting—works in
tandem with popular Hollywood cinema to justify the notion of blackness
as criminal or animalistic.
Black Boys and the Disourse of Crime

Media discourses about black male youth today are still often limited to
notions of criminalization or anti-social behavior, as Stuart Hall observed
as far back as 1978, “the two [race and crime] are indissolubly linked: each
term references the other in both the official and public consciousness.”5
The persistence of the discourse of the criminal black youth in the public
consciousness directly impacts social relations between black youth and
the rest of society. News media imagery that criminalizes black youth can
also inform cinematic presentations of black male youth. Hall explains
that the media “locat[es] and situate[es] black crime geographically and
ethnically, as peculiar to black youth in the inner-city ‘ghetto’s … [which
are then] fused into a single theme: crime, race, and the ghetto.”6 A par-
ticularly disturbing example of the effects of this criminalizing discourse is
the phenomenon of the “school-to-prison” pipeline in which black chil-
dren are forced into the criminal justice system for normal child behaviors,
such as wrestling or roughhousing.7 The continual cultural production
of media images of “black crime” has functioned to perpetuate colonial-
era notions of black inferiority and black beastliness—translated today
into black criminality as a natural biological propensity for misbehavior.
BOYS IN BLACK AND THE URBAN GHETTO CHILD 123
Black male children bear the significant negative effects of the widespread
articulation of images and discourses about the thuggish nature of black
male youth.
There are specific ways the media criminalizes black youth, which are
regularly replicated in Hollywood film depictions of black children. Black
males are often visually constructed as naturally criminal, hence naturally
lacking in innocence. News coverage tends to find excuses for white chil-
dren who commit crimes (something must have gone wrong), while no
one is surprised when black children commit crimes; there are no ques-
tions about “what went wrong” like there are for white child criminals. In
contrast to white children, black children are described in ways that ally
them with adulthood rather than childhood. The notion of innocence lost
is not part of the media discourse where black children are concerned.
The following Tate and Brown cases illustrate these points quite clearly.
The cases are examples of children who committed murder—normally an
exclusively “adult” crime—but they are also evidence of the way visual
media frames notions of childhood and race (Fig. 4.1).8
On Friday, 26 February 2009, a small-town, 11-year-old white boy
from Pennsylvania named Jordan Brown walked into his father’s bedroom
and shot his father’s pregnant fiancé, Kenzi Houk, in the head with a shot-
gun, killing both her and her unborn son. Jordan then gathered his sister
and calmly walked to the bus stop. He boarded the bus to school as if it
were any normal day. The crime shocked the nation because of both its
brutality and Jordan’s young age, which the media played up at every turn.
Almost all of the media coverage raised the notion of the child’s inherent
innocence and questioned what could have happened to Jordan to “cause
him” to commit murder (because something must have happened—white
boys do not kill people). The discourse surrounding Brown’s actions
focused on finding a reason why, if he was guilty, he would violate the one
enduring tenet of childhood: innocence. Debbie Houk, the victim’s own
mother, is quoted as saying: “I’m sad to think that an 11-year-old would
commit such a crime.”9 Jordan Brown maintained his innocence and has
never admitted to killing Houk (Fig. 4.2).
In contrast, on the night of 28 July 28 1999, 12-year-old African
American Lionel Tate was at his home playing with his six-year-old
cousin, Tiffany Eunick, whom his mother, Florida State Trooper Kathleen
Grossett-Tate, was babysitting. Lionel, an avid Professional Wrestling
Fan (WWE [previously WWF]), alerted his mother a short time later that
Tiffany was not breathing. Tiffany would be pronounced dead not long
124 D. OLSON
Fig. 4.1 Jordan Brown mug shot age 11, yearbook picture, and Brown at foot-
ball practice (Jordan Brown, “Boy Who Killed Dad’s Pregnant Fiancée, Moving to
Dad’s House,” Huffington Post, 1 December 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/12/01/jordan-brown-killing-kenzie-brown_n_2223585.html;
Caitlin Keeting, “Six Years After Being Charged with Murder at age 11, Jordan
Brown May Get New Trial,” People, 6 March 2015. http://www.people.com/
article/jordan-brown-murder-hearing-trial; Andrea Canning and Maggie
Burbank, “Jordan Brown Murder Case takes Emotional Toll,” abcnews.com, 28
April 2010. Accessed 5 August 2015. http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/jordan-
brown-murder-case-12-year-adult/story?id=10288704)
after from severe internal injuries. Tate told the police that he was doing
“wrestling moves” with Tiffany and that he had held her in a chokehold,
but that he fell, and she hit her head.10 Tate insisted it was an accident,
that he had not meant to hurt Tiffany and that they were just playing.
The prosecutor for the case would describe Tiffany’s injuries as similar to
Fig. 4.2 Left:Lionel Tate, age 12 mug shot, center and right: age 13 at trial (Antonia Monacelli, “Murderous Children:
12 year old Lionel Tate killed a 6 year old girl,” accessed 25 July 2015, http://antonia-monacelli.hubpages.com/hub/
Murderous-Children-Lionel-Tate; “When Life Means Life,” St. Petersburg Times Online, 3 June 2001, http://www.
sptimes.com/News/060301/photos/truelifegallery/pages/tl-tate.htm; “Enough Blame to Go Around,” CBSnews.com,
9 March 2001, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/enough-blame-to-go-around/)
BOYS IN BLACK AND THE URBAN GHETTO CHILD
125
126 D. OLSON
a fall from a three-story window. In the news media, Tate was character-
ized most often by his weight: a “166-pound boy [who] was practicing
professional wrestling moves on the forty-eight-pound girl.”11 Among the
many media reports about this crime, there were no other descriptions of
Lionel other than his weight and his fascination with Pro Wrestling. This
fascination would form the basis for his defense. Broward County Circuit
Court Judge Joel T. Lazarus described the crime not as “the playful acts
of a child, [but as] cold, callous, and indescribably cruel.”12
What is significant about these two tragic cases is the discourse used by
media to discuss the boys’ crimes in relation to their condition of being a
child. Within the social consciousness, such a horrendous crime as mur-
der exists exclusively within the sphere of adulthood. Though the age at
which adult/child is defined is often in question, few would argue that an
11- or 12-year-old is still a child.13 A child who commits murder discom-
bobulates deeply embedded cultural notions of what a child is and that
child’s ignorance, that is, their inherent innocence, of adult sins. However,
the media framework surrounding these two cases is representative of the
role race plays within such discourses of childhood and innocence in our
culture, particularly regarding young males.
In the reports about the Jordan Brown case, he was characterized as
“[t]he most surprising murder suspect” who was a “chubby-faced fifth-
grader with dark brown hair and an energetic smile. He liked riding bikes
and reading Harry Potter books. Since the third grade, he played quarter-
back in his community’s football league”—all the accoutrement of child-
hood innocence.14 This description carries with it numerous implications
concerning the cultural beliefs about the nature of childhood. “Chubby-
faced” is a term heavily imbued with infancy, as well as notions of angels
and Victorian-style cherubs, all of which are common visual images regu-
larly used to represent cultural beliefs about what childhood is in the public
imaginary—innocent and pure. The information that Jordan played foot-
ball, and that he was a quarterback—a particular code for white youthful
wholesomeness helped paint the picture of a sweet, normal, all-American
boy; an image that contrasts markedly from the crime Brown was accused
of committing.15 Most news reports also used the phrase, “held respon-
sible” as opposed to “guilty,” a subtle signal that suggested a refusal on
the part of adults to acknowledge the boy’s obvious intent. Brown was
declared delinquent, which in juvenile court is equivalent to a guilty ver-
dict, even though Brown had not (and to this day has not) confessed to
the crime. Almost every report discussed how the prosecutors in the case
and county officials were pushing to be sure the boy received counseling
and help so that the “youngster [could] turn his life around.”16
Criminal intent in Jordan Brown’s crime was continually questioned—
there must be some underlying cause that would make a white child do
such a thing. Media pundits suggested sympathetic reasons for “why” he
shot his father’s fiancé. An MSNBC report states there “must be some-
thing wrong with the kid. An 11 year old doesn’t shoot people like this.”17
CNN reported that the boy was jealous of Houk and the new baby, while
Lawrence Steinberg, professor at Temple University and an expert in ado-
lescence, in an ABC News report stated that even if Brown was jealous,
“a child’s brain isn’t fully developed—especially in areas that control deci-
sion-making, risk-taking and impulse control” and so Brown should not
be held responsible.18 Local news media described Brown as an “all-Amer-
ican” kid who had a “healthy relationship” with Houk.19 When asked by a
reporter how Brown was doing during his incarceration, his defense attor-
ney Dennis Elisco said: “He’s an emotional wreck, he’s devastated, he’s
confused, he doesn’t understand what he’s being charged with. He’s 11
years old—he’s a typical 11 year old kid—I mean, he’s a baby.”20 Brown’s
continued denial of any culpability in the death of Houk and her unborn
child contributes to the discourse that frames his alleged crime within
notions of white childhood—“he’s a baby”—innocence.
The goal of the prosecutors and defense attorneys in this case was to
get Brown the help he needed, to avoid trying the boy as an adult, and to
help him “turn his life around,” to perhaps restore, if not childhood inno-
cence, then at least the appearance of such innocence. No such discussion
was reported concerning Lionel Tate. Interestingly, three years after the
crime, Brown’s father, who never believed his son guilty and instead fully
embraced his child’s innocence to the exclusion of all evidence to the
contrary, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he “grieved that his son had
lost so many years of his childhood.” He stated “you have an 11-year-old
child who is wrongfully accused of a double homicide … you can never
get back what’s been taken from him.”21 To Brown’s father, his son’s lost
childhood, his lost innocence, appears as the singularly haunting tragedy
within the enormity of this disturbing crime.
It seemed to all involved that this case was not just a cold and inhumane
assault on a pregnant mother, but also a deadly assault on cultural notions
of childhood innocence itself, something that was never referred to with
Lionel Tate. Indeed, as Robert A. Davis explains, notions of childhood
innocence can “trap” children, “burdening them with an ideal of perfec-
128 D. OLSON
tion [that is] unsustainable.”22 This burden of expectation does not serve
as an excuse for Brown’s horrific act, but rather, the discourse about the
expectation of Brown’s childness functions to clarify that in the Brown and
Tate cases, the children themselves—the “Child”—by their disturbingly
unchildlike behavior, challenged the very notion of innocent childhood
itself.
Conversely, in the case of 12-year-old African American Lionel Tate,
media reports continually foregrounded his race and focused on his large
size as somehow indicative of “natural” criminal behavior. There were
no discussions about an ulterior cause in Tate’s case like there were for
Brown’s. Instead, news reports about Lionel Tate portrayed a very dif-
ferent picture. There are no positive physical descriptions of 12-year-old
Lionel Tate. No “chubby cheeks” or mention of other activities the child
enjoyed. Most of the images accompanying news stories showed Tate with
eyes half-closed, non-smiling, head tilted to one side, and appearing as if
he were bored. In contrast, many of the images accompanying stories of
Brown showed him smiling, in his football uniform, or with his father.
There were no images of Tate riding his bike, or doing normal boy things.
And because Tate took responsibility for the death as accidental and said
they were just “playing,” the media reports distorted childhood “play” in
Tate’s case as assaultive and dangerous—as if that were the only play black
boys engaged in. The discourse surrounding the Tate case was devoid of
any language suggestive of innocence or childlike behavior. Jordan Brown
played “wholesome” football, but Lionel Tate wrestled, which was por-
trayed as a more “dangerous” sport than the equally violent sport of foot-
ball. Mike Downey, in an LA Times article titled “Assigning the Blame in
Murder by a Child’s Hand” stated that Tate’s claim of playing wrestling
with the six-year-old victim “made [his] skin crawl.”23 In an ABC News
report, Tate is described at his January 2001 trial: “Lionel sat quietly in
court, almost as if he didn’t know what was happening, watching through
the eyes of a young adolescent.”24 Tate was not described as a child, but
as an adolescent—a term that is easier than “child” to associate with adult
criminal behavior, as Hall has suggested. Some headlines did not even
name Tate but instead fused the boy and the crime into one identity:
ABC’s headline “‘Wrestling’ Case Draws Life Sentence” or NY Times’
“Boy Convicted of Murder in Wrestling Death.”
The case itself became a symbol of a broken juvenile justice system
that holds 12-year-old children accountable as adults. Additionally, there
were very few descriptions of Tate’s victim, Tiffany Eunick, also African
American, other than her slight form (48 pounds) as a contrast to Tate’s
size. There are no mentions of any “child-like” characteristics of young
Lionel Tate like there are in the Jordan Brown case. Rather, news reports
about Lionel Tate consistently focused on the child’s unchildlike weight.
The Sun-Sentinel called him “husky” and the victim’s mother described
Lionel as a “very large boy for his age” who stood “nearly 6 feet tall.”25
Most news reports specifically mentioned Lionel’s weight—ranging any-
where from 166 to 170 pounds—in direct relation to the victim, six-year-
old Tiffany’s weight of 48 pounds. Shelley McKinney claimed Brown had
a “reputation as a schoolyard bully” though she offers no sources or exam-
ples to support this claim.26 The New York Times summed up the conflict-
ing image of Lionel Tate by describing him as “a man-child who looked
old enough to know the consequences of his actions yet who seemed still
to live in a world of make-believe,” but who is accused of “stomping a
younger playmate to death.”27 The repetitive nature of the juxtaposition
of the child’s weight with his age functions as a negation of Lionel’s child-
ness; while acknowledging his youth, he was continually described as non-
childlike—as more adult—by reason of his height and weight alone, he
“looked” like he was older. But the prevailing discourse in the Tate case
depended more specifically on connecting his blackness with his size in
such a way as to suggest, or, rather, to convince the public and a jury, that
because of those disparate things that he was not a child at all. He was an
adult and should be seen and treated as such.
The news media was not the only venue for depictions of Lionel Tate
as a non-child. In 1993, the A&E network broadcast a documentary
about the Lionel Tate case narrated by well-known Biography and History
Channel anchor Bill Curtis.28 And while the documentary highlights the
“shocking” case of a 12-year-old child accused of murder and sentenced
to life in prison, the images presented in the documentary do not support
Tate’s childness at all; rather, they paint a picture of a violent and animal-
istic non-child. There are no images of Lionel smiling or having fun in any
of the still photos the documentary presents. The film repeatedly shows
Tate as somber and threatening—even at 12 years old—and describes him
as “streetwise,” which implies “a certain sense of having gone astray—
becoming too worldly at a young age.”29 The film’s framing of the case
predisposes viewers to see the images of Tate as threatening rather than
as a 12-year-old with childlike qualities. The film opens with images of
a young black girl running and jumping (her back to the camera—“just
some black girl”) and then cuts to Tate as he looks up from a document at
130 D. OLSON
Fig. 4.3 “Child’s Play, Deadly Play,” A&E, 1993, frame grab
a table. The shot is bathed in red light, and, as Tate looks up, the camera
freezes, capturing his unsmiling face, clearly suggesting he is threatening,
even at 12 years old. Such manipulated representations of Tate remove his
child status and instead conflate his blackness with popular beliefs about
black males’—of any age—natural propensity for violence (Fig. 4.3).
Tate is never shown smiling, playing, running, or participating in any
other typical childlike activities. Most of the images of Tate in the film
are of his mug shot, in which he is confused and scared, or shots from his
trial in which he is dressed in a formal button-up shirt (as opposed to a
more childlike outfit such as a t-shirt and jeans) and flanked by adults. The
discourse surrounding the case of Lionel Tate, particularly in contrast to
the media discourse of Jordan Brown’s case, fortifies the notion that he is
a non-child, a brute, a beast (reinscribing the old black brute stereotypes)
and therefore deserving of the life-in-prison sentence that he was given.30
These two cases exemplify the cultural pervasiveness of the discourse that
criminalizes and adultifies black boys, eliding them from notions of child-
hood and innocence. As we will see, Hollywood films are also complicit in
these disturbing portrayals of black children.
Blaxploitation Films and the New Negro Child

As demonstrated in the above examples, the notion of childhood innocence
is still most often reserved for white children. The media portrayal of the
Brown and Tate cases indicates that the discourse of childhood today does
not stray too far from the historical portrayals of black children during
the colonial age. Modern images of black children are virtually identical
to earlier depictions of black males as savages. As Gloria Ladson Billings
explains: “[the] notion of little Black boys as cute does not last very long.
Before long they are moved to a category that resembles criminals. Their
childhood evaporates before they are eight or nine-year-old when teachers
and other … officials begin to think of them as ‘men’.”31 It is clear that
different perceptions of black and white children developed over time and
were reinforced by commercialized mass culture industries. As we will see,
the ghetto and hood films of the 1970s, called Blaxploitation films, fea-
tured black males in a modern reworking of the “savage African” character
that was common during the colonial era. These early Blaxploitation films
laid the groundwork for today’s popular black gangster characters, which
bear a striking resemblance to the colonial-era, “savage African” image.
By the end of the 1960s, the harmless, bumbling, sweetly ignorant,
pickaninny black child had been visually and discursively replaced with the
street-hardened, ghetto-bred, violent gangster, an image that has slowly
become the dominant image of young black males in popular cinema
today. As Paula J. Massood explains, previous idyllic images of passive
non-threatening blacks on screen (such as Sidney Poitier’s roles in Lillies
of the Field [1963] and A Patch of Blue [1965]) were slowly replaced with
urban ghetto spaces.32 These cinematic images of violent black youth con-
verged with discourses about crime and poverty to create the now-iconic
image of the criminal and savage black youth, a reinvention of the histori-
cal savage buck stereotype.
Films that feature urban black youth appeared regularly on the coattails
of the popular Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. As Ed Guerrero explains,
Blaxploitation films were released right after the end of the Hays code
in 1966 and ended about the mid-1970s. They were action–adventure
films that featured all- or mostly all-black casts with black protagonists
132 D. OLSON
in the action hero role: Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song (1971), Gordon Parks’ Shaft (1971), and Gordon Parks, Jr.’s,
Superfly (1972). These films were usually set in the inner-city ghetto, and,
as Guerrero argues, were made as a desperate attempt by Hollywood to
slow declining revenue caused by competition from both television and
white flight to the suburbs. Both circumstances reduced theater atten-
dance dramatically resulting in a significant decline in box-office revenue.
In response, Hollywood embraced Blaxploitation as a means to regener-
ate that lost income. Sweet Sweetback, Shaft, and Superfly were box-office
hits and celebrated the “baad nigga” hero—a pimp or criminal, stylishly
dressed, witty, smooth-talking, who gains the upper hand against the
white man, something unseen in a Hollywood film prior to the 1970s.
Blaxploitation films were most often set in poor areas of the inner city and
featured funk or jazz soundtracks. Van Peebles’ Sweetback became the
icon for the “baad nigga” character. As Paula J. Massood describes:
Sweetback’s characteristics of distance, silence, and independence made him

a hero for the youth audiences that filled the theaters. Ironically, these char-
acteristics made Sweetback the ultimate American hero. Combining traits of
loner and folk hero, Sweetback personifies the tension between individual-
ism and collectivism emphasized by American ideology. Sweetback’s rejec-
tion of authority figures, his sexual success, and his proven cunning link him
with similar figures played by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.33
Hollywood reluctantly took advantage of the rising civil rights movement,

the popularity of “Baad Nigga” characters like Sweetback, and the grow-
ing “dissatisfaction with Hollywood’s persistent degradation of African
Americans.”34 As Yvonne D. Sims argues: “Faced with impressive box-
office receipts, studios tried to replicate the formula of Sweet Sweetback,
Shaft, and Superfly by inundating audiences with the same formula, but
poorer quality of story development.”35 So although Hollywood was
finally open to producing African American-cast films, the motive was
purely financial rather than as an acknowledgment of the growing black
role in society. Once the financial crisis lessened, so did Hollywood’s foray
into black-cast films.
On the one hand, Blaxploitation films were beneficial to the black
audience. These films, at first, were black films made by black filmmak-
ers, which featured black protagonists and white villains. This was an
important accomplishment considering the white-dominated Hollywood
industrial system. On the other hand, Blaxploitation films did little to fur-
ther the notion of black children and childhood as “innocent”; in fact,
Blaxploitation films tended to reinforce entrenched stereotypes about
black children as more adult than child. The opening scenes of Van
Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback, for instance, features a young Sweetback intro-
duced to adult sexuality, an image that works to naturalize, rather than
interrogate, cultural codes about aberrant black male youth (Fig. 4.4).
And depictions like these reveal the discursive longevity of beliefs and fears
about the hypersexuality of black males.36 As Celeste A. Fisher argues:
“While there are clearly some narrative and aesthetic differences in the
films of the 1970s and the 1990s … they illustrate that the concern about
responses to particular constructions of blackness, specifically construc-
tions of urban black youth, is not a new debate.”37 The image of the child
Sweetback experiencing (not just obtaining) sexual knowledge continues
a tradition of depicting black males as non-children, not innocent, which
sets the stage for the depictions of later black youth as non-children, such
as in the film Fresh (discussed below) where Fresh is offered sex for drugs.
One notable exception to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s is
Martin Ritt’s 1972 film Sounder, which appeared at the height of the
Blaxploitation craze. Sounder is a historical family drama film about a poor
African American sharecropper family set in the Depression era and is
based on the 1969 novel of the same name by William H. Armstrong. The
protagonist is an 11-year-old boy, David Lee, and his dog Sounder who
often go hunting to help provide for the family. When the father is jailed
for stealing food, David Lee journeys to try and find where his father is
being held. Along the way David Lee befriends a black schoolteacher in
an all-black school that fuels the boy’s desire for an education, a marked
Fig. 4.4 Sweet

Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song. Directed by Melvin
Van Peebles. Los
Angeles: Yeah, Inc.,
1971, frame grab
134 D. OLSON
difference from the young budding gangster, Sweet Sweetback. Tom

Symmons argues that Sounder “was a key feature in the heated debate over
race representation in Hollywood … [as it] ran counter to the controver-
sial blaxploitation boom of the period.”38 Indeed, Sounder was produced
with a budget less than a million dollars but returned more than seventeen
million in box office and rentals. It was nominated for an Academy Award
for Best Picture, and its stars, Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson, for Best
Actor and Best Actress. Paul Warshow states that the film “escapes the old
benign racist stereotype of blacks as content in their deprivation … [and]
at the same time, it escapes the countervailing modern white liberal or rad-
ical view which sees blacks as only a social problem or sees them as people
only negatively.”39 While the narrative focus oscillates between the father,
Nathan, and his son David, the depiction of David as a bright, curious,
hard-working, and resilient youngster is one of the few positive portrayals
of a black boy in American film. He is neither portrayed as a pickaninny
character nor as an aggressive gangster. However, the portrayal was not
without some criticism. Some of the film’s critics felt the Morgans were
“too polite, happy and harmonious considering the precarious nature of
their existence.”40 The film does tend to play on the old romanticized
version of the South where blacks were polite, deferred to whites, and did
not cause trouble. While the timing of the film offered an alternative to
the hardcore Blaxploitation characters, as Symmons states: “The politics
and culture of Black Power [were not] served by a film set during a period
and in a place where open resistance or the assertion of racial difference
were simply not available as responses to racial injustice.”41 Despite the
criticisms, the depiction of the black children in Sounder gives evidence to
the potential for non-stereotypical depictions that, unfortunately, have not
materialized in Hollywood films.
With the beginning of the 1980s, the industry saw the decline of
Blaxploitation films. As white suburbs began to build their own theater
houses, Hollywood-produced Blaxploitation films declined significantly.
But the popularity of the Blaxploitation anti-hero characters did not go
away; rather, they evolved into early 1990s “hood” films about youth
gangs, what Celeste A. Fisher terms “ghetto-centric street films,” that often
feature a black male childhood rife with drugs, crime, and unrestrained
violence in inner-city “jungles” far from white suburbia.42 Films such as
Boyz in the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) or Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995),
both box-office hits, continued the black inner-city gangster, “baad nigga”
image and created a “specific urban cinematic code” that reinforced for
whites the belief in blacks as “violent people.”43 These ghetto and hood
films, then, featured black males in a modern reworking of the “savage
African” character that was so popular during the colonial era.
The Reimagined African (American) Savage

The modernized “African savage” has been a consistent character type in
films beginning in the 1980s and is clearly present in more recent films,
such as Stephen Hopkins’ The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), Fernando
Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener (2005), Kevin Macdonald’s The Last
King of Scotland (2006), and Steve Jacobs’ Disgrace (2008). These are all
popular films that depict either violent, mentally unstable, emasculated, or
sexually aggressive black men as a threat to whites and Western culture, and
all of these films are told from a white point of view. These modern depic-
tions of savage black men, I suggest, are direct descendants of early travel-
literature characterizations of black people. In recent Hollywood “ghetto”
films, the black African savage character has been reimagined as the urban
jungle “native,” and the lush but mysterious vegetation of the African
jungle is replaced with the grit and darkness of America’s inner cities. The
oversexed, savage African has been transformed into the gangsta thug who
roams freely causing murder and mayhem throughout America’s urban
landscapes until captured and confined in America’s vast penal system.
Guerrero argues that popular black urban films are “structured spaces”
in which Hollywood constructs “themes and formulas dealing with black
issues and characters that are reassuring to the sensibilities and expecta-
tions of an uneasy white audience.”44 And in Hollywood film the “jungle”
is a space that has been historically tethered to non-normative, non-white
cultural forms.
Examples of the savage African trope abound in contemporary cinema.
For example, in Dangerous Minds, the title alone alludes to the potential
violence from children of color. The film’s opening segment sets up the
white middle-class as more “civilized” than the dark, urban jungle of the
inner city, from which these children are bussed. The establishing shots of
the film are in black and white, beginning with a medium-shot of a dark
hallway facing a staircase. There is graffiti on the wall to our right that says
“we love you baby!” and the camera pans slowly to the screen’s left to show
the graffiti-covered walls of a room. The camera stops at the room’s cor-
ner where a makeshift memorial has been set up, flanked on either side by
graffiti-covered walls. The film in its beginning suggests death, and a sym-
136 D. OLSON
bolic “ending,” alluding to the cultural quagmire of inner-city youth. Next

a medium-shot moves us outside facing another wall of graffiti. A black
man walks across the frame, visually equating blackness with the defacement
of the graffiti and the earlier memorial. This scene is followed by close-
ups of graffiti-covered walls, a tilted stop sign, and then a narrow-framed
long-shot of a single sidewalk (the road is barely visible) and a presumably
homeless man who stumbles, not walks, down the sidewalk—the stumbling
suggests alcohol or drug use. These establishing shots, and the use of grainy
black/white film stock, connect the state of flawed urbanity historically to
the presence of African Americans. The next shot is the film’s first wide-
shot, and it is an image of the “projects,” multilevel apartment buildings.
Significantly, the film’s title slowly dissolves onto the image—“Dangerous
Minds”— equating blackness, poverty, and the projects with the earlier
(unidentified) death, homelessness, and urban decay.
The lack of color in these opening scenes equates starkness—a space of
emptiness—with hopelessness and connects them to the geographic spaces
the camera has shown. The black/white grainy film also suggests a tempo-
ralization of urban poverty that, as Johanns Fabian argues, “ideologically
… has the effect of putting an object of discourse [the children of color]
into a cosmological frame such that the temporal relation becomes cen-
tral and topical.”45 The film suggests a longstanding historical connection
between blacks, urbanity, and crime, and it naturalizes the articulations by
suggesting that the inner city has (and blacks have) always been that way.
The next scenes are shots of the school bus as it travels through black
and white urban streets clogged on either side with old cars, further rein-
forcing the suggestion of a temporal relation. The air appears foggy, sug-
gesting pollution—not just of the air, but of the city itself. A group of
“ghetto” black girls is waiting on the corner as the bus pulls up. A few
black male teens join the group, and they all, noisily, get on the bus. The
film next cuts to an image of the bus coming toward the viewer down a
well-maintained, middle-class, tree-lined street. Some of the children are
hanging out the window, arms gesturing at passersby. As the bus gets
closer, color dissolves into the objects on screen, strategically reinforcing
the temporal relation of the past to the present. The bus becomes the
familiar yellow-orange, and the trees and lawns turn a deep summer green.
The school comes into view, and the film presents a montage of mostly
white teens in various non-threatening positions—sitting on benches,
standing passively in small groups, playing hackey-sack. As the bus with
the black urban kids unloads, the film utilizes a series of cuts to juxtapose
the “threatening” demeanor of these black and brown youth—waving

arms, smoking, cat-calling—with the more passive (proper?) demeanor
of the surrounding white teens, thus establishing this group of black
teens as “Other” and potentially dangerous. The “different” behavior of
the “bused” students alludes to notions of black pathology. As Thomas
Kochman explains: “A ‘fakelore of black pathology’ easily becomes trans-
lated to a ‘folklore of white supremacy.’ Within such a translation process,
different behavior (black) becomes deviant behavior (black), and as every-
one knows, ‘deviant’ behavior is pathological, worse than inferior: illegiti-
mate! As such, ‘deviant’ behavior needs to be ‘normalized’ (white is right)
and its ‘causes’ eradicated.”46 And the classroom scenes that follow are
similarly constructed: highlighting the different-as-deviant behavior that
threatens the suburban bourgeois school. All the students are children of
color, and all is chaos. The boys are especially unruly, shouting obscenities
and making sexual overtures, and in varying degrees of physical tussling
with each other. The project of this film (and others of this type) is to pres-
ent the white teacher—Michelle Pfeiffer—as the only one who can “fix”
these broken, unruly, animalistic teens—that is, to “civilize” them. The
unruly classroom filled with children of color positions the white teacher
as the “source of social uplift and redemption.”47
The ideological implication in Dangerous Minds, and other similar
films, is that black males, in particular, are prone to criminal behavior. The
discourse about the criminal “nature” of black children justifies attempts
to corral and control actual black youth. As Hughey observes, such films
“[take] the same recycled stereotypes about race, class, and … troubled
schools and [magnify] their racialized tension,” so that when the chil-
dren reach the school only the “white savior’s instructions” can lead them
out of their culture of poverty and criminality.48 Widespread images of
gangster youth in cinema allude to a “self-fulfilling prophecy for African
American youngsters, whose limits of achievement [are] pre-determined
for them … and perpetuate dominant society’s continued fear and subju-
gation of African Americans.”49 That self-fulfilling prophecy also functions
to remove innocence from children of color in that they are always already
“corrupted” by their blackness and the inner city. This notion is evident in
Dangerous Mind’s early focus on the school bus—an allusion to the forced
busing of school children following the 1968 Green vs. New Kent County
decision to enforce “affirmative integration”—and is repeated again in
Pfeiffer’s lecture to the kids about their “choice” to get on that bus to
school (as opposed to staying in their neighborhood to sell drugs).50
138 D. OLSON
Fisher argues that popular ghetto youth films are in essence “coming-
of-age films in which the characters struggle to define themselves in rela-
tionship to the environment in which they live … [but] the protagonists
exist in an environment that perpetuates criminality.”51 Indeed, films like
Boyz in the Hood (1991), South Central (1992), Menace II Society (1993),
and 187 (1997) suggest that the criminal environment is made criminal
by the ontologically violent nature of the black men and boys who inhabit
it. In 187, for example, Samuel Jackson plays a teacher at a public school
in New York who is attacked and almost killed by some of his black male
students. He subsequently moves to Los Angeles to begin a new life and
ends up being harassed and attacked by Hispanic male students there.
The film tends to validate white fear of urban youth of color from the
West to East coast, embracing a national view of black and brown male
violence. And, while Dangerous Minds showcases the potential of children
of color, that potential is only achieved through the removal of the kids
from the “criminal” inner city to “white” schools through forced busing.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, out of all the ethnicities in the class [no
white students], it is a black girl who gets pregnant, a young black male
who is the “rapper/dancer,” a black male who drops his pants and shakes
his bottom at Pfeiffer, and the black girls who vocally challenge Pfieffer
the most. While these behaviors are not criminal in themselves, they are
framed as precursors to the more serious offenses that black children are
expected to commit.
So while Dangerous Minds appears to suggest the humanity and intelli-
gence of children of color, its underlying discourse reiterates that they can-
not escape their inherent criminality. It can only be held in check via the
paternal tutelage of good, moral white folk, and a move to the white sub-
urbs. Linda G. Tucker explains that mainstream films like Dangerous Minds
“tend to entertain white audiences while reassuring them that the threat
of blackness, which is embossed in the white imagination as the image of
the black male, has been contained.”52 In American cinema, innocence for
black children, and especially boys, has become a c ategorical impossibility.
Tropes such as these are so powerful that even a more complex, indepen-
dent film like Fresh falls back into old patterns of racist portrayals.
Fresh and the New (Old) “Baad Nigga”

One of the few Hollywood films to star a young black child is Boaz
Yakin’s compelling 1994 film Fresh. Fresh had a limited theatrical release
in August, 1994, only 411 theaters, with a box-office gross of just over
$8 million. Yakin shot Fresh on location in New York City at just under

his $3.3-million-dollar budget. Fresh is classified as an independent film;
winning three awards at the Sundance Film Festival, but, like Precious,
became a part of the Hollywood machine and was picked up and widely
distributed by Miramax and Lumière Pictures. And although the film had
limited release at first, it has become a classic of the urban ghetto-film
genre.53 While Fresh creates, and sympathizes with, an intriguingly com-
plex black male child character, the film effectively affirms the narrative of
flawed black childhood even as it interrogates the socio-economic condi-
tions of Fresh’s world and the complex connection between notions of
innate criminality, brutishness, and blackness. Like so many of the urban
ghetto, black youth films, on the surface Fresh sympathizes with the plight
of the black child, but ultimately denies the normativity of childness that
he seeks.
In many coming-of-age films, the purpose of the child protagonist’s
journey is to shed childhood and advance toward adulthood. The coming-
of-age genre, or Bildungsroman, often feature narratives with a “coherent
identity, organic development, linear and teleological movement, and a
closure that avoids openness.”54 Myra Mendible describes the genre as
a “civilizing” project in which protagonists seek “successful social inte-
gration … [through] processes of assimilation, acculturation, and con-
formity.”55 A typical Bildungsroman narrative moves the character from
childhood innocence to adult experience and from the margins into the
norm (Western white bourgeois). Fresh’s journey is just the opposite:
from adulthood toward innocence, however unachievable (one cannot
unknow knowledge). The juxtaposition between Fresh’s adult knowledge
and his desire for childhood innocence is one of the most compelling
aspects of this film.
As a black child character, Fresh is unique in that, though he is framed
by the classic urban drug-crime space, he is deeply resistant to its culture
and does not embrace the gang lifestyle. Rather, he performs the “baad
nigga,” as it is expected of him. Fresh rejects criminality but willingly
participates in criminal activity, a paradox that aligns Fresh with similar
inner-city, coming-of-age films. In such films, the child characters desire
for “escape” from the socio-economic conditions of the inner-city con-
flicts with their fears of surviving in an environment they are unfamiliar
with—that is, white suburbia. Michael, aka Fresh, (Sean Nelson) lives in
a Bronx project with his aunt and 11 cousins. He seems like a sagacious,
drug-dealing, burgeoning gangster, and yet he isn’t. Fresh does not want
to be a gangster; he wants to go to school. But Fresh’s environment does
140 D. OLSON
not allow for the trappings of childhood innocence. Fresh is a drug-runner

for multiple dealers in his neighborhood. His sister, Nicole (N’Bushe
Wright), is a drug addict who attracts the unwanted attention of one of
Fresh’s bosses, Esteban (Giancarlo Esposito). Fresh dreams of escape for
himself and his sister, and, rather than squander his drug earnings on gold
or fancy clothes, he squirrels it away in a can buried at an old train yard.
He hates the violence and poverty he is surrounded by and hates the job
he believes he must do to earn money, but displays a remarkable savviness
for his young age. Fresh experiences complete autonomy—he comes and
goes as he pleases; he chooses to go to school; he regularly plays speed-
chess with his father, Sam (Samuel L. Jackson), with whom he is not sup-
posed to have any contact; and he participates repeatedly in illegal activity.
The opening scene in Fresh is reminiscent of John Ford’s The Grapes
of Wrath (1940) opening crossroads scene, minus the telephone poles.
Fresh begins with a wide-shot of high clouds and blue sky, then a slow
tilt towards the ground to reveal an expanse of field as far as the eye can
see. The camera is positioned in the center of a crossroad, the facing lane
traveling away from the viewer toward the horizon. The crossroad image
in Fresh functions in much the same way as it does in Grapes of Wrath:
Like Tom Joad, Fresh is at a crossroads in his young life. While many
ghetto-centered films portray black youth as powerless within a corrupt
racist system, this film highlights the decisions Fresh makes in order to
take control of his life and escape the influences that corrupt it. While the
film makes clear that Fresh has an unchildlike autonomy, he participates in
the discourse of the coming-of-age genre by strategically choosing actions
that advance his goals, yet the limited options available to him perpetuate
the discourse of the urban gangster film. In Fresh the “discourse of indi-
vidualism and choice” progresses throughout the narrative as Fresh care-
fully maneuvers himself around the human hazards of his environment,
maneuvers that also collide with the discourse of the urban black film.56
The choice to commit crime to further a non-criminal goal becomes the
only option within the context of the Fresh’s world. The Grapes of Wrath
is about a marginalized people (“Okies” from Oklahoma) and their mis-
treatment by “the establishment,” as they navigate losing their home and
being forced to find a new one. Like Fresh, the Okies are trapped by an
environment they cannot control and are forced to make decisions using
the limited, and limiting, tools available. But unlike the white and rural
Okies, Fresh is part of a cycle of marginalized and lost inner-city children
who are trapped, not by the “establishment” per se, but by local drug
Fig. 4.5 The Grapes of Wrath. Directed by John Ford. Los Angeles: Twentieth
Century Fox, 1940. Opening shot, frame grab
and street violence culture, which are the effects of establishment neglect
(i.e., the poverty that results from few job opportunities). Fresh wants to
escape his home in search of a better one, whereas the Okies were forced
from their home (which they loved) and have to seek a new one (Figs. 4.5
and 4.6).
Much of Fresh’s cinematography uses such classic Hollywood tropes as a
challenge to the cultural notions in play about black male criminality, ideal-
ized innocence, and the complicated, often violent, politics of urban street
life. The film begins with scenes that connote a historical sense of black
pathology, similar to the way dissolves and fade-ins are used in Dangerous
Minds to conflate blackness, urban blight, poverty, and criminality with
savagery. Within the film’s opening shot of the crossroads, small, two-
story buildings slowly dissolve in on either side of the road, revealing a
city street. The dissolve technique is again used to connote time and his-
tory, suggesting the once-pristine field has become tarnished, disfigured—
a visual prediction of innocence (nature) and its loss. The camera closes
142 D. OLSON
Fig. 4.6 Fresh. Directed by Boaz Yakin. Los Angeles: Lumière Pictures, 1994.
Opening shot, frame grab
in on a red brick wall, as street signs dissolve into view. Finally, a medium-
shot of a bare cement wall on a clean, well-lit street, then a stop sign and an
empty garbage can appear on the corner. But then this street view slowly
transforms into a scene of urban decay: the clean cement wall becomes
covered in graffiti; the garbage can is now overflowing; the stop sign is
tagged with graffiti, and garbage blows in and out of frame. From screen
left a pair of young legs appear walking, and then join other walking legs.
The camera pans slowly up and we see young Fresh on a busy city street
walking across the frame. With this opening sequence, the film establishes
a visual connection between refuse—waste—and the ethnic population
that slowly dissolves into view: the “waste” is the humanity that “defaces”
the once-clean street and the “purity” of the “field” that has become an
inner-city “jungle.” As Celeste A. Fisher argues the “most controversial
aspect of hood films is, arguably, the representation of the urban environ-
ment. The neighborhood … consists of dilapidated buildings and noisy,
overcrowded housing projects … where drug use, unemployment, and
single-parent families are commonplace … [it is] constructed as separate
from the rest of the city in which [it is] located.”57 In the case of Fresh, the
opening insinuates a contamination of a once-pure “natural” space—the
open field—by non-white invaders who visually ooze out of the buildings
and up from the garbage that blows freely along the once-pristine street.
Normally, classic images of children counteract notions of corruption, but
in the visual narrative of Fresh, particularly the opening juxtaposition of
[innocent] nature and the [corrupt] urban, children of color do not offset
such spoilage, but rather are a part of it.
A recurring motif throughout the film is the close-up of Fresh’s feet.
We first meet Fresh through his feet; as the camera pans the crowd it finds
and follows his feet walking, then skipping, then running across the road
before the camera tilts up and Fresh’s body comes into view. This three-
beat movement of Fresh’s feet is repeated at key moments throughout
the film and parallels the film’s broader narrative structure: walking—his
early cautiousness with his father and the dealers; skipping—his too-rare,
but treasured moments of carefree childhood play; and running—his final
manipulation of the dealers to gain his and his sister’s freedom. The foot-
pace motif also suggests the manifestation of Fresh’s inner strength in
resisting the lure of the street lifestyle, which includes spending money on
flashy clothes or status objects. Dennis M. Rome notes that the film rarely
depicts “African Americans, particularly males, who are achievers,”58 but
the recurring foot motif alludes to Fresh’s potential for upward mobility.
He is going somewhere—the constant shots of his feet in motion visually
affirm his desire to escape towards, ironically, stability.
The narrative of black childhood in Fresh is punctuated by the distinct
absence of what is normally associated with childhood. As the film pro-
gresses, his cold calmness and quiet, deliberate speech is unnerving and
situated at key moments where the interstitial space between child and
adult is uniquely interrogated. While there are a handful of scenes of Fresh
walking with his four friends, their talk is filled with descriptions of violent
acts (real or imaginary) and dreams of being gangsters and having a lot of
money. Fresh’s friend Chuckie, who is Hispanic, is particularly enamored
with the dominant media’s romantic black gangster image, as he emulates,
unsuccessfully, what he thinks is “gang speak.” Fresh tries unsuccessfully
to temper Chuckie’s over-the-top display. When Chuckie finally meets
drug dealer Esteban (Fresh is using Chuckie’s fascination with being a
gangster to set up Esteban), Chuckie’s artificial posturing is incomprehen-
sible to the real gangster, who never speaks in such an exaggerated way:
Chuckie: I got the dope moves.

Esteban: You got the what?
Chuckie: I got the stupid juice, I bust the stupid moves.
144 D. OLSON
Indeed, Chuckie’s swagger is much like what Richard Wright describes

in Black Boy: “We spoke boastfully in bass voices; we used the word ‘nig-
ger’ to prove the tough fiber of our feelings; we spouted excessive pro-
fanity as a sign of our coming manhood.”59 But Chuckie’s attempt at
achieving what he believes is manhood ends tragically; as his swagger ulti-
mately causes his death at the hands of the very gang he believed his dis-
course made him a part of. Amie J. Ellis suggests that the gangster lifestyle
provides an “exhilarating racial and social identity that offers a gratifying
if only fleeting and illusory sense of control and strength.”60 Chuckie’s
certainty that his language tethered him to blackness is proved false when
Chuckie is rejected by the real gangsters because of his faux gang speak.
He is then killed because of his equally artificial gangster bravado—wav-
ing a gun, imitating a gang swagger, and flashing gang hand signals—but
then not being able to actually shoot. The film here punishes Chuckie’s
rejection of childhood and his investment in the mythic signs of The
Black Gangster. His synthetic performance of the stereotyped discourse of
black masculinity “perpetuate[s] negative feelings and racial attitudes that
demonize young black males”61 within dominant culture. Unlike Chuckie,
who renounces childhood, it is Fresh’s desire for normative childhood
that ultimately saves, and at the same time irrevocably damages, him.
The only scene where Fresh is shown participating in any playful child-
like behavior is early in the film when he is at school inside the gym playing
basketball and watching Rosie (Natima Bradley), who he likes, practice
her step dancing. We see a montage of short close-ups of Fresh laughing
and goofing off as he plays ball and is teased by his friends about Rosie,
who connotes traditional, “normal” American childhood. Despite Fresh’s
criminal acts, he is still a child at heart. But this fleeting moment of child-
hood abandon is shockingly juxtaposed in the film’s second basketball
scene. As in the earlier basketball scene, Fresh is with his friends at a play-
ground basketball court. He spies his girl Rosie playing double-dutch with
her friends, and he goes over to talk with her. They engage in lighthearted
banter about the type of car they would each own one day, an emblem of
the futurity that is inherent to childhood but so often missing in cinematic
depictions of African American childhoods.
As Fresh returns to his friends, a conflict arises on the court between
a black teen and a young black boy. The boy is a basketball whiz and
continually blocks the teen, making baskets and winning the game for his
team. The man’s anger grows, and he leaves the court, only to return a
few moments later shooting wildly all around, killing the young boy and
Rosie. As the camera pans 360 degrees around the man, he postures over
the boy, waving his arms and shouting—“Go ahead and run you pussy-
assed punks!”—in startling imitation of Chuckie’s earlier macho posturing
and false bravado. The film here interrogates what was Chuckie’s sup-
posedly artificial gang-speech and behavior by suggesting that Chuckie’s
simulated signifiers of black masculinity were, in fact, accurate. Such con-
flicted coding of black masculinity in the film implies that even some black
males—like the shooter—are drawn into the dominant media’s constructed
notions about how black male “gangsters” talk and act. As Roland Barthes
explains about semiology and myth: “Myth plays on the analogy between
meaning and forms,” and in the case of both Chuckie and the gangster-
shooter, the mythic form of black masculinity is more appealing than the
alternative.62
This death scene is pivotal for Fresh because Rosie’s violent death pro-
vides the catalyst that sets his plan in motion. Two young black children
lay in pools of blood, representing both innocence and its impossibility.
Fresh, his shock emphasized by the low-angle camera that follows him as
he slowly walks over and puts his hands on Rosie’s neck to try and stop the
blood flow. Her little leg kicks spasmodically—a tragic parody of her ear-
lier step-dance practice. The last shot is a low-angle, deep focus of Rosie’s
small, white-sandaled feet lying still and the young basketball player lying
dead in a pool of blood in the background (Fig. 4.7).
Ellis argues that “these violent rituals of black manhood reveal a certain
participation in and reiteration of dominant norms, norms that function
ultimately to ‘police’ and ‘contain’ black male [child] identity.”63 These
discursive codes position black masculinity as naturally thug-like and work
to keep black males within the confines of the broader historical social
narrative of the “black brute.” All black males, then, regardless of age,
become synonymous with the expectation of criminality and gangsterness.
Fig. 4.7 Rosie’s feet.

Fresh, frame grab
146 D. OLSON
Fresh attempts to reveal the troubling cultural absence of the black child
experience in the inner city by confronting, then conflating, the notion of
black childhood with death, not innocence. The film critiques the domi-
nant cultural forces that work to make black innocence impossible, tragi-
cally surrendering black childhood to its historical position as Other.
After Chuckie’s death, the cops take Fresh to the station for question-
ing, and his refusal to name the assailant leads the white officer to exclaim
in frustration: “This place is a regular zoo, ain’t it? That’s what you kids
like, isn’t it, the fucking zoo? … Fuck all you goddamn monkeys … Perez
[the other cop, who is Latino], you like this fucking zoo so much, you go
play with the animals.” The death of a second child in the neighborhood
does not elicit sympathy from the officers, who represent the establish-
ment, and, in fact, demonstrates to Fresh that “social control mechanisms
are often complicit with criminal behavior because they problematically
posit inner-city communities as deserving their social problems,” even the
deaths of their children.64 Despite Fresh’s good heart and desire to escape
his environment, he cannot escape the insidious social mythology that
places him alongside the gangster who shot Rosie: to the dominant insti-
tutions, they are one and the same.
One of the most persistent stereotypes about the black male juvenile
delinquent is that he is fatherless. In 1965 the well-known and contro-
versial Moynihan Report concluded that the problem with the African
American child was the absence of fathers from the home:
Negro youth growing up with little knowledge of their fathers, less of their
fathers’ occupations, still less of family occupational traditions, is in sharp
contrast to the experience of the white child. The white family, despite many
variants, remains a powerful agency not only for transmitting property from
one generation to the next, but also for transmitting no less valuable con-
tracts with the world of education and work … Negro children without
fathers flounder—and fail.”65
To Moynihan’s credit, the study was a call to action to end the social
conditions of racism that he argues cause such fractured families. But
the beliefs about the fractured and flawed African American family, and
particularly the black male, have persisted. Moynihan’s conclusions were
contested in Lovelene Earl and Nancy Lohmann’s 1978 study “Absent
Fathers and Black Male Children,” which concluded that while there are
higher rates of absentee fathers in black families, black children often look
to other black males in the community as role models. While the Earl
and Lohmann study appears to offer a more positive outcome for father-
less black boys, the study argues from a position that accepts as natural
the failed black nuclear family, much like Moynihan, rather than ques-
tioning the assertion that the black family is a failed family.66 In 1997,
Jennifer E. Hamer studied “The Fathers of ‘Fatherless’ Black Children”
and acknowledges the “vague parental and familial position of Black non-
custodial fathers.”67 And while her conclusion that non-custodial black
fathers care for their children, she also found that they do not value sup-
porting their children monetarily, which continues the stereotype of the
black male as irresponsible and childish. And Ron Haskins 2009 article
“Moynihan Was Right: What Now?” perpetuates the belief in the black
family as inherently flawed with the black male bearing the burden of the
failure of the black family.68
What these studies demonstrate is the historical trajectory of white
beliefs about black men and the sons they produce and then abandon.
Fresh both acknowledges that historical narrative of the broken black fam-
ily at the same time that it complicates it. The only male role model that
Fresh interacts with is his father, but the film hints that Fresh is not sup-
posed to see his father, Sam, though it is never revealed why. Sam is a
gruff-talking, street-wise alcoholic who obviously cares for Fresh. And the
one thing Fresh does look forward to in the film is playing speed-chess
with his father. The two meet regularly in the park. Sam is an “emotion-
ally cut-off ex-drug addict and current alcoholic” who “never offers Fresh
the illusion that he will save his son.”69 But Sam relates to Fresh valuable
life lessons connected to the game of chess, particularly how to read an
opponent and anticipate moves. Indeed, it is his father’s suggestion that
Fresh is too afraid to lose his pieces that leads Fresh later to view all the
pieces as expendable in pursuit of the king, that is, his freedom. Fresh
internalizes this advice and it allows him to sacrifice Chuckie70 and kill the
dog.
The film continually interrogates the notion of innocence by juxtapos-
ing familiar child behavior with scenes of adult horrors. Fresh has con-
vinced two dealers that they are each trying to move in on the other’s
territory. Though Fresh is not a purely innocent child, he understands
adult expectations of innocence and uses that expectation to his advan-
tage. Each dealer believes what Fresh says because he performs innocence;
he “acts” as an innocent child would act—he is wide-eyed, professes no
knowledge, declares undying loyalty in a high-pitched childlike voice. And
148 D. OLSON
he understands his power to depict innocence because he also understands

adult illusions about children’s innocence. Such a performance, as Robin
Bernstein argues, “shape[s] … racial projects [by positioning] each [both
childhood and its performance] to appear natural, inevitable, and there-
fore, justified.”71 The adults around Fresh expect him to act like an inno-
cent child, as all children naturally act, and so he performs that expectation
in order to further his goal. Innocence for Fresh is a strategy, not an onto-
logical condition. For instance, when Fresh and Chuckie are sitting in the
grass at the train yard talking, Fresh looks longingly out across the water
and the cityscape behind it, mimicking the most famous pose of Martin
Luther King, Jr., as Fresh quietly states: “I have a dream.” But then Fresh
will not disclose the dream to Chuckie when he asks. Fresh’s reference to
King’s dream speech reveals the irony that is freedom for Fresh. On the
one hand, he has complete autonomy and freedom of movement, yet is
trapped by the geopolitical matrix of poverty, drugs, and crime that com-
prise his inner-city world. His freedom doesn’t guarantee a “better life.”
And the fact he will not reveal his dream to Chuckie reinforces the degree
of separation that exists between Chuckie’s “dream” of being a gangster
and Fresh’s “dream” of escaping the gangster life. Fresh says he likes the
serenity of the train yard, the “nature” that is there, but Chuckie calls it
boring. This discussion connects to the film’s opening nature scene and its
“corruption” by the city, the corruption of the “dream” of freedom and
quality of life. The scene immediately following this boy-bonding moment
is Chuckie’s death in a dark alley at the hands of James’ men.
One way the film emphasizes Fresh’s childness while at the same time
highlighting his adultification is through close-ups of Fresh exhibiting
normal child mannerisms. In the shootout scene where Esteban’s men
confront James’ men, Fresh is sitting in the car sandwiched between
Esteban and another gangster. As they watch the store across the street,
one of Esteban’s men slices the throat of one of James’ men. The momen-
tarily shocked expression on Fresh’s face fades, as he reaches for a candy
bar. When Esteban’s men get out of the car to confront James’ men inside
the store, Fresh gets out of the car and sits on the car’s hood eating a candy
bar and watching the shootout between Esteban and James. This scene
presents a double entendre as we watch Fresh—the “director”—watching
his own “movie” filled with stereotypical criminal black males shooting
each other, or, as Fanon puts it he “experience[s] his being through oth-
ers.”72 Fresh here experiences—observes—his gangster actions through
the lens of his negation of those actions. He distances himself from the
violence and death before him (which he caused) in order to hold on to

his inner rejection of that gangster label. Significantly, the camera cuts
to his short legs swinging, as he watches the shootout, a very childlike
motion. Fresh is the instigator here, and it is ironic that in order to escape
the condition and expectations of the gangster world, he has to play the
master gangster.
The play of “looks” in this scene suggests W.E.B. du Bois’ “double-
consciousness” theory of identity—the continual oscillation between
dominant white societies’ beliefs about black children (gangster) and real
black existence (for Fresh, the reality of trying to survive). Fresh places
himself, literally, outside the physical violence by sitting on the hood of
the car and watching, but he bears responsibility for the violence, though
he had a noble intent to escape a criminal existence. He uses the hand
he is dealt and the limited/limiting tools available to him that “[define]
black males [and black male children] as the producers, consumers, and
perpetrators of violent criminal activity.”73 The sense of tragedy in Fresh,
comes from the knowledge that the game is rigged to begin with. What is
depressing is not that he loses his innocence, but that he was never allowed
to have it in the first place.
In his famous essay, “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon describes the con-
flict within the black spectator who must either identify with the “good”
white protagonist, or align himself with the “bad” black antagonist.74 As
Fresh watches the shootout, he rejects being identified with “the savages
on screen” in front of him; and yet he is one of them. When Fresh is con-
fronted with his own image, he rejects it instead of aspiring to attain it.
His desire, then, his “dream,” is to escape the position society has marked
out for him by rejecting those cultural expectations established by social
discourse, to “not be” what society says he is, to not be what he sees
around him, to undo what he has learned, to begin anew—“fresh” as
it were. Fresh has killed James and his men, and even Chuckie, as effec-
tively as if he’d pulled the trigger himself. After the gun battle, as Esteban
gets out of the car to go see Nicole, he turns to Fresh and says “you’re a
man now,” solidifying the cultural assumptions about the nature of black
childhood as precursor to adult black savagery. Fresh becomes a “man”
by conjuring a drug rivalry (which did not exist before) that resulted in
many deaths. Ellis argues that such performance of masculinity is “but
one way in which poor urban black men have sought to define themselves
as black men both within and against a system governed by patriarchy,
white supremacy, and capitalism. Thus, deathly violence and death defi-
150 D. OLSON
ance manifest as a desperate attempt for black men to both assert their
manhood and preserve their humanity.”75 In this sense, Fresh believes that
by causing the deaths of the dealers, he will regain his humanity for him-
self and his sister.
One of the most important ways the film complicates Fresh’s childness
is through his cruel and emotionless killing of the dog, Rosco. Earlier in
the film, Fresh protested Chuckie’s plan to fight the dog for money. Fresh
claims the dog is a pet, that he found it, and wouldn’t have given it to
Chuckie if he were going to fight it. But Chuckie fights Rosco anyway.
Rosco wins by grabbing the neck and choking the other dog to death, a
short, graphic and troubling scene. After Chuckie’s death, and after his
aunt tells Fresh she is going to send him to a group home, we see Fresh
leading the dog (a pit bull terrier) along a sidewalk and into an alley. He
kneels down and looks into the dog’s eyes, petting its head. He softly says
“c’mon Rosco” and leads the dog to a steel bar jutting out of the wall.
Fresh throws the leash up over the bar and slowly begins to raise Rosco
off the ground by his neck. The camera cuts to Rosco’s legs jerking wildly,
then cuts to linger on Fresh as he struggles to tie a knot while holding
the dog’s weight. We hear the disturbing whiny gurgling of the dog, as it
is slowly choking to death. Then Fresh produces a gun, stands back, and
stares at Rosco. His eyes register deep pain for a brief moment, but he
reins it in, takes a deep breath, raises his chin, points the gun at the dog,
and fires three times.
Tom O’Connor argues that Fresh killed the dog in order to “desensi-
tize himself and thereby override his sensitive nature. Because he has to
betray the dealers who trust him, he cannot flinch in the face of their vio-
lent power.”76 I disagree with O’Connor here because Fresh killed the dog
after the shootout scene with James and Esteban, and so he already had
lied to Esteban. Rather, I believe Fresh killed Rosco because he needed to
“kill” the distortion that Rosco had become, corrupted by violence like
the others around him. While Fresh cared for the dog and tried to protect
it before the fight, afterwards Rosco became just another pawn in the
game. Killing Rosco also symbolized Fresh killing the violence in himself,
to not be afraid to “lose his pieces” as his father told him. Inhumanity
then becomes a condition of and a step towards, achieving his humanity.
Rosco’s trajectory mirrors Fresh’s in that both had to perform violence—
inhumanity—to survive but, to truly reclaim humanity, Fresh has to kill
the violence, that is, the now-violent Rosco. In notions of childhood and
innocence, there is no greater childhood motif than a white “boy and his
dog,”—think of the Little Rascals’ Petey (1929–1946), Rusty and Rin Tin
Tin (1954–1959), or Timmy and Lassie (1954–1974). This motif in Fresh
is distorted by those in “the hood,” by Chuckie fighting the dog, and then
by Fresh who kills it. The trauma of Fresh seeing his pet kill another dog
allied it with the insidious blight of Fresh’s environment. In this sense, the
idealized “boy and his dog” motif is another corruption of the fabric of
Fresh’s childhood. The way Fresh kills the dog, the excessive cruelty of it,
underscores the fundamentally ambiguous articulation of black childhood
innocence in the film.
Conclusion
In the end, innocence functions for Fresh as a tool, not as a state of being
he has had or can reclaim, although he laments its loss. Fresh achieved his
goal: He and his sister will enter the witness protection program and escape
the city. In the final scene of the film, Fresh meets Sam in the park. As he sits
down, Sam admonishes him for being late and then says: “You gonna sink
or swim on your own today. I’m not always gonna be there to hold your
hand. You ready to take it from me? You ready to be the king?” As Fresh
looks at his father, he begins to cry. This is the first time we see any childlike
emotion from Fresh. His tears at the end are not because this is the last time
he will see his father, as O’Connor argues, but rather because of the irony
in his father’s statement: His father did hold his hand. Sam’s chess teachings
gave Fresh new tools to use to escape the trap of the ghetto and to make
his own path. His father’s advice gave him the courage and means to perse-
vere. The tragedy, however, is that Sam was only able to guide Fresh from
a distance. To stand on his own, to shed all trappings of childhood, Fresh
had to become that thing he despised—the savage black gangster. But while
Fresh presents black inner-city childhood as a “deformation of a standard,”77
it critiques the white, romanticized standard of childhood innocence which
cannot be attained: “Popular culture purged innocence from representations
of African American children, the black child [is] redefined as a nonchild.”78
Ultimately, Fresh does not reconfigure or resist stereotypes about the innate
savage and criminal nature of black youth, but neither does it support such
stereotypes. While the film in many ways reinforces the fear of blackness—
especially when it appears as a soft-spoken and polite black boy who just
wants to go to school—it also draws attention to the ways in which institu-
tional power, and the discourse of such power, constructs the “trap” of the
ghetto for black children.
152 D. OLSON
Notes
1. The Emmett Till case is a perfect example here of a black male
child feared as an adult sexual predator (he allegedly made “ugly
remarks” to a white woman shopkeeper) and the resulting justifica-
tion by an all-white jury of Till’s lynching because he was a black
male (automatically suspect). See The Lynching of Emmett Till: A
Documentary Narrative, edited by Christopher Metress, University
of Virginia Press, 2002.
2. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other
Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 23.
3. For more information, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
(New York: The New Press, 2010); Kenneth B. Nunn, “Race,
Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the War on
Drugs Was a War on Blacks,” Gender, Race & Justice 6 (2002):
381; R. Richard Banks, “Beyond Profiling: Race, Policing, and the
Drug War”. Stanford Law Review 56.3 (2003): 571; Lawrence D
Bobo and Victor Thompson, “Unfair By Design: The War on
Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System,”
Social Research 73, no. 2 (2006): 445–472.
4. http://abcnews.go.com/US/cleveland-cops-recklessly-shot-boy-
12-toy-gun/story?id=27402837; http://www.cnn.
com/2014/11/26/justice/cleveland-police-shooting/
5. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, et al., Policing the
Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan,
1978), 327. See also, Stuart Hall, Michelle Alexander, and Cornel
West, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2010).
6. Hall, et al., Policing, 329.
7. The school-to-prison pipeline is where for-profit prisons and juve-
nile centers pay kickbacks to court judges for every young person
that a judge sentences to prison or to a juvenile facility. The major-
ity of young people sent to these juvenile centers are black or
brown. For more, see Catherine Y Kim, Daniel J. Losen and
Damon T. Hewitt, The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal
Reform (New York: NYU Press, 2012); SofÃa Bahena, North
Cooc, Rachel Currie-Rubin, et al., Disrupting the School-to-Prison
Pipeline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 2012).
8. “Racial Inequality in Youth Sentencing,” fairsentencingofyouth.
com, Accessed 5 August 2015. http://fairsentencingofyouth.org/
the-issue/advocacy-resource-bank/racial-inequality-in-youth-
sentencing/
9. Balingit, Moriah, “Jordan Brown Held Responsible for 2 Homicides,”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 14 April 2012. http://old.post-gazette.
com/pg/12105/1224304-54-0.stm?cmpid=newspanel4
10. Antonia Monacelli, “Murderous Children: 12 Year Old Lionel

Tate the Youngest Person Ever Sentenced to Life Without the
Possibility of Parole,” 10 March 2012. http://antonia-monacelli.
hubpages.com/hub/Murderous-Children-Lionel-Tate.
11. “Florida Boy Faces Life Term,” CNN.com, 9 March 2001. http://
www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/03/09/wrestling.sentence.03/.
12. Dana Canady, “Sentence of Life Without Parole for Boy, 14, for
Murder of Girl, 6,” 10 March 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/
2001/03/10/us/sentence-of-life-without-parole-for-boy-14-in-
murder-of-girl-6.html
13. See John B. Carroll, Human Cognitive Abilities: A Survey of Factor-
Analytic Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14. Stephanie Chen, “Boy,12, Faces Grown up Murder Charges,”

CNN, 10 February 2011. http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/
02/10/pennsylvania.young.murder.defendant/
15. As of 2011, 70 % of NFL players were black, but 97 % of quarter-
backs were white. Hub Arkush, “Why does NFL have few black
QBs?” Pro Football Weekly, 27 February 2012. http://www.pro-
footballweekly.com/2012/02/27/why-does-nfl-still-have-few-
black-qbs. Also see, Marc H. Morial, “Black Quarterbacks Leading
More Teams in NFL,” Huffington Post, 30 September 2013.
http://www.huf fingtonpost.com/marc-h-morial/black-
quarterbacks-leadin_b_4005326.html; Brett Deckert, “NFL
Quarterbacks: Race Still a Factor, According to ESPN’s Jemele
Hill,” 24 November 2010. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/
526301-nfl-quarterbacks-race-still-a-factor-according-to-espns-
jemele-hill.
16. Joe Mandak, “Jordan Brown Guilty: 11-year-old Murdered Dad’s
Pregnant Fiancé, Judge Rules,” Huffington Post.com, 13 April
2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/13/jordan-
brown-guilty-11-year-old-murder_n_1424877.html.
17. CheQapol, “11 Year Old Accused Of Killing Dad’s Pregnant

Girlfriend,” YouTube, 22 February 2009, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=nDDr62qVVS4
154 D. OLSON
18. Lawrence Steinberg, qtd in Andrea Canning and Maggie Burbank,

“Jordan Brown Murder Case Takes Emotional Toll,” ABC News,
28 April 2010. http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/jordan-brown-
murder-case-12-year-adult/story?id=10288704&page=2.
19. Marc Scolforc, “Teen Gets New Hearing in Case of Woman’s
Killing,” http://www.wtae.com/news/pa-supreme-court-hears-
case-of-boy-11-charged-with-pregnant-womans-murder/24938720
20. “11 year old Charged as an Adult?” CBS News, 24 February 2009,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6leA-eD5GY
21. Balingit A-1.
22. Robert A. Davis, “Brilliance of a Fire: Innocence, Experience and
the Theory of Childhood,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 45,
no. 2 (2011): 384.
23. Mike Downey, “Assigning the Blame in Murder by a Child’s

Hands,” LA Times, 26 January 2001. http://articles.latimes.com/
2001/jan/26/news/mn-17293
24. “Leniency for Lionel Tate?” ABC News, 7 March 2001, http://
abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123746
25. Jody Needle, “Teen Indicted in Girl’s Killing,” Sun-Sentinel, 12
August 1999, http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/
sfl-tateindict-story.html; “Leniency for Lionel Tate?” 20/20
ABC News, 7 March 2009 http://abcnews.go.com/2020/
story?id=123746&page=1#.UI6nrIbNkYI.
26. Shelley McKinney, “The Bully Schoolboy and his Mindless

Mommy,” Enter Stage Right, 19 March 2001, http://www.enter-
stageright.com/archive/articles/0301tate.htm. The only other
reference to Lionel Tate as a bully that I found is in a Fox News
report interview with a forensic psychologist, Dr. Michael Brannon,
who claims to have interviewed Tate right after his arrest. He states
that Tate clearly had the potential for violence: “There was a long
history of violence in school. His kindergarten teacher, who said
that she taught for 30 years, said he was the worst behaved child
she ever had in her classroom. There are other teachers who came
forward to say that he was a bully in the classroom. At one point,
he cursed out a principal of a school. He had played very rough, to
where other parents wouldn’t let him play with their kids. He was
aggressive in terms of his overall approach to his peers. He was a
bigger kid than the rest of his peers. On test data and stimuli, he
saw things like razor blades. He saw things like smashed animals.
He was even aggressive when confronted in the interview. So, all of

those things began to paint a picture of a child who had a high-risk
potential.” Dr. Brannon himself is not without controversy and
was a Pro Wrestler before earning a doctorate in forensic science,
perhaps suggesting a conflict of interest where the Tate case is con-
cerned. Kyle Swenson, “Expert Witness/Former Pro Wrestler
Michael Brannon Costs Taxpayers,” 20 June 2013. http://www.
miaminewtimes.com/2013-06-20/news/michael-brannon-
forensic-expert/
27. Dana Canedy, “Boy Convicted of Murder in Wrestling Death,”
New York Times, 26 January 2001, http://www.nytimes.
com/2001/01/26/us/boy-convicted-of-murder-in-wrestling-
death.html; Terry Aguayo, “Youth who Killed at 12 will return to
prison, but not for life,” New York Times, 2 March 2006. http://
www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/national/02tate.html?_r=0
28. American Justice, “American Justice: Child’s Play, Deadly Play,”
A&E, 1993, 29 April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
kGLMX4XO6G8
29.
Clive Erricker, “Against the Protection of Innocence,”
International Journal of Children’s Spirituality 8, no. 1 (2003): 5.
30. Tate’s lawyers, and the prosecutor, joined forces to successfully
appeal to Florida governor Jeb Bush to commute Tate’s sentence
to three years (already served), one year house arrest, and ten years
probation. But unlike Brown, Tate received no rehabilitation ser-
vices while in state custody and eventually, at age 19 violated his
parole by robbing a pizza delivery person of four pizzas. He was
sentenced to 30 years (an excessive sentence) for parole violation
and is currently serving that sentence.
31. Gloria Ladson Billings, “Boyz to Men? Teaching to Restore Black
boys’ Childhood,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 14, no. 1
(2011): 10.
32. Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban
Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003):
80–81.
33. Massood, Black City Cinema, 96.
34. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1993): 69–70. For more on Blaxploitation films, see
Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and
Genre (New York: Routledge, 2007); Mikel Coven, Blaxploitation
156 D. OLSON
Films (Harpenden, Herts: Kamera Books, 2010); Josiah Howard,

Blaxploitation Cinema: the Essential Reference Guide (New York:
FAB press, 2010).
35. Yvonne D. Sims, Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action
Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2006):136.
36. Emmett Till is one such case of a black male youth who was accused
of, and then horribly killed (lynched) for, making “sexual” advanced
to a white woman. As a black child, Till was a victim of the cultural
codes that connect hypersexuality, violence, and blackness.
37. Celeste A. Fisher, Black on Black: Urban Youth Films and the
Multicultural Audience (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006):
xxi.
38. Tom Symmons, “ ‘The Birth of Black Consciousness on the Screen’?:
The African American Historical Experience, Blaxploitation, and
the Production and Reception of Sounder (1972),” Historical Journal
of Film, Radio, and Television 35, no. 2 (2015): 277.
39. Paul Warshaw, “Sounder,” Film Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1973): 61.
40. Symmons 291.
41. Symmons 293.
42. Fisher, Black on Black, ix–x.
43. Massood, Black City Cinema, 83.
44. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 24, 162.
45. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its
Object, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983): 74.
46. Thomas Kochman, quoted in Errol Lawrence, “In the Abundance
of Water, the Fool is Thirsty: Sociology and Black Pathology,” The
Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, (London:
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1984): 93.
47. Matthew W. Hughey, The White Savior Film (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2014): 52.
48. Hughey, White Savior, 55.
49. Dennis Rome, Black Demons: The Media’s Depiction of African
American Male Criminal Stereotypes (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2004): 2.
50. David J. Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 17. See also, Ronald
P. Formisano, Boston Against Bussing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in
the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991); Christine H. Rossell, The Carrot or the Stick for School
Desegregation Policy: Magnet Schools or Forced Busing? (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1990).
51. Fisher, Black on Black, xiii.
52. Linda G. Tucker, Lockstep and Dance: Images of the Black Male in
Popular Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007): 101.
53. Fresh is number 15 on IMDb’s list of all-time best urban ghetto
films, http://www.imdb.com/list/ls000962633/; and number
21 on Ranker.com’s list of all-time best black films, http://www.
ranker.com/list/best-hood-movies/all-genre-movies-lists.
54. Stella Bolaki, Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary
Ethnic Women’s Fiction (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, D.V.,
2012): 9.
55. Myra Mendible, “Rev. of Bolaki, Stella. Unsettling the

Bildungsroman: Reading contemporary ethnic women’s fiction,”
Postcolonial Text 7, no. 2 (2012) np.
56. Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of
Black Masculinity, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2000): 211.
57. Fisher, Black on Black, xii.
58. Dennis M. Rome, “The Social Construction of the African

American Criminal Stereotype,” Images of Color, Images of Crime,
3rd ed, edited by Coramae Richey Mann, Marjorie S. Zatz and
Nancy Rodriquez (New York: Roxbury Publishers, 2006): 79.
59. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Collins, 2006): 78.
60. Amie J. Ellis, If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011): 36–37.
61. Miles White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the
Performance of Black Masculinity (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2011): 3.
62. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, Noonday Press, 1972):
125.
63. Ellis, If We Must Die, 37.
64. Tom O’Conner, “The Ethics of Violence: Representing Inner-city
Communities and the Case of Boaz Yakin’s Fresh,” Pedagogy 11,
no. 2 (2011): 414.
65. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National
Action, Presented to the US Department of Labor, 1965. http://
www.blackpast.org/primary/moynihan-report-1965
158 D. OLSON
66. Lovelene Earl and Nancy Lohmann. “Absent Fathers and Black
Male Children,” National Association of Social Workers September
(1978): 413–415.
67. Jennifer E. Hamer, “The Fathers of ‘Fatherless’ Black Children,”
Families in Society 78, no. 6 (1997): 564.
68. Ron Haskins, “Moynihan was Right: Now What?” AAPSS 621
(2009): 281–314.
69. O’Connor, “The Ethics of Violence,” 410.
70. When Fresh decides to manipulate Esteban and James, he finally
gives in to Chuckie’s persistent requests to get a job running drugs
like Fresh. Fresh knows Chuckie cannot keep his mouth shut and
uses Chuckie’s need to brag to set up the conflict between the two
drug dealers, James and Esteban. When Fresh is going on a job to
deliver heroin for Esteban (which Fresh switched to cocaine in
their backpacks), they are jumped by the rival dealer, James. Fresh
had told Chuckie that if they were jumped to run, to drop the bag
and run. But when they are jumped (as Fresh knew they would
be), Chuckie postures in front of the gang, waves his gun around
and is shot dead as Fresh runs away.
University Press, 2011): 4.
72. Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 109.
73. Fisher, Black on Black, 87.
74. Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 109.
75. Ellis, If We Must Die, 17.
76. O’Connor, “The Ethics of Violence,” 410.
77. Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1998): 117.
CHAPTER 5
Soldier Bo(d)y: The Transnational

Circulation of the African (American)
Savage Child Image
Images of African children in popular Hollywood films often support

Western hegemony of the developing world; their black bodies are imag-
ined as a site of either inherent criminality and violence, or as primitive,
uncivilized, and in need of paternal (white) protection and guidance.
Historically dehumanizing imagery of African males, as we saw in Chap.
2, became the template for modern portrayals of black youth in urban-
ghetto films. Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism explains the process
by which European peoples have historically exoticized, or “othered,”
East Asian and North African cultures in written and visual narrative
and through socio-economic and political interactions. In other words,
the “Orient” was made knowable only through Western interpretation,
Western discourse. Orientalism is a power structure whereby Europe and
America continually reiterate their superiority over “Oriental backward-
ness” through discourse. As Said explains, “Orientalism depends for its
strategy on [a] flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner
in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever
losing the relative upper hand.”1 African Orientalism was (is) evident in
the West through negative and disparaging depictions of black peoples
and cultures in art, literature, music, and in socio-political discourse that
primitivizes all aspects of African culture before and after colonialism.
Such Orientalist portrayals also include perceptions of children through
a Western lens that views childhood innocence as symbiotic with white-

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_5
160 D. OLSON
ness. One of the ways visual imagery reinforces white child innocence is
through the depictions of black male children in wholly non-childlike
roles. The African child soldier is just such an image that contradicts
everything the West believes about what childhood is and should be.
My argument in this chapter is that the body of the African child soldier
as depicted in the Hollywood film is connected to historical Western
notions about all black male children as inherently violent and unre-
deemable; notions that are embodied in the black child soldier in the film
Blood Diamond (2006).
Part of my argument about the discursive nature of cinematic images
of African American children (and childhood) is that such images are
informed and reified by similar images of the African child, who is fur-
thest from the Western ideal of childhood innocence and perfection.
Indeed, modern media outlets foster a transnational circulation of dispar-
aging images of black children that reveal a pattern of misrepresentations
regarding the nature of black children, particularly males. African children
are quite often portrayed as transgressive and fractured, as non-children,
“perverted from [childhood’s] ‘natural’ course of innocence, fragility, and
purity.”2 The notion of an African child is inexorably bound to images
of “boys and girls with bloated bellies, no parents, and bruised and bro-
ken bodies [which] present a compelling image of victimhood.”3 Such
images are used most effectively in fundraising efforts by NGOs (Non-
Governmental Organizations). As Kate Manzo argues, “images of chil-
dren … [are the] means through which NGOs produce themselves as
humanitarian.” The images of starving black children are accompanied
by a discourse of value-laden “poverty alleviation” that is framed as sup-
porting human rights, such as the “right” to [Western] childhood, rather
than providing basic human needs.4 Manzo argues that the “iconogra-
phy of childhood” becomes a “brand logo that advertises NGOs encoded
humanitarian principles … [which] simultaneously endorses, constructs,
and undermines the humanitarian principles espoused by the NGOs con-
cerned.”5 These images of starving black children circulate freely on the
Internet and in television commercials shown globally and use Western
conceptions of childhood to put forth their humanitarian agendas. The
child image in this case becomes the visual “interpellation” for the viewer
to participate in “alleviating” poverty in less developed areas. But, as Slavoj
Žižek argues, the act of donating becomes a “semantic over-investment”
and is rather a consumerist “way to fulfill a whole series of ethical duties”
while not effecting any real change (Fig. 5.1).6
Fig. 5.1 Save the Children (left), Unicef (center), Partners for Care (right) (“Save the Children,” accessed 19 July 2015,
savethechildren.org; “UNICEF,” accessed 19 July 2015, unicef.org; “Partners for Care,” accessed 19 July 2015, partners-
forcare.org)
SOLDIER BO(D)Y: THE TRANSNATIONAL CIRCULATION OF THE AFRICAN...
161
162 D. OLSON
The complex denial of innocence to black children is achieved by the

distancing effect of the NGO images that circulate transnationally as “char-
ity” seeking donations. They are visually children in order to stimulate
sympathetic (or guilt) donations, but are not considered a “real” child in
the idealized Western sense. Their images function as a distancing mecha-
nism that elicits sympathy, on the one hand, but comforts white racial
anxieties, on the other. The black child is culturally positioned as “not
innocent” and “not like us” (white children) and so their images, while
sympathetic, do not elicit any significant reform to improve their condi-
tion. In her article about the Hungarian Roma, Andria Timmer explains
that the objects of NGOs are constructed as “‘needy subjects.’ Such a
construction is problematic because (1) it often deprives the aid recipient
of agency, (2) it obscures in-group differentiation and projects a homog-
enized identity focused on the most marginalized members of the group,
and (3) it does not solve a double bind facing the agencies, whose contin-
ued funding and recognition rely upon continued reinforcement of differ-
entiated rather than integrated status for those they try to serve.”7 So the
images of starving black children are children in name only, visually and
ideologically distanced and differentiated, from what the West considers
“normal” children/childhood.
Even the child’s individuality is elided, its historical and cultural context
mute, as the image becomes merely a symbol of Third World poverty. In
1981 Jorgen Lissner argued convincingly that:
The public display of an African child with a bloated kwashiorkor-ridden

stomach in advertisements is pornographic, because it exposes something…
it puts people’s bodies, their misery, their grief and their fear on display with
all the details and all the indiscretion that a telescopic lens will allow. It is
very telling that this type of social pornography is so prevalent in fundrais-
ing campaigns for the benefit of other races in far-away places but virtually
non-existent when it comes to domestic concerns. I can recall few examples of
pornographic advertisements and posters designed to raise money for disad-
vantaged [white] people in Western countries.8
Revisiting Lissner’s concerns in December 2014, John Hilary decries

the return of such imagery, labeling it “development pornography” that
“strip[s] individual children of their dignity and present[s] them to the
Western viewer as helpless objects isolated from any social or historical
context.”9 Following Žižek, whites then can feel good about “helping”
starving black African children (for 0.32 cents a day) while denying those
children the same ideological worth as white Western children.
SOLDIER BO(D)Y: THE TRANSNATIONAL CIRCULATION OF THE AFRICAN... 163
In much the same way that NGO images of black children undermine
notions of childness, the cinematic image of an African child-as-victim-of-
civic-dysfunction, in effect, subverts the notion of victimhood by natural-
izing such conditions as poverty and civil strife in geographic areas that
have historically been portrayed as filled with endemic conflict and pov-
erty. As N. Frank Ukadike notes: “European and American movie mak-
ers, through their lenses—caricatured Africa as a ‘dark continent’ whose
inhabitants were nothing but savages or docile primitives doing funny
things in the jungle to amuse white thrillseekers.”10 Jo Ellen Fair argues
that media imagery of Africa as war-torn, ravaged by poverty and disease
(particularly AIDS) works to “reproduce certain dominant notions of real-
ity” for the West that continually portrays Africans as Other.11 Images
of the troubled African child often function as modernized versions of
the savage African (and African American) stereotype, in which the socio-
political conditions associated with their abject poverty are presented as
a result of the inherently, and historically, savage nature of “uncivilized”
Africans, rather than as stemming from situations like neocolonial inter-
ference by the West.12 As Fair argues, “Africa’s media image as it exists in
the American press has been formed, informed, and re-formed within …
Western discourses in which the meaning of ‘Africa’ is made.” For most
Americans (and Europeans as well) Africa is a dark and threatening “place
over ‘there,’ and not ‘here,’ while its peoples (‘they’) are not ‘us’.”13
And so we have come full circle in the depictions of black children in
cinema: we began with “Orientalized” images of “savage” or “childlike”
(in a negative sense) Africans that evolved into similar images of African
American children as “savage,” “uncivilized,” and “ignorant,” and now
we return to African children as imagined in the modern white mind and
depicted on screen. Such images, which are descendants of colonial imag-
ery, continue to further the notion of black childhood as Other and inher-
ently non-innocent, impure, and violent.
Hollywood has a long history of portraying Africa in a derogatory and
paternalistic way, beginning with D.W. Griffith’s 1908 one reeler The Zulu’s
Heart.14 As I have shown in Chaps. 2 and 3, colonial images of Africa(ns)
have been perpetuated to such an extent that “the Western public today,
is by and large left with decontextualized vision-bites of the continent and
its peoples,”15 and there are abundant examples of romanticized images
of Africa in Hollywood film—King Solomon’s Mine (1937, 1950, 1985),
The African Queen (1951), Mogambo (1953), Hatari (1962), Shaft in
Africa (1973), and numerous versions of Tarzan, to name just a few. And
while the end of colonialism began with the independence of Libya in
164 D. OLSON
1951, followed by the rest of the colonized nations throughout the 1960s
and early 1970s, geopolitically, much of Africa has remained subject to
Western powers through neocolonialism—the continued exploitation
of her natural resources by Western corporations in return for aid pack-
ages. Economic infiltration into Africa by Western corporations has influ-
enced Africa’s move to capitalism via transnational corporate control, and
through the saturation of Africa with American popular culture—televi-
sion, music, and particularly, film.
African Childhood in Hollywood

In Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, Maryellen Higgins argues that in
1994 the Rwandan Genocide, which garnered worldwide news coverage
and “pricked the consciousness of human rights advocates,” the end of
Apartheid, and the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black
president all marked Hollywood’s renewed interest in Africa.16 As Higgins
states “Western film images of Africa express more about the West than
anything substantial that could be said about actual Africans,” which is
evidenced by the type of “Western-centric” films Hollywood set in Africa
from the 1990s onward. Higgins argues that Hollywood films since 1994—
such as The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), Hotel Rwanda (2004), The
Constant Gardener (2005), Lord of War (2005), The Last King of Scotland
(2006)—present “images of humanitarian crises”17 that ultimately build
the public case for Western intervention and “American-enforced secu-
rity” efforts. As Shohat and Stam assert, the spectator of Hollywood’s
Africa feels “a rewarding sense of national and imperial belonging, on the
backs of … other[ed] peoples.”18 Alternatively, Higgins claims that films
set in Africa after 1994 tend to feature “flawed tragic heroes” that are
“morally suspect” (such as Danny Archer in Blood Diamond ) and work
to “cast shame on former colonizing nations … but then switch gears and
advocate revised Western intervention.”19 But Christopher Odhiambo
Joseph suggests that Hollywood’s African-set films “implicitly reiterate
and ‘normalize’ imaginations, attitudes, myths, stereotypes, and percep-
tions of the North about Africa, as part of a continuum in the tradition
of Hollywood films that persistently portray Africa as a place literally on
its knees, begging for intervention.”20 For Joseph, these films employ a
“strategy of signification” that “like the trickster in traditional African
folklore” tricks the viewer into accepting the film’s “sensitive and empa-
thetic representation of Africa as a continent more sinned against than

sinning,” but the film’s visual imagery presents Africa as the same “dys-
functional, diseased, corrupt, and insecure place”21 that it has always been
in the white imagination, leading to an “anthropocentric moralism,”22
which paradoxically, allows viewers to sympathize with, yet be comforted
that Africa(ns) and their children are still inferior to the West.
Hollywood’s complex visual relationship with Africa merges with its
portrayal of (or absence of) black children in its films set in Africa. First,
very few of these films feature black children beyond ethnographic-style
background images of usually naked children carrying baskets on their
heads, tending herds of animals, or rummaging through piles of garbage.
Secondly, African children are often portrayed as complicit in their own
condition because they are “inherently” prone to “uncivilized” and some-
times violent behaviors; for instance, in The Gods Must be Crazy (1980)
the omniscient white narrator, effecting a pseudo-British accent, contrasts
images of modern life and its children and African tribal life, in which
the bush children are depicted naked and part of the “ignorance” of tra-
ditional tribal culture. In one scene, a pre-teen African boy is complicit
with the corrupt agents of authority when he turns Xi in for killing a goat.
According to Davis, “Almost all the blacks behave in a clownish fashion …
and [are] usually incompetent.” And while Gods is a satire and presents the
simplicity and “naturalness” of the tribe as an alternative to the filth and
stress of modern life, the film ultimately supports the power of whiteness
and modernity, particularly in the final scenes when the lone white woman
saves all the village children.
Similarly, in Lord of War young boy soldiers litter the backdrop denot-
ing generational criminality and violence—supported by the film’s focus
on the African drug lord and his mentally unstable son. The historical
conflation of childlike behavior onto black adults blurs the lines between
adult and child in such a way as to elide childhood from black peoples
all together—African children are just small adults and African adults are
just large children. This view of African children also resonates with the
way cinema depicts African American children—as adultified and outside
“normal” childhood, as I have shown in the earlier chapters. African chil-
dren in Hollywood films tend to be “adjuncts to whites … as dark shad-
ows affixed to white foreground characters.”23 If black African children
are given any film “role,” it is as a servant to the white protagonist or
worse, as part of the nature/natural backdrop of African violence or deg-
166 D. OLSON
Fig. 5.2 Lord of War. Directed by Andrew Niccol. Los Angeles: Lions Gate
Films, 2005. Opening “life of a bullet” scene, frame grab
radation, such as in the image below from the “life of a bullet” opening
of Lord of War in which the bullet’s journey ends in the forehead of an
African child. This is shocking, but not altogether “unexpected.” While
Lord of War is not exclusively set in Africa, the parts of the narrative that
are located in the West African nation of Liberia are presented visually
as infested with war, violence, insanity, and AIDS. Such presentations of
Africa merely “repackaged entrenched stereotypes”24 and have resulted in
the most common modern cinematic image of the black African child: the
child soldier (Fig. 5.2).
Invisible Children and the Cinematic Reach

of the White Savior
While images of child soldiers have made cursory appearances in such films
as Hotel Rwanda (2004), Lord of War (2005), The Last King of Scotland
(2006), it was not until the appearance of the amateur documentary
Invisible Children: The Rough Cut (Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, Laren
Poole) that images of African child soldiers gained widespread popularity.
While the film was effective in raising awareness for the plight of child sol-
diers in Uganda, its troubling elitist attitude—masked as acknowledged
naiveté by the filmmakers—underscores the way film images of black chil-
dren are used as vehicles for the persistent “White Savior” complex.25 The
title itself infers that African people, and particularly children, are invisible
as humans to the Western gaze and thus need to be “discovered” by

whites, an age-old colonial attitude, and so the young white filmmaker’s
goal is to “make [them] visible” to the West.
Invisible Children (years later shortened to the 30-minute Kony 2012)
is about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony’s campaign to abduct children
and force them to fight in his “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA). Russell,
Bailey, and Poole “stumbled” upon the story of Ugandan children who
walk miles each night from their villages to sleep en masse in the rela-
tive safety of the city to avoid being taken by Kony’s militia.26 Because
they did not have any official distribution access for their film in 2003,
they posted the “rough cut” on Google video, their own website, and
later on YouTube. It eventually went viral through social media sites like
Facebook and YouTube. The popularity of Invisible Children via social
networking and its romanticization of child soldiers temporarily raised
public awareness of the plight of some African children, but only to “doc-
ument and restage the traumas of abject poverty, resource-driven con-
flicts, militarism, and acts of terrorism.”27 As such, it raises questions about
how the imagery of black child soldiers contributes to Western viewers’
insatiable appetite for violence voyeurism. Treju Cole, American-born,
Nigerian author, tweeted that the public response to the child soldier phe-
nomenon in the US was “American sentimentalism … [amounting to]
emotion-based claims to moral superiority” under the guise of humanitar-
ian concern.28 Cole’s criticism makes sense particularly as there have been
numerous other better child soldier documentaries that have not received
the attention that Invisible Children has. For instance, Neil Abramson’s
Soldier Child (1998) predates Invisible Children and is a compelling docu-
mentary about the rehabilitation of child soldiers. The film does not spec-
taclize the child soldier for the West but rather takes a humanistic look at
how to restore normalcy and humanity to a group of children who were
brutalized by adults.29
The public reaction to Invisible Children in 2006 was quite substantial,
but it wasn’t until the film was shortened to 30 minutes and renamed
Kony 2012 that the African child soldier once again emerged as a popular
cinematic archetype through the massive “branding” across multiple social
media platforms of the short Kony 2012. The filmmakers, who had formed
a non-profit group called Invisible Children, targeted young people in
high schools and college campuses with their media campaign, resulting
in what Lars Waldorf calls “commodity activism,” or “clicktivism,” that
reintroduced the old White Savior complex to a new generation of young
168 D. OLSON
people.30 Kony 2012 plays on the political effects of sentimentalism, what

Jane Tompkins suggests is the “possibility of social action” based on the
emotional power that images can foster. One of the ways Kony 2012 was
so effective is that it challenged the “natural sanctity” of the child while
at the same time, distanced that sentiment by presenting African children
as other, much like NGO imagery does.31 But the “emotional experience
that validates privilege” really only functioned to “amplif[y] the illusion
that the expression of such enthusiasm—whether through social media or
other information and communication technologies, has substantive posi-
tive material impacts beyond the big emotional experience of the enthusi-
ast.”32 And so the “American sentimental” discourse that swirled around
the re-emergence of child solder archetypes in the African-set films of the
1990s spilled over into the social consciousness to “subtly intertwine”
the themes of black male child soldiers, African violence and atrocity, and
colonialist rhetoric in the public imaginary, reinforcing black children as
prone to violence and criminality. As Stuart Hall explains, “It is race which
provides the mediated link between the structured positions of secondari-
ness and subordination which is the ‘fate,’ the ‘destiny’ inscribed in the
… experience and the consciousness of [Africans] being second-class peo-
ple,”33 which is part of the visual strategy of the original Invisible Children:
Rough Cut film.
Invisible Children opens with a tracking shot, a solitary key light shin-
ing on a young black boy walking, head down, carrying a sack over his
shoulder. Throughout the scene the young boy never looks up at the cam-
era or acknowledges the filmmaker. A voice over by Jan Egeland, UN
Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, states: “It is a moral
outrage to see thousands of children that have been abducted, that are
maltreated, that are going through the most horrendous torture by the
rebel movement … with so little international attention.”34 As the last line
is spoken, the child walks past the camera and is swallowed by the dark-
ness. With this opening image, the film discursively positions the child as
“victim” and partially visible as the key light exposes him, but then the
child disappears into the stereotypical darkness-that-is-Africa image. As
Benedict Carton argues, “African children are portrayed simply as victims:
forever abandoned, turned to fodder by warlords, or buried in endemic
calamity,” waiting for the benevolent hand of the West to raise them up
from their pagan existence.35 Invisible Children continues these narrow
representations of African childhood through such imagery that positions
the black male child as a pure victim of Africa’s “dark” forces.
From its first scene, the young filmmakers of Invisible Children, estab-
lish an elitist and paternal outlook towards Africa that is clearly rooted in
historical myths and stereotypes, even joking that they look forward to
“conquering” the Sudan, albeit with their camera. After the introductory
scene with the black child, the film cuts to a series of mock-interview scenes
with three young white men who talk about where they have previously
traveled. They address the stationary camera jokingly—one man states he
“doesn’t have a girlfriend and isn’t dating”—suggesting that that is the
reason he is able to travel to make the documentary. But the juxtaposition
of these young men, acting very smug and immature against the earlier
seriousness of the African boy, sets the irreverent tone of the film. Equally
disturbing, however, is the colonial discourse that persists throughout the
film’s narration. The filmmakers claim they came to Africa to “face the
danger head-on and leave as warriors,” but they quickly “realized there
wasn’t much to do here.” Africa turned out to be a big disappointment
for these privileged adventure seekers: the “normalcy” of Africa, which is
not what they expected, contrasted with the pervasive myths about the
war-torn and chaotic Africa just “waiting-to-be-saved” that these young
white filmmakers expected. They label a long-take of the Sudanese grass-
lands dotted with scrub brush as “the most depressing shot ever.” These
same words appear slowly across the bottom of the screen to emphasize
the sentiment. Even the African landscape is denigrated by the white film-
makers because it did not fit with their expectations of the stereotypical
lush jungles filled with adventure or the often-imaged barrenness of fam-
ine that begs for white intervention. That the landscape itself garners the
filmmaker’s contempt reveals an attitude of superiority that overshadows
the entire film. What follows these opening scenes are montages of Jack
Ass-style (MTV 2000–2002) stunts: they burn a termite hill and acciden-
tally set their arms on fire; they clumsily mutilate a snake while screaming
and hopping around (the camera correspondingly hopping around), and
they throw up—often. The narration expresses their disappointment in
not “seeing signs of war,” and their worry that the only “war footage”
they have is of them killing a snake. The filmmaker’s dialogue demon-
strates the Western Orientalist view of Africa as always at war and chaotic,
its people—all of them—always suffering in the abject poverty that these
young white men hoped to affirm with their camera.
Invisible Children, while documentary in style, follows the familiar
genre of white savior films, where a white character seeks “truth” or tries
to “find themselves” by traveling to less developed countries to “make a
170 D. OLSON
difference.” The protagonists of white savior films advance or grow by

being positioned opposite, and above, the poverty or primitiveness that
frames the host culture. Hollywood has a long history of white savior
films36—The World of Suzy Wong (1960), Cry Freedom (1987), The Power of
One (1992), Beyond Rangoon (1995), The Ghost and the Darkness (1996),
Seven Years in Tibet (1997), The Last Samurai (2003), and Avatar (2009)
to name a few. Invisible Children follows a similar narrative path in that
its young filmmakers seek “truth” and to become “warriors,” that is, to
grow up.
Since Invisible Children’s emergence on social media, images of child
soldiers have evolved into a Western “cautionary tale of innocent child-
hood gone awry.”37 When it hit Facebook in 2006, the film went viral,
beginning one of the largest cyberspace-inspired grassroots humanitarian
campaigns in modern history and spawning the even more successful Kony
2012 campaign—released online—which garnered over 100 million views
on YouTube and contains the same colonial discourse.38 For instance, in
the opening scene, the birth of the filmmaker’s son—shot in handicam
style—he narrates: “every single person in the world started this way.”
However, the statement exhibits his fundamental white privilege and a
glaring ignorance of healthcare for most of the developing world. The
birth scene is obviously a cesarean (the woman’s body is behind a sheet
and we only see her head as doctors and nurses work behind the sheet)
while most African births are vaginal, and the majority of African women
do not have access to hospitals or the option for cesareans.39
Like the original film Invisible Children, Kony 2012 reduces the com-
plex social and cultural issues that comprise the problems in Uganda to
a narrative that privileges Western modernity. The film opens with bright
images of white children and adults on cell phones, chatting over Skype
and through e-mail, riding bikes, and there is even a birth scene in a mod-
ern hospital. The film then changes to dark, night-time images of black
children walking along a road to a safe house to sleep for fear of being
kidnapped by Kony rebels. This contrast in light/dark, technology/prim-
itive imagery works to validate the notion that Uganda needs Western
help while at the same time omitting any real context for Kony or the
war. Invisible Children’s popularity spawned overwhelming media atten-
tion on the plight of child soldiers, including capturing the attention of
Hollywood directors like Edward Zwick.
I believe the social media interest in Invisible Children at that time
significantly contributed to the audience receptivity and romanticization
of the child soldier narrative. By the 2006 release of Edward Zwick’s

film Blood Diamond, the issue of child soldiers had a fairly large follow-
ing and was a widely discussed issue particularly among young people,
due in part because of the online circulation of the Invisible Children
cyber-documentary.
The White (African) Perspective

Blood Diamond was released theatrically on 8 December 2006. It received
five Oscar nominations, a Golden Globe nomination, and a slew of other
nominations and recognitions, grossing $57 million domestically, and
$114 million worldwide (though, only Djimon Hounsou, who played
Solomon Vandy, the “noble African,” won any awards).40 Yet, the film was
met with mixed reviews. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called it
an “exceptionally foolish thriller”41 while James Berardinelli stated that
“despite the participation of two marquee topping actors and the strength
of the director’s resume, it’s hard to imagine there’s much of an audi-
ence for a movie fueled more by the politics of African atrocities than the
adrenaline and testosterone cocktail that typically characterizes this sort of
film.”42 While critics panned the film, viewers rated it quite highly, with an
8/10 (332,750 user reviews) on IMDb.com and a 90% likeability rating
on rottentomatoes.com (566,120 user ratings). Rotten Tomatoes critics,
though, gave it only 65% (6/10). These numbers suggest that the film,
and its depiction of Africans, resonated with the general population even
if critics attempted to dissuade viewers from buying into them.
It was producer Paula Weinstein’s interest in blood diamonds that con-
vinced director Edward Zwick, who admits to knowing nothing about
the problem beforehand, to take on the project.43 As a director, Zwick
has taken on other liberal humanist projects before, such as Glory (1989),
Courage Under Fire (1996), and The Last Samurai (2003). This history
suggests Zwick would be conscious of presenting the subject in a more
truthful way. While child soldiers dot the landscape of other Hollywood
films set in Africa, Blood Diamond is a rare film that actually incorporates a
child soldier’s experience as part of its dual narrative. In fact, it was Zwick
who added Dia’s character to the original script:
Ten years ago, there was a rather unfortunate, Indiana Jones-ish adven-
ture script floating around Hollywood about two men who find a diamond
in Botswana. A few writers took that piece and placed the story in Sierra
172 D. OLSON
Leone, and they invented a character named Solomon Vandy, a fisherman

who is forced to work the mines. Then I rewrote it and gave Solomon a son.
That allowed me to start talking about child soldiers, who became a central
part of the movie. It also created a kind of equivalence. A man looking for
a diamond and a man looking for his son provides an interesting juxtaposi-
tion. The child is the jewel.44
The narrative trajectory of the blood diamond Solomon finds parallels the
trajectory of Dia’s kidnapping and forced participation in the war: both
are valued, lost, then recovered. But the journey of both the diamond and
the child presents Africa and Africans as chaotic and primitive, needing
Western guidance and redemption. It is my argument that the body of the
African child soldier in Blood Diamond is an extension of, and inextricably
bound to, Western historical notions about black male children as inher-
ently violent and unredeemable, notions which are embodied in the film’s
mutilated and hypergangsterized black child body.
Blood Diamond takes place in the 1990s Sierre Leone, which was
plagued throughout the decade by civil wars. While there is no longer any
formal European colonization, like many former African colonies, Sierre
Leone continues to be a victim of neocolonial corporate interests that
follow historical patterns of exploitation and resource extraction, specifi-
cally the mining of diamonds. The film follows Danny Archer (Leonardo
DiCaprio), a white mercenary and diamond smuggler born in Rhodesia
(Zimbabwe). The film’s plot centers on the smuggling of “conflict dia-
monds.” Richard Voeltz explains that “blood diamonds are stones that are
smuggled out of countries at war and used to support that war, by paying
for more arms, increasing the death toll and furthering the destruction
of the region.”45 While in the local jail, Archer hears of a rare, large pink
diamond that a mine worker, Solomon Vandy, has discovered. Archer gets
Vandy out of jail and bullies Vandy into an agreement: if Archer helps him
find his son Dia, (who has been captured by the RUF rebels and made a
child soldier), then Vandy must give Archer the diamond. In the course of
returning to the mining camp to retrieve the diamond, the pair hooks up
with an idealistic American journalist, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly),
who becomes Archer’s love interest. Archer is an opportunist: his only
concern is getting the pink diamond so he can “get off this continent.”
Vandy was a Mende fisherman before the RUF rebels terrorized his vil-
lage, including cutting the arms off the men and boys, and enslaved him
to work in the diamond mines. As we will see, these character traits sup-
port both the denigration of Africa and the savage African trope.
Zwick’s intentions were to raise awareness about the issue of conflict

diamonds, and, along with consultant Sorious Samura (Cry Freetown
[2000] and Exodus from Africa [2001]), he hoped that, by telling a story
about child soldiers, he might help “the people of Sierra Leone [to forgive]
the children for their role as RUF [Revolutionary United Front] terror-
ists. He felt that by telling the story of this boy and the terrible things that
happened to him, those seeing the movie might come to understand—
and perhaps reach forgiveness. That goes for an entire country.” Despite
Zwick’s intentions, the film has been justifiably criticized for its portrayal
of Sierre Leone and its people. Voeltz claims that the film portrays Africa
“as the most violent, scary, and apocalyptic hell on earth, teeming with
tribal rivalries, unimaginable atrocities, genocide, murderous dictators,
poverty, disease, corrupt governments, and children transformed into
stone-cold killers.”46 Diana Adesola Mafe argues that “the film’s efforts to
avoid essentializing Africa are also undermined by its reductionist repre-
sentation of Africans as universally oppressed … [the film] is rampant with
recycled imagery—lush jungle inhabited by monkeys, black savagery, and
a solitary (racist) white man who is more capable of survival than most
of the ‘natives’ put together.”47 And Denov remarks that the “formu-
laic verbal imagery of child soldiers” present in films like Blood Diamond
“fuel[s] the demonisation of African Youth, and simultaneously create[s]
a dichotomy between those children deemed ‘worthy’ of protection and
rehabilitation and those not.”48 Such reception of Blood Diamond’s por-
trayal of child soldiers underscores the films flawed contextualization of
the story. In the end, the spectator is invited to side with the greed and
corruption of the white savior, rather than the African victims of Western
exploitation and corruption.
Though the film begins in the village with Solomon and Dia, the nar-
rative is constructed through the lens of white Danny Archer. By viewing
Africa through the cynical Archer, Blood Diamond’s visual and narra-
tive perspective arguably denigrates blackness. The film is bookended
by beautiful imagery of Africa—first of Solomon and Dia at the beach
and on his way to school, and then of Archer as he lays dying, surveying
the expanse of natural beauty in front of him. As the film makes clear,
however, each of these scenes ends in “death”—the father–son bond
is destroyed, and Archer literally dies bemoaning the fact he could not
escape Africa. The film’s early poignant moments between Solomon and
Dia are lost the moment Archer appears on screen as the dominant point
of view.
174 D. OLSON
The lack of black point of view is nothing new to Hollywood cin-

ema; Hollywood has a long history of telling African stories through
white eyes and that is particularly true of Blood Diamond. As Peter Davis
explains,
The placing of Africans on the cinema screen reflected their dispossession,

for their loss of political power on the field of battle determined their sitting
on the field of focus, they forfeited their right to appear centre-screen …
When Africans did appear on the screen it was as adjuncts to whites; they
told us more about whites—how whites saw themselves, how they rein-
vented and re-enacted mythologies of white supremacy—than they ever
revealed about African lives. Africans in the cinema were but as dark shad-
ows affixed to white foreground figures.49
Davis goes on to note the patterns that such marginalization created: “In
film after film, Africans would be defined as either good or bad by their
actions towards whites, which determined whether they were the Faithful
Servant or the Savage Other. These stereotypes … block the perception
of Africans as existing in their own right—and not merely as adjuncts of
white society.”50 Blood Diamond follows the same narrative strategy. While
Solomon and Dia’s story is first told from their perspective leading up to
the raid on their village, that perspective quickly disappears with Danny
Archer’s arrival. While working in a diamond mining operation, Solomon
finds and hides a large pink diamond. Recovering that diamond becomes
the catalyst for the rest of the action, but from Archer’s point of view,
not Solomon’s. And like Dia, Solomon is positioned throughout the film
as a victim of black African cruelty; he is severely beaten and constantly
threatened with death by the rebels. As Manthia Diawara argues, “[The]
simplistic portrayal of the Black man as quintessentially evil prevents the
film from dealing adequately” with the complex individuality of each black
character.51 Though Solomon elicits sympathy from the audience in the
film’s early scene, his later crazed and violent outbursts, spittle flying from
his mouth, stripping naked in the prison, veins popping in his neck, all
shot at low angle, tend to frame him as the “savage African,” emphasiz-
ing his irrationality, rather than eliciting sympathy for his frustration and
fear. These later shots have the effect of aligning him with the ruthless
RUF rebels, who act in a similar manner, reifying the notion of black
male instability and innate violence. Indeed, it is in the prison where the
film’s perspective changes. Once Archer enters, the point of view becomes
his alone; we see the events, and Africa itself, through Archer’s eyes.
Meanwhile, the former protagonist Solomon becomes almost servile to
Archer, who blackmails him into helping recover the diamond.
We first see Archer sitting, lit slightly from the side, as the camera tracks
slowly through the bars of his cell. The next scene is a close-up of Archer’s
face, then a cut to a long-shot of the dark prison, as the guards lead in a
group of rebels who are shouting and chanting. In fact, we do not know
where Solomon is, and assume he is with the group being led in—another
way the film aligns all black Africans with violence and chaos. From
Archer’s point of view, we watch the prisoners coming in, and then cut to
Solomon, who is in a cell across from Archer, also dimly lit. The two men’s
stories, as well as Dia’s, are hereafter entwined, but solely from Archer’s
perspective. Solomon’s narrative after the prison scene only advances in
relation to the events that happen to Archer. Even after Archer’s death,
his desires haunt the narrative, desires that Solomon fulfills for Archer by
leaving Africa at the film’s end. In Blood Diamond, then, the lack of black
perspective functions as a structuring absence within the film’s discourse.
It affirms the articulation of a white perspective (Archer’s) with the resto-
ration of order, control, and civilization.
Black ChildSoldiers in Black Savage Bodies

Denov argues that images of child soldiers in popular media are “highly
racialized and imbued with stereotypes. [D]epictions of child soldiers as
‘dangerous’ and ‘disorderly’ work to underscore the perceived moral supe-
riority of the North as compared to the ‘savage’ South. Such representa-
tions also cement linkages of race, perversity, and barbarism, dehumanize
the child soldiers and their societies, and ultimately present a site from
where colonial themes are played out.”52 Images of African child soldiers
in Hollywood films are very similar to Hollywood’s depictions of young
black gangsters. Both are often associated with acts of violence, which
seem gratuitous because they are removed from the social and political
conditions that helped to foster such violence (Fresh is an exception here
as the violence is embedded within a socio-political context).
The violent acts of the child soldiers in Blood Diamond lack nobility
or agency, something that would not be missing from white children
in cinematic war situations. As Sarah Maya Rosen and David M. Rosen
argue, Hollywood’s white child soldiers, Hunger Games’ (2012) Katniss
or Ender in Ender’s Game (2013), for example, have agency, and the nar-
176 D. OLSON
rative is told from their perspectives. They are depicted as “capable of

bravery, moral decision making, and [are] able to demonstrate both the
heroic and the sometimes brutal and bloody aspects of a warrior’s role.”53
By contrast, in Blood Diamond and films like it, the black child soldier has
no voice, no autonomy, and is positioned always as a victim. The absence
of agency in the depiction of the black child soldier reverberates with ideo-
logical implications about the (non-)subjectivity of black males and the
“white man’s burden” to protect them (a paternalist attitude by colonial
whites towards Africans). Archer literally functions in a “paternal” role
to Solomon and Dia in Blood Diamond, and, at one point in the film,
Solomon tells Archer that Africa might be “better off” under white rule,
a condemnation of Africa by an African, reassuring the audience that even
Africans themselves believe in white superiority.
Both African and African American childhood are often imagined as lack-
ing or uncivilized, and, in the case of the child soldier in Blood Diamond,
childhood is presented in the film’s opening as tranquil and similar to
mornings for any family—father walking son to school, son complaining
about having to get up, father explaining to his son the benefits of school,
and their easy banter back and forth. Next follows a poignant scene in sub-
dued, Chiaroscuro lighting with the ocean as backdrop, while Solomon
and Dia share an almost spiritual moment before Dia turns to head for
school. This pastoral scene acts as a contrast to the coming catastrophe,
and the scene very quickly changes to the chaotic destruction of their vil-
lage by the RUF rebels. Mafe argues that the “black-on-black” violence
in Blood Diamond “endorse[s] the myth of African savagery” especially in
light of the almost poetically joyful way the camera glides from one victim
to another.54 The film interestingly ends with the same paternalism with
which it began: Archer lies dying on the hill, in full sunlight, overlook-
ing the green, lush expanse of African landscape. Significantly, the early
silhouettes of Solomon and Dia by the ocean transform into chaos and
violent bloodshed, but after Archer’s death scene overlooking the mag-
nificent African plain, the film cuts to Solomon in London (civilization)
selling the pink diamond and arranging for his family’s escape from Africa.
The first silhouettes suggest that African primitiveness leads to violence
and chaos; the second sillouette implies that when the white man pater-
nally “overlooks” Africa it leads to civilization.
Solomon, as with Dia, is at the mercy of those in control of his fate. Just
before the rebel attack scene, Archer tries to convince Solomon to tell him
where the pink diamond is. Archer states: “I know people, white people—
without me, you are just another black man in Africa,” suggesting that
black people are of no consequence in Africa; only whites have power.
The next sequence is typical of the white savior film and lends credibility
to the above statement: the white man, Archer, leads Solomon to safety
through his own city while dodging the attacking rebels. The viewer is
positioned as a reluctant witness to the brutalization and deaths of African
citizens: young boys shooting AK47s at women and children; child sol-
diers dragging a young girl by her legs suggesting an impending rape; and
the graphic dismemberment of a young village boy at the behest of the
rebel commander. This same young boy appears in a later scene recover-
ing at the white man Benjamin Kapanay’s (Basil Wallace) orphanage. The
visual comparison between this boy’s earlier and later circumstances sup-
ports the association between Africa and chaos: TIA—“This is Africa”— a
recurring phrase throughout the film that refers to Africa’s constant state
of turmoil. The boy’s later safety at the orphanage suggests the restoration
of order and rule of law can only be achieved through or by the agency of
whites. Even the brutal training scene, in which a blindfolded Dia is forced
to shoot a man with an AK47, is sandwiched between scenes of extreme
poverty, which both naturalizes African poverty—the scenes are long-shot
“postcards” that only feature black Africans—and connects that poverty
to the “natural” brutality of the African male rebels who then “teach” that
violence to the boys they have kidnapped.
Paul Virilio, in War and Cinema, writes insightfully about the way
Hollywood cinema aesthetics replicate the visual perceptions of war:
“alongside the ‘war machine,’ there has always been a ‘watching machine’
capable of providing … a visual perspective on the military action under-
way.” Hollywood has a long history of positioning Western whites favor-
ably within war-themed cinema, thereby emphasizing white perspective as
the civilizing, moral force against an evil, immoral black or brown enemy.
Virilio states that “such outrages, murder or torture … [feed] the media
with [images] of their sacrificial victims … [and make a spectacle of] the
world of ancient religions and tribal gatherings.”55 The violence commit-
ted by children in Blood Diamond is spectaclized for the white Western
viewer and hints at the already-known “thug gangster” African American
child, who is most often represented in cinema in the same way. Though
Blood Diamond takes place in Africa, the child soldier is not so far removed
from the gangster black youth that inhabit graffiti-adorned streets in the
opening scenes of Fresh, for instance. In fact, Blood Diamond connects
the two through its use of popular American rap songs by Tupac Shakur,
178 D. OLSON
Mack 10, Pupa Bajah and Baw Waw Society [who model themselves after
LL Cool J] and Western “gangsta” imagery.
Blood Diamond visually elides any cultural specificities from its images
of “African” life. Sierre Leone, where the story is set, becomes the visual
surrogate for all of Africa, despite it being only one of the 53 countries
on the continent.56 For instance, during the village attack, the rap song
“Tok” by Masta Kent (featuring Bullet Rhymes), provides the extradi-
egetic musical score. The song “Tok” refers to the Fambul Tok, a Krio
phrase meaning “family talk,” the name of a grassroots organization that
was Sierra Leone’s version of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(modeled after South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission).57
In the Fambul Tok “perpetrators and victims at the local level might come
together, drawing on Sierra Leonean culture and traditions” to resolve
their grievances and move beyond the trauma of the decade-long civil
war.58 John Caulker explains,
Before the conflict, Sierra Leoneans used to describe ourselves as one big
family. ‘The family tree will bend but never break,’ as we say here. In Fambul
Tok, family is not merely biological, but the community as family, the dis-
trict as family, and even the nation as family. We have found that there is
little interest in Western notions of punishment at the community level. We
have our own way of addressing justice, our own ways of disciplining people,
but it does not involve sending them to prison. Nor do we send them into
exile.
There is an adage in our local dialect that says: “There is no bad bush
to throw away a bad child,” which means that when a person has done
something bad the most important thing is to try and rehabilitate them, not
simply throw them out of the community. Our culture is built around con-
versation, centred in storytelling, where people sit around the fire at night
to talk about the day’s events.
Also, part of our tradition is in talking to our ancestors. If you do not
please them, you will have bad luck. If you appease them, you are bound
to have a good harvest. Fambul Tok communities have ceremonies that
involve invoking the spirit of ancestors and asking for their blessing. This
is a very important part of the reconciliation process. To sum up, the com-
munities involved in Fambul Tok are drawing on our culture and tradi-
tions, sometimes adding some new elements, in order to promote grassroots
reconciliation.59
None of the cultural nuances explained here by Caulker are visible in

the film, and many of the scenes featuring images of the community are
selected to fit the Western narrative of African life: a desperately poor,

but colorful shanty town on a hill; young children climbing with pigs
on a mountain of garbage (smiling and laughing); and children flying
makeshift kites on muddy, garbage-strewn streets. These “stereotypical”
scenes of filth and chaos suggest to the Western viewer both “authen-
ticity” (These are common tropes about Africa) and justification for the
attack, particularly the child soldier’s participation, juxtaposed as it is with
the earlier children climbing on and living in “garbage.” The attack scenes
specifically highlight the black child body as it wrestles with the size and
strength of the AK47 when attempting to aim and fire at villagers. The
scene contains rhythmic jump-cuts of people screaming, running, and
jeeps following filled with children and men shooting wildly at the fleeing
people. Medium, low-angle shots show Archer literally holding Solomon’s
arm at times to lead him away from the fighting (Fig. 5.3).
Much of the camera work in Blood Diamond focuses on the smallness
of the child body in relation to the weapons used; for instance, during the
rebel attack on Freetown, a boy of about ten is trying to shoot a DShK
heavy machine gun from the back of a jeep. His small arms wrestle with
the powerful gun as he shoots wildly into the fleeing crowd. The slightly
low-angle, stationary camera pauses on the child wrestling to fire the huge
machine gun. A close-up shot of another boy shooting an AK47 empha-
sizes the blank expression on his face. It is followed by an over-the-shoulder
shot from the child’s perspective, briefly then cuts back to a medium-shot
as he shoots wildly into the fleeing crowd. As Virilio explains: “War can
Fig. 5.3 Blood Diamond. Directed by Edward Zwick. Los Angeles: Warner
Bros., 2006. Childsoldier, frame grab
180 D. OLSON
never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to
produce that spectacle,” and the spectacle in Blood Diamond is not the
fleeing Archer and Solomon, but the frenzied shots of Africans shooting
up Africans, which create a “cinematic[ly] … ‘tragic lyricism of ubiqu-
itiousness and ever-present speed’ [which] renews the mythical chronos
of aboriginality, that eternal present of native-born offspring for whom
time is ceaselessly annulled.”60 In this scene, Blood Diamond establishes
the nativeness of the Africans, who, the film suggests, without whiteness,
revert to their natural, and timeless, savage instincts.
The juxtaposition of a song that celebrates the coming together of
Sierra Leoneans with a scene where its children brutalize and kill their
own people underscores the film’s allusions to Africa’s failed attempts at
“civilizing” itself. In “The Coming Anarchy,” Robert Kaplan, a corre-
spondent for The Atlantic, forecasts the “apocalyptic vision of world inse-
curity caused by Third World environmental degradation, societal collapse
and failure to modernize.”61 For Kaplan, that Third World degradation
sits squarely in Africa’s “primitiveness” and inability to model itself after
Western societies. He describes Sierre Leone in the 1990s as “premod-
ern formlessness” that is a “threat to the rest of the world because of
unchecked human growth and movement, environmental abuse, and the
failure of modernity to take root.”62 According to Kevin C. Dunn, Kaplan
is “engaging in a colonizing act of power by controlling representations
of the ‘Other’ and producing a specific, politically saturated picture of
the world … to produce his vision of security.” Kaplan’s colonial-era lan-
guage demonstrates just how little Western narratives about Africa have
changed. And this same outlook is reflected in Blood Diamond’s visual
attitude towards Sierre Leone and its people.
The film also uses American rap music videos to align violent African
children with African American youth. As Solomon sneaks into the rebel
camp, a song is heard above the clamor of children posturing and playing.
Following Solomon’s lateral movement into the camp, the camera pans
across a child’s face, then a TV showing a music video, then to another
child who looks almost directly into the camera, then turns left to look
toward the music video on the TV. The song is “From tha Streetz” by
American rap artist, Mack 10. The audible verses are:
This is for the straight thugged-out, the low ride pro’s

Triple O.G.’s with the hot six fo’s
Go fast ballers, bangin’ six gears
Three time felons with the tattooed tears

For all the homies out there that cook it up good
Distributin’ so up they project a neighborhood
Whether it’s Peruvian or Ghetto D
Won’t you bust down a kid and sell a ounce for me?
Significantly, as the TV screen comes into view, and the child turns his
head back towards it, the line “won’t you bust down a kid and sell a ounce
for me?/ I’m from the ghetto” are clearly heard. To “bust down a kid”
means to verbally or physically attack, to scold or criticize, referencing
the need to “correct,” to punish, (all?) black youth “from the ghetto”
whether in New York, or Kono, Sierra Leone.63 As Danny Hoffman
argues, these are youth “with an image of themselves as part of a global,
black male underclass, revolutionary heroes with a great deal in common
with US rappers and gang members … Hollywood film … provide[s] a set
of images for how one performs that kind of identity.”64 This performance
is made visible in the way the boys in the rebel camp talk and dress; they
emulate the American rap artists that they listen to. The visual tethering of
the African child and the American rap video in this scene clearly implies
that black males are criminal everywhere and at any age.
The visual rhetoric of children maiming and killing other children sug-
gests that these otherwise “invisible children” [invisible from the West]
are only made visible through the atrocity of their own destruction—a
destruction that the film infers can only be stopped by Western inter-
vention. Indeed, the child soldier’s graphic violence in Blood Diamond
functions to create a spectacle “that serve[s] no other end than to draw
attention to themselves.”65 Michael G. Lacy and Kathleen C. Haspel argue
the “Orientalist tropes of chaos and disorder offer a panoramic view of
impoverished cultural spaces, ideologically distancing progressive and civi-
lized western spectators from a chaos of brown and black people frozen
in time and place.”66 Indeed, the film portrays the rebels as insane with
no purpose behind their violence when, in fact, the RUF arose from the
decades-long dissatisfaction felt by displaced and marginalized youth.
According to Rosen, the “rebel forces came to Kono not to create a revo-
lutionary force, but to gain access to the same resources [the diamond
fields] that had been drawing migrants and bandits since the 1950s.”67
The very real cultural and economic conditions that fueled the civil war
are elided from the film’s portrayal of the rebels: “Widespread poverty,
the personal enrichment of the elite, the failure to use the wealth of Sierre
182 D. OLSON
Leone to develop a robust market economy, and the lack of education and
job opportunities ensured an endless supply of unemployed, unemploy-
able, and alienated youth.” These marginalized youth began to join forces
with the more privileged student movement, and both adopted a belief in
the “necessity of radical violence” as the solution to Sierre Leone’s prob-
lems.68 The relationality between actual social and political conditions and
rebel violence is ignored, allowing the film’s narrative to emphasize the
“savage black African.” The film’s aesthetic and diegetic discourse work
in tandem to create a historically informed neocolonial narrative about
“dangerous” African males.
Conclusion
The images of child soldiers in Blood Diamond support the prevailing dis-
course that frames blacks as “primitive, immoral, and threatening.”69 The
effect is to elide the African child soldier’s status as victim and instead
frame them alongside the adult rebels as equally culpable. An alternative
portrayal of the African child soldier can be seen in the award winning
film Ezra (2007), a Nigerian/French/Austrian coproduction. The film
follows Ezra’s appearance at the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation
Committee. The film is shot entirely from Ezra’s point of view, including
his interactions with the white characters, and “delves deep into the moral,
philosophical, and legal quagmire” that is the issue of child soldiers. In
Ezra the child soldier is a multifaceted, complex character who is simulta-
neously perpetrator and victim, remorseful yet not responsible. As Valerie
Hébert states: “Ezra offers no resolution to these contradictions, and
instead aims to balance the problem of child soldiers with the larger social,
political and economic conditions that create them,”70 something Blood
Diamond does not do. Rather, Archer’s continual use of the derogatory
phrase “TIA” elides any specificity of social, political, or economic condi-
tions as a cause of socio-political unrest and instead reduces the conflicts
to the chaos that the film shows as “natural” to Africa.
In Blood Diamond scenes that depict the disturbing brutalization and
indoctrination of Dia and the other captured boys are negated by paral-
lel scenes where the same children party and celebrate their commission
of atrocities during raids. The indoctrination scenes are low-lit, close-ups
of the boys’ terror-filled faces as they huddle naked on a dirt floor and
beaten by the rebels. One scene begins with a low-angle, slow pan from
behind the bed of a pick-up truck to reveal the boys seated in the dirt,
blindfolded, and surrounded by chanting rebels. The slow pan positions

the viewer at a “safe” distance until a medium-shot of the blindfolded
Dia, who is taken up and forced to shoot his first man. The same slow pan
is used when Solomon finally finds Dia in the rebel camp. The viewer is
again positioned literally outside (The first shot is from the outside of the
cabin looking through gaps in the board wall) and from Archer’s point of
view, as he watches the scene unfold. The cabin is dimly lit, the hand-held
camera walking with the boys as we watch Dia reject Solomon with cries
of, “Enemy! Enemy!” Surrounded by screaming child soldiers, Solomon
ends up prone in the mud—a reversal of the indoctrination scenes. The
boys have now become the black savage rebels that the film hinted they
were all along.
Dia’s denial of his father specifically elides any notion of the innocence
of the black male child and instead, the film’s pans reveal what the white
viewer has already suspected—black boys, like black men, are naturally
violent. Though the tragedy here is the loss of the father–son bond, those
who do the most killing in the film are young black boys, which works to
naturalize age-old myths about the black male (child or adult) as ontolog-
ically criminal or bestial. Even though the viewer is witness to Dia’s initial
abuse at the hands of the rebels, the film’s compelling visual intersections
of rebel violence with Dia’s vulnerability as he absorbs and then accepts
the rebel teachings disallows any notion of the nobility or resistance that
white child soldiers would elicit. In order to make the narrative palatable
for Western viewers, the film must position the spectator to unconsciously
blame the black child for succumbing to the rebel teachings and for par-
ticipating in a “pornography of violence” that subverts Western notions
of children and childhood.71 Indeed, as Archer (not Solomon) saves Dia
during the final assault on the rebel camp, government troops hidden in
the tree line mow down the child soldiers—another parallel scene to the
earlier attack in the city when the RUF rebels blocked roads and slaugh-
tered the fleeing citizens. As Catarina Martins explains there is a strat-
egy when visually constructing child soldiers that presents viewers with
the “paradox between the nature of children as inherently innocent and
good, and their role as perpetrators of the most atrocious crimes,”72 and
atrocities committed by children of color make more sense to the Western
audience within both historical notions of black savagery and prevailing
discourses about black male youth and criminality (i.e., savagery). These
parallel scenes work to make the slaughter “ok” in the ways that Martin
elaborates.
184 D. OLSON
After Archer’s death, we only see Dia one more time: he is shy, with-
drawn, and dazed. He does not speak and only reluctantly hugs his father
when the family gets off the plane in London. The film’s visual depic-
tion of Africa, as well as its discursive construction of Africa as a land of
chaos peopled by animals, functions to recreate, reimagine, and reinvent
for the modern viewer the almost singular colonial narrative about Africa.
It uses the cover of “humanitarian” concerns to sneak rank ethnocentrism
in through the back door. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the film sug-
gests that the only way for Africans—and African children—to know peace
is to leave Africa behind for the more “civilized” West.
Notes
1. Edward W. Said Orientalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books,
2003), 7.
2. Myriam Denov, “Child Soldiers and Iconography: Portrayals and
[Mis]Representations,” Children & Society, 26 (2012): 282.
3. Scott Gates and Simon Reich, eds, Child Soldiers in the Age of
Fractured States (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2009): 5.
4. Kate Manzo, “Imagine Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the
Iconography of Childhood,” Antipode 40, no. 4 (2008): 634.
5. Ibid 635.
6. Slavoj Žižek, “How Corporations Make Profits by Associating
Themselves with Charitable Causes,” Video lecture. Web. http://
www.sacsis.org.za/s/story.php?s=957
7. Andria Timmer, “Constructing the ‘Needy Subject’: NGO dis-
courses of Roma Need,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review
33, no. 2 (2010): 264.
8. Jorgen Lissner, “Merchants of Misery,” The New Internationalist,
June 1981, http://newint.org/features/1981/06/01/merchants-
of-misery/
9. John Hilary, “The Unwelcome Return of Development
Pornography,” The New Internationalist December 2014, http://
newint.org/features/2014/12/01/development-pornography/;
see also Karen Rothmyer, “They Wanted Journalists to Say ‘Wow’:
How NGOs Affect Media Coverage of Africa.” The Joan Shorenstein
on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. Discussion Paper Series
#D-61, January 2011, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/
publications/papers/discussion_papers/d61_rothmyer.pdf
10. N. Frank Ukadike, “Western Film Images of Africa: Genealogy of an

Ideological Formulation,” The Black Scholar 21, no. 2 (1990): 30.
11. Jo Ellen Fair, “War, Famine, and Poverty: Race in the Construction
of Africa’s Media Image,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 17,
no. 2 (1993): 7.
12. See also, Sharyn Kennedy and Steve Hill, “Global Poverty, Aid
Advertisements, and Cognition: Do Media Images of the
Developing World Lead to Positive or Negative Responses in
Viewers,” New Zealand Journal of Psychology 39, no. 2 (2010):
56–66 and Romola Sanyal, “Slum Tours as Politics: Global
Urbanism and Representations of Poverty,” International Political
Sociology 9, no. 1 (2015): 93–96.
13. Fair, “War, Famine, Poverty,” 10.
14. The Zulu’s Heart (1908) is the first US film set in Africa, though it
was not shot there. It is a story about a white family in South Africa
who are attacked by a tribe of Zulus (played by white actors in
blackface). When the father is killed, his little girl—with her white
innocence—wins the affection of one of the Zulu warriors who had
recently lost his own daughter. The Zulu warrior then intervenes
to save the white child’s mother.
15. Paul S. Landau, and Deborah D. Kaspin, eds, Images & Empires:
Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002): 5.
16. Maryellen Higgins, Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (Athens, Ohio:
Ohio University Press, 2012): 3–4.
17. Ibid 5–6.
18. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (New

York: Routledge, 1994): 103.
19. Higgins, Hollywood’s Africa, 7–8.
20. Christopher Odhiambo Joseph, “Ambiguities and Paradoxes: Framing
Northern Intervention in The Constant Gardener,” Hollywood’s Africa
After 1994 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2012): 96.
21. Ibid 97–98.
22. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 201.
23. Peter Davis, In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s
South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996): 39, 3.
24. Megan Hershey and Michael Artime, “Narratives of Africa in a
Digital World: Kony 2012 and Student Perceptions of Conflict and
Agency in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Political Science and Politics 14,
no. 3 (2014): 636.
186 D. OLSON
25. The term is coined by Teju Cole, “The White Savior Industrial
Complex.” The Atlantic, 21 March 21 2012, http://www.the-
atlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-
industrial-complex/254843/
26. Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Laren Poole were originally going to
do a story on the violence in the Sudan, but they were denied entry.
27. Neil Narine, “Global Trauma and Narrative Cinema,” Theory,

Culture, and Society 27, no. 4 (2010): 120.
28. Teju Cole, qtd in Ron Krabill, “American Sentimentalism and the
Production of Global Citizens.” Contexts 11, no. 4 (2012): 53. See
also, Emmanuel Dongala, “Hollywood Pirated Videos and Child
Soldiers,” Warscapes.com, 2 November 2011, http://www.
warscapes.com/opinion/hollywood-pirated-videos-and-child-
soldiers.
29. Soldier Child can be viewed in full here: http://topdocumentary-
films.com/soldier-child/. Other less exhibitionistic child soldier
documentaries include: Children in War (2000), Fight Like
Soldiers, Die Like Children (2012).
30. Lars Waldorf, “White Noise: Hearing the Disaster,” Journal of
Human Rights Practice 4 (2012): 469.
31. Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the
Politics of Literary History.” in Ideology and Classic American
Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 272–273.
32. Ron Krabill, “American Sentimentalism and the Production of
Global Citizens,” 53.
33. Hall, Policing the Crisis, 329, 347.
34. Norwegian Jan Egelend was Undersecretary General for

Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief from 2003–2006. He
focused much of his efforts on relieving suffering in Uganda, the
Darfur region, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
35. Benedict Carton, “Africa.” Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood:
In History and Society, edited by Paula S. Fass (New York: Gale,
2003).
36. For more on White Savior Films see Matthew Hughey, The White
Savior Film: Content, Critics, Consumption (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2014).
37. Denov, “Child Soldiers and Iconography,” 280.
38. Shayne Pepper, “Invisible Children and the Cyberactivist Spectator,”
Nebula 6, no. 4 (2009): 40–55.
39. For more on African births, see: “Giving Birth—the Most

Dangerous Thing an African Woman can do?” 9 March 2012,
http://www.theguardian.com/journalismcompetition/giving-
birth-the-m ost-dangerous-thing-an-african-woman-can-do;
“Africa Renewal” Special Issue on Africa Women, http://www.
un.org/africarenewal/magazine/special-edition-women-2012/
investing-health-africa%E2%80%99s-mothers
40. Djimon Hounsou won the 2007 Image Award for Outstanding
Supporting Actor, and a 2007 Black Reel Award for Best Supporting
Actor, and numerous other film critic’s awards, IMDb.com:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005023/; box office amounts
from Boxofficemojo.com
41. Manohla Dargis, “Diamonds and the Devil, Amid the Anguish of
Africa,” New York Times, 8 December 2006.
42. James Berardinelli, “Blood Diamond,” http://www.reelviews.

net/movies/b/blood_diamond.html
43. “Production Notes-Blood Diamond,” Cinema Review, accessed 5
July 2015, http://www.cinemareview.com/production.asp?prodid=
3774
44. “Seven Questions: A Chat with Blood Diamond Director Edward
Zwick,” Foreign Policy, 6 December 2006, http://foreignpolicy.
com/2006/12/06/seven-questions-a-chat-with-blood-diamond-
director-ed-zwick/
45. Richard Voeltz, “Africa, Buddies, Diamonds, Politics, and Gold: A
Comparison of the Films Blood Diamond (2006) and Gold (1974),”
Nebula 7, no. 1&2 (2010): 190.
46. Voeltz, “Africa, Buddies, Diamonds,” 186.
47. Diana Adesola Mafe, “(Mis)Imagining Africa and the New

Milenium: The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond,” Camera
Obscura 25, no. 3 (2011): 79.
48. Denov, “Child Soldiers and Iconography,” 289–290.
49. Peter Davis, In Darkest Hollywood 3.
50. Ibid 9.
51. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification
and Resistance,” Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia
Diawara (New York: Routledge,1993): 218.
52. Denov, “Child Soldiers and Iconography,” 282.
53. Sarah Maya Rosen and David M. Rosen, “Representing Child

Soldiers in Fiction and Film,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social
Justice 24, no. 3 (2012): 311.
188 D. OLSON
4. Mafe, “(Mis)Imagining Africa and the New Millenium,” 79.

5
55. Virilio, War and Cinema (New York: Verso, 1989): 3, 5
56. Africa consists of 53 (official) countries including the island nations
of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Madagascar, the Comoros,
the Seychelles, and Mauritius.
57. Krio is the official language of Sierre Leone.
58. John Caulker, “Fambul Tok: Reconciling Communities in Sierra
Leone,” Accord 23 (2012): 53.
59. Ibid 53.
60. Virilio, War and Cinema, 5, 32.
61. Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic Feb. 1994;
Kevin C. Dunn, “Fear of a Black Planet: Anarchy Anxieties and
Postcolonial Travel to Africa,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 3
(2004): 484.
62. Robert Kaplan, quoted in Kevin C. Dunn “Fear of a Black Planet.”
493–494.
63. “Bust On,” Dictionary.com, accessed 15 July 2015, http://dic-
tionary.reference.com/browse/bust+on.
64. Danny Hoffman, “Virtual Virtuosity: Visual Labor in West Africa’s
Mano River War,” Anthropological Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2011):
966.
65. Ibid. 961.
66. Michael G. Lacy and Kathleen C. Haspel, “Apocalypse: the Media’s
Framing of Black Looters, Shooters, and Brutes in Hurricane
Katrina’s Aftermath,” Critical Rhetorics of Race, edited by Michael
G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono (New York: New York University Press,
2011): 27.
67. David M. Rosen, Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and
Terrorism (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2005), 76.
68. Ibid. 80–81.
69. Lacy and Haspell, “Apocalypse: The Media’s Framing,” 36.
70. Valerie Hébert, “Suffer Little Children” Review of Ezra, accessed
15 July 2015, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.
pl?trx=vx&list=h-genocide&month=0907&week=c&msg=%20
kiJ/swZyL4No9ylRaV%2BmJw&user=&pw=.
71. Rosen and Rosen, “Representing Child Soldiers,” 308.
72. Catarina Martins, “The Dangers of a Single Story: Child-soldiers
in Literary Fiction and Film,” Childhood 18, no. 4 (2011): 438.
CHAPTER 6
The Black Child Star
There is no denying that Hollywood has changed dramatically since its

inception. The Hollywood industry has historically been aligned with
such technological developments as sound and color in the 1920s, televi-
sion in the 1950s, video cassettes in the 1980s and DVDs in the 1990s.
Each of these technological innovations introduced new challenges to the
Hollywood film industry, marking a “growing pain or turning point” in the
way motion pictures were produced, distributed, and consumed.1 The most
rapid changes, however, have taken place in the last decade with the advent
of digital technology, the Internet, accelerated globalization, and a grow-
ing trend toward tech-savvy viewers who desire media consumption across
multiple platforms that have challenged the traditional Hollywood business
model.2 In order to compete with the numerous media platforms available
to consumers, Hollywood invests heavily in what Lindan Dalecki describes
as “media synergy strategies” in which the industries’ horizontal integra-
tion is “deployable across multiple media platforms.”3 One of the ways
Hollywood has adapted to this changing consumer landscape is by market-
ing stars across multiple media platforms, then banking on that star power
to bring in consumer dollars. For the Hollywood industry, stardom has
become an important vehicle for “facilitat[ing] an immediate connection
between consumer and commodities” in a global digital age.4 The forces
of synergy and convergence that have come to define the new Hollywood
media machine raise an interesting question: Do these new conditions offer
hope for the presentation of the black child in mainstream cinema?

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_6
190 D. OLSON
Jaden Smith and the Transnational Black

Child Star
As I mentioned in the introduction, Jaden Smith’s acting forays are trou-
blesome because his famous parents, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith,
tend to fuel his film career. This sponsorship would suggest that significant
acting roles for black male children are still very few, if non-existent—
so much so that in order for Jaden to get a role it must be produced,
that is, paid for, by his famous parents. Jaden’s break-out role was as Will
Smith’s young son, Christopher, in the 2006 film Pursuit of Happyness—
Will Smith is one of the producers. Jaden’s performance in Happyness was
widely praised and helped fuel his rising celebrity status, leading to a mod-
est role in Scott Derrickson’s 2008 The Day the Earth Stood Still and a
bit part in “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” the same year. Will Smith
is likewise listed as a producer for Karate Kid (2010), Jaden’s second
film, which was also produced by the same companies that did Pursuit of
Happyness: Overbrook Entertainment and Columbia Pictures.5 Not sur-
prisingly, Will Smith, Overbrook Entertainment, and Columbia Pictures
also produced Jaden’s third film, After Earth (2014). And while using
the same production companies for each film is not in itself problematic,
it does suggest that others are not offering roles (or acceptable roles) to
Jaden Smith.
One of the significant aspects of Jaden’s star power is his visibility in
popular culture. He is one of the highest paid child actors in Hollywood
today, worth an estimated eight million dollars, from his ventures into rap
music, TV appearances, and high-budget Hollywood films, not to men-
tion his active Twitter and Facebook presence.6 Arguably, Jaden Smith
is the most well-known black child actor since Sunshine Sammy of the
silent film era, and the most globally known black child actor in recent
memory. Jaden’s media presence is representative of the new forces of
convergence and synergy within the Hollywood-media-Internet industry,
as his forays into different entertainment forms attest. Smith has a world-
wide following on the Internet with hundreds of fan pages in as many
different languages—testimonies to his global appeal. For instance, Jaden
is hugely popular in China, following his filming there of Karate Kid, and
has amassed a significant—and profitable—Chinese fan base.7
While his prominence is in many ways a result of his famous parents,
his popularity and persistent presence may bode a reversal of Hollywood’s
habitual gangsterization of black childhood. Karate Kid was a s uccessful
THE BLACK CHILD STAR 191
film, pulling in $176.6 million domestically ($359, 091, 618 million dol-
lars worldwide); however, some of the film’s success can be attributed
to familiarity with the story and curiosity by fans of the wildly successful
original 1984 version (starring Pat Morita and Ralph Macchio).8 But the
same cannot be said for Jaden’s third film, After Earth. The film had a
budget of $130 million but only earned $27 million domestically dur-
ing its opening weekend (31 May 2013). In the past, this would consti-
tute a flop by Hollywood standards, particularly for a film that stars one
of Hollywood’s most reliable box-office draws, Will Smith. After Earth
had the weakest opening weekend for any Will Smith film to date and
uncharacteristically received widespread negative reviews, even winning
three Razzi awards for Worst Actor, Worst Supporting Actor, and Worst
Duo in a film.9 But so far the film has grossed $244 million dollars world-
wide, which makes it fairly successful, indeed—much more successful than
the critics’ favorite, Ender’s Game (with a budget of $110 million it only
grossed $125.5 million worldwide), another science fiction film released
in 2013, which featured a white boy as the protagonist. This raises inter-
esting questions about the ways in which contemporary audiences negoti-
ate with and receive a black male child protagonist, whose image circulates
both domestically and transnationally.
Globally, After Earth beat out all competition its opening weekend
ranking number one in the UK, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Taiwan,
South Korea, Indonesia, and Mexico, with China pulling in an impressive
$34.4 million its opening weekend.10 Contrary to Hollywood executives’
habitual insistence that they must whiten films for a global audience, such
popularity suggests that global audiences are less averse to a black child
protagonist than US audiences. Critical reception of the film, however,
was on par with much of the domestic criticism; for instance, the UK’s
Guardian review states that Jaden Smith “plays the role throughout with
a face like a smacked bum.”11 Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail char-
acterizes Jaden’s performance as “a boy who is a repellant combination of
cocky and whiny.”12 And Luke Hopewell, of Gizmodo Australia, observed,
“You start to notice that the main character, Jaden Smith, is actually stupid
on purpose. He’s been told that he’s crashed on a planet where everything
here can kill you and every decision is life and death. so [sic] why not go
throw goddamn rocks at giant killer monkeys, shout at giant predators to
simply ‘go away’ and generally disobey the orders of your superior, expe-
rienced commanding officer and father. Aren’t you meant to be a soldier,
kid?”13 So while the critical discourse about Jaden’s performance is similar
192 D. OLSON
to the US critic’s assessment, judging by the money the film has garnered,
global viewers were more than satisfied with the Smith film.
How much of the film’s criticism is due to the race of the character
is much more difficult to determine. Abena Agyeman-Fisher compares
the glowing reviews of Jaden’s performance in Karate Kid—“he’s got
something rare to see in a child actor-he’s got presence”; “Smith has …
a fey beauty and a poise that’s almost disturbing in its utter command of
the screen”—with some reviews of After Earth—“Smith the Elder needs
to realize that Smith the Younger just doesn’t have the chops to carry a
movie”; “In [Jaden Smith’s] case, there isn’t even a claim of talent”—and
concludes that the Hollywood industry really only crowns one black male
star at a time. She argues that “whether it was Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby
or Denzel Washington, I know I’m not alone in noticing that there is usu-
ally one Black media darling allowed to exist at a time … But the idea that
we can have SEVERAL or MANY Blacks of note dominating the media
at the same time has always been a no-no.” She compares the Smiths’ act-
ing forays with those of Martin Sheen and his sons, Emelio Estavez and
Charlie Sheen, who have starred together in numerous critically acclaimed
films with no criticism of dynasty-making as is the case with the Smiths.14
But Noel Brown argues that “Hollywood’s obsessive pursuit of synergy is
matched only by its desire to exploit the commercial potential of preexist-
ing “family” brands.”15 The Smith family brand helps assure Hollywood
the potential for huge profits globally, rather than relying solely on domes-
tic box-office receipts.
Jaden in the Jungle
As I have argued elsewhere, one of the least diverse film genres regard-
ing child characters is American science fiction.16 Until the 1990s very
few black actors were given significant roles in science fiction films, and if
they were cast, they were always minor characters and usually the first to
die by alien means.17 In sci-fi films that feature children, there is even less
diversity. So it is a significant achievement that Jaden Smith stars in the
Hollywood big budget, sci-fi thriller After Earth, directed by M. Night
Shyamalan. But the film misses a significant opportunity to present a black
child as heroic as the film consistently undermines its own project. While
Kitai (Jaden Smith) is sent alone on a mission to save his father, Raige
(Will Smith), his glaring ineptitude underscores his (naturally?) unheroic
nature.
After Earth is a father–son bildungsroman adventure tale about an

emotionless, high-ranking father and his starved-for-attention, arrogant
14-year-old son, Kitai, who embark on a short space journey that goes very
wrong. The film’s father–son framework is a common trope for coming-
of-age tales for boys, and is well represented throughout the sci-fi genre,
for instance: the Star Trek series (the long saga between Spock and his
father Sarek), Star Wars’ Return of the Jedi (1983), Back to the Future series
(1985, 1989, 1990), Future Zone (1990), Lost in Space (1998), Frequency
(2000), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), Tron:
Legacy (2010), and Real Steel (2011). As discussed in Chap. 2, the inter-
sections of white and black masculinity have resulted in a long history of
discursive conditions that denigrate and often emasculate black manhood.
While the global popularity and success of Smith at the box office imply
things have changed for black child roles, the form and content of the film
itself suggest things have largely stayed the same.
The racial space of the black father–son relationship in cinema tends to
reify the Moynihan-style notion of the fractured black family, particularly
the absent, emotionally unavailable black father, which is Will Smith’s role
in After Earth. Yet, the father–son reconciliation familiar to other sci-fi
franchises is thwarted in After Earth, as the bond that is supposed to be
repaired through the adventure is left unfulfilled. Even as father and son
hug after their rescue, the actions appear stilted and forced. Neither char-
acter grows and Kitai, who as the child hero should have advanced and
matured, does not. It is my argument that the film’s overt discourse about
achieving heroism—that is, battling fear—is subverted by the narrative
positioning of Raige and Kitai as inherently inferior. In other words, the
film constructs the historically informed emasculated, unemotional and
distant black father (The film actually ‘breaks’ his legs, rendering him both
symbolically and literally impotent.) and his “pickaninny” child within the
framework of the future, linking historical beliefs about blacks, the jungle,
and generational inferiority.
After Earth is based on a story written by Will Smith (specifically as
a vehicle for Jaden) with the screenplay written by director M. Night
Shyamalan and Gary Whitta. As we have seen with Precious and Beasts
of the Southern Wild, racist discourse affects both white and black direc-
tors, suggesting an unconscious discursive blindness to reinterpretations
of negative stereotypes. As Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono argue,
racial discourses “reify racial identities and logics while effacing their own
existence, thereby remaining illusive, going underground, and defying
194 D. OLSON
detection.”18 All Americans, black and white, are subject to the discur-
sive conditions that can foreground race while intending to do the exact
opposite.
The film takes place a thousand years in the future on the planet
Nova Prime, after Earth’s inhabitants have abandoned their polluted
and uninhabitable world. As the humans colonize Nova Prime, its
natives create a monster, called an Ursa, to help eliminate the humans.
The Ursa is blind and kills by “smelling” pheromones given off by
human fear. A high-ranking human commander, with the overdeter-
mined name of Cypher Raige (Will Smith), discovers how to com-
pletely suppress fear, a process called “ghosting,” which allows the
Ursas to be easily killed. But the suppression of fear appears to have
eradicated Raige’s other emotions as well, and through flashbacks we
learn that during the colonization of Nova Prime, Raige’s daughter,
Senshi (Zoë Isabella Kravitz), was killed by an Ursa. Raige’s five-year-
old son, Kitai, hid under a glass dome during the attack and witnessed
Senshi’s death. The guilt over his sister’s death fuels Kitai’s resentment
of his father, who was not at home to protect them. Conversely, Raige
incomprehensibly blames his young son for not doing anything to save
his sister. In an effort to repair their relationship, and at his wife’s
insistence, Raige takes Kitai with him on a mission to deliver an Ursa
to the military’s training grounds. Predictably, they crash land on the
nearest planet—the now uninhabitable Earth. The ship breaks into two
halves, and the rescue beacon is in the faraway tail section. Raige’s legs
are both broken, so Kitai has to journey alone through the jungle to
the tail section of the ship, though they can communicate with each
other through a devise on Kitai’s arm. Raige is completely emotion-
less throughout the film (Smith’s performance is uncharacteristically
wooden and stale), as his young son Kitai desperately—and unsuccess-
fully—vies for any expression of love or approval from his father.
The plot is a typical bildungsroman “coming-of-age” tale where a
child on the verge of adulthood must make a perilous quest that results
in enlightenment (adulthood) at the end. Rather than meet the chal-
lenge, however, Kitai ignores Raige’s instructions throughout the film,
acts rashly and without exercising common sense, and does not achieve
enlightenment or adulthood at the journey’s end. In fact, he chooses to
remain infantile. The film genders heroism as strictly masculine, highlight-
ing emotional strength, physical strength, military prowess, and protective
self-sacrifice as specifically male attributes. The only two females in the film
who act heroically (Katia’s sister and the bird) both die. Raige’s wife, Faia
(Sophie Okonedo) appears only in the beginning of the film and functions
as the source of parental wisdom to Raige, who does not really know his
own son. There is only one reference to Faia’s job when Raige refers to
working with her in the “turbine division,” so we can assume her job is
something bureaucratic and passive (in comparison to being a Ranger).
When we first see Faia, she is manipulating a complicated hologram image,
but as Raige enters the room, she quickly closes it, suggesting her work is
less than or not as important as his. And so the film does not include Faia
in the discussion of heroism other than, at the end, when Kitai desires to
work with her instead of Raige. In fact, other than these first scenes, no
women appear for the remainder of the film, aside from the bird. This is
a film about achieving a narrowly conceived, idealized masculinity and
particularly about controlling emotion.
In contrast to After Earth, Ender’s Game, released the same year (2013)
and based on a popular young-adult, sci-fi novel, stars another young
male protagonist who has father issues and who is positioned as a savior.
Alone, After Earth can just be considered a failed film, one of many—but
when juxtaposed with Ender’s Game, the race and gender politics of the
two films reveal the cultural work these texts perform. Ender’s Game did
slightly better at its US opening ($28 million) but has not yet matched
the financial success of After Earth internationally (worldwide total $245
million, with $15.4 million in DVD sales. Ender’s Game had a world wide
total of $90 million, and $25.5 million in DVD sales).19 Ender’s Game stars
Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, Ben Kingsley as Mazar Rackham, and Asa
Butterfield as Ender Wiggin. But Ender, who is white, is a much different
character than Kitai: he is smart, stoic, exudes nobility, exhibits empa-
thy and care for others, and frequently outthinks the adults. According
to Vincent M. Gaine, “Ender’s maturation is similar to the journeys of
young heroes Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter and James Kirk (in the new
version of this character played by Chris Pine). These young heroes have
an unambiguous heroism about them—Obi Wan Kenobi informs Luke
that he must ‘become a Jedi’, while Captain Pike informs Kirk that he sees
the ‘greatness’ in him.”20 Kitai, however, is never told similar things. In
fact, he is made fun of by others (significantly, their all-white crew), and
exhibits no heroic traits. Therein lies the difference: the black boy pro-
tagonist does not mature, does not possess any heroic qualities with which
to build on, and does not progress towards adulthood like the white boy
protagonist.
196 D. OLSON
Towards a Black Child Hero?

So, Kitai is not a typical child hero: there is no bravado, no charisma, nor
any moments of great understanding. Rather, he is very weak and, signifi-
cantly, does not learn from his experiences. Oddly, in the opening scenes
when he’s at school, Kitai is the youngest cadet in his class—academically
superior, but immature, as his teachers tell him. Unlike white child adven-
ture heroes in other Hollywood coming-of-age science fiction films who
from the beginning display a keen intelligence—Super 8 (2008), Ender’s
Game (2013), the Hunger Games or Harry Potter films—Kitai exhibits
neither keen intelligence nor thoughtful reflection. He is not really on the
verge of manhood, though at 14 he should be. He is stubborn—an “insuf-
ferable brat”21 according to one critic—and constantly refuses orders. He
has no clear idea of how to handle extreme situations—which makes him
the victim of pranks by Raige’s white crew—and exhibits a desperate need
for attention from an emotionally unavailable father.
Ender in Ender’s Game also has a troubled relationship with the father-
figure at the academy, but Ender is particularly heroic in that he is compas-
sionate yet not afraid to fight; he is thoughtful, rarely just reacts, and has
a heightened sense of empathy and compassion, which allows him to walk
away in the end and attempt to save the alien race he almost destroyed.
And when Ender refuses an order, it is because he has figured out a better
solution that furthers the trajectory of his heroism. For instance, when
Ender sneaks away to meet the alien and attempts to communicate with
her despite his fear, he exhibits a special insight into the creature’s behav-
ior leading to his heroic disregard of orders to stay inside the ship. In
After Earth, the fight in the bird’s nest is only one of the two places in
the film that Kitai demonstrates his potential for insight when he intuits
how to beat the lion by tricking it onto a weak part of the nest and push-
ing it through to its death. But those intuitive moments in After Earth,
which should build in frequency as he progresses toward maturity and
enlightenment, are both rare and unprogressive. When the mother bird
later saves Kitai’s life by sacrificing her own, he exhibits no compassion for
the animal. Rather, he is frightened by the bird’s large body that covers
him (in contrast, Ender is not frightened by the giant alien body). Indeed,
the singular heroic element that Kitai lacks is insight. That the bird sacri-
ficed its life to save his seems lost on Kitai. As the low-angle shot focuses
on Kitai’s expressionless face staring blankly at the dead bird, the camera
dollys backwards and arcs up over the scene, in an omniscient perspective
shot that emphasizes Kitai’s smallness in relation to the enormous bird,

her sacrifice, and the lush expanse of jungle. Roni Natov argues that “the
suggestive power of birds, whose sounds powerfully evoke a nonverbal
spirituality, as well as the regenerative power of plants and flowers … is to
learn to trust the intuitive,” something Kitai does not learn throughout
the narrative; rather, the bird expresses more compassion and insight than
Kitai, by selflessly sacrificing her life to save the person who tried to save
her children.22
Rather than advance as a child hero, Kitai’s actions remain reactions
throughout, a crucial difference between a typical white child hero, like
Ender (or Harry Potter), and Kitai. His immature and reactionary dis-
course throughout the film reflects his narrative positioning as a traditional
pickaninny character. Kitai embodies the pickaninny trope throughout the
film (with a hint of the Zip Coon caricature discussed below), never matur-
ing or evolving out of that stereotypical behavior. He does not learn the
“perfect balance between impulses towards empathy and towards accom-
plishing the ‘greater good’” as most child heroes do.23 Within the very
limited selection of black child hero characters in Hollywood films (none
of whom are equal in characteristics to white child heroes), Kitai’s lack of
insight, compassion, and judgment suggests his lack of moral center—or
rather, a lack of innocence. The form of “innocence” Kitai embodies is not
born of purity, but rather of ignorance, or stupidity, another characteristic
of the pickaninny character discussed at length in Chap. 2. After Earth’s
narrative discourse, then, resonates with the historically informed, cul-
turally constructed notions of black children as non-children, inept, and
certainly not heroic.
As a black child, Kitai is also literally “returned to the jungle” in After
Earth, but exhibits no practical knowledge of how to survive in a natural
environment, leading to multiple near-death experiences. Of course, this
also hints at the historically informed paternalistic notions of Africans’
inability to manage themselves. Indeed, there are numerous tracking
shots of a panicked Kitai just running blindly through the jungle, yelling
at the animals to “leave me alone!” (In contrast, Katniss Everdeen in
Hunger Games is also in an unfamiliar jungle but never blindly runs; her
directions are always the result of thinking logically about which direction
she should take). Kitai lacks many of the qualities that white child heroes
commonly possess, and instead his character presents a blended version
of a pickaninny and Zip Coon character. Heather A. Weaver explains
that the “central conceit” of the Zip Coon character is his “sense of
198 D. OLSON
self-importance [that is] out of alignment with the day-to-day demands

of his world,”24 an accurate description of Kitai’s flawed yet vocal sense
of entitlement throughout the film, which is coupled with his picka-
ninny doltishness and almost cartoonish fear of being followed.25 And
while Kitai is not a “dandy” in the sense of a traditional Zip Coon adult
character, he does flaunt his “schooling”—his academic success (which
he oddly never draws on throughout the adventure)—and his arrogant,
but misguided, belief in his own abilities, a notion that is soundly and
repeatedly checked by other characters—including animals—throughout
the film.
Yet, After Earth does offer a noteworthy reversal of a common sci-fi
film trope in which characters of color are usually the first to die. When
the ship carrying Raige and Kitai crashes, the entire crew, who are all
white, die, and only Raige and Kitai, the black characters, survive. In a
subtle way, their survival foregrounds race and comments on the genre’s
treatment of people of color, specifically its history of racial exclusion.26
The film fails to redeem the genre, however, because of its association
of black masculinity with flawed heroism and impotence. Kitai’s des-
perate need for acceptance is used by others in the film to trick him or
laugh at him; for example, when Kitai slips away from his father on the
ship to go see where they are holding the Ursa. The men guarding the
creature taunt him so that he will go close to it, knowing full well it will
try to attack him, and he will panic. Later, when Kitai must venture out
to find the tail of the ship, he does not take the mission seriously from
the start. His first encounter with an Earth animal, a baboon, results in
blind, almost hysterical (and comical) panic. Even though his father tries
to direct him, Kitai completely disregards his father’s direction, running
blindly through the jungle, which results in a mob of baboons trying to
kill him. Kitai’s panic at meeting the first single baboon underscores his
innate immaturity and lack of heroic insight.
Finally, when Raige gives Kitai the order to abort the mission to reach
the tail of the ship, Kitai refuses and insists he can make it, which would
traditionally signal the start of the protagonist’s maturity and progression
to adulthood. Yet, even this is framed as petulance and childishness, rather
than heroism. With tears streaming down his face—tears which the cam-
era, in close-up, lovingly caresses—Kitai shouts at Raige about his sister’s
death, vocalizing the guilt he feels because he did not try to save her.
Rather than offer words of support, Raige illogically admonishes Kitai for
not trying—even though he was a five-year-old child at the time. After
Earth does not portray a positive, nurturing father-figure; on the contrary,

Raige represents fatherly absence even when he is present, which is visually
reinforced as Raige is shot only from the waist up for the majority of the
film, effectively castrating him. The absence of the lower, sexually potent,
half of Raige’s black body mimics a deep, dysfunctional Oedipal struggle
between father and son, not over the mother, but over the deceased sis-
ter. The camera angles that only capture half of Raige’s body also sug-
gest his half-hearted attempts at fatherhood—to both the deceased sister
and Kitai—and bring a “vivid contrast” between Raige’s unnaturally con-
trolled emotion and his son’s uncontrolled emotional abandon.27 Such
visual discourse ultimately reinforces existing beliefs about the impotence
of black fathers (the Moynihan Report) and the potential for criminality in
black male youth (inability to control emotional impulse). Like the other
films discussed here, After Earth suggests only two emotional states for
black child characters (indeed, black males of any age): wild abandon or
complete emotional disconnection. Both states are, unfortunately, associ-
ated with inhumanity.
Kitai’s behavior suggests an internal struggle between a fear of and a
desire for the masculinity that he lacks. Michael E. Connor and Joseph
L. White describe the necessity of a black male presence, which “offers
children the opportunity to interact with the essence of maleness: the
voice rhythms and sounds, smells, texture, body size, and the difference
between male and female bodies … through these high quality interper-
sonal relationships, boys [develop] confidence and the skills they need
to negotiate the transition through their adolescence to adult years.”28
As Lincoln Geraghty argues, “Father–son relationships accentuate a sense
of passing on experience, making their perceived offspring into better
people.”29 Considering the state of black fatherhood in modern America,
After Earth misses an opportunity to privilege repairing the relationship
between father and son, to highlight father–son nurturing. Instead the
film infers—both visually and narratively—the impotence of black mas-
culinity, particularly when, at the end of the film, Kitai openly rejects his
father’s masculine occupation, rejects heroism, and chooses his mother’s
assumedly safer feminine one (which the film never reveals). The result of
their conflict is not Kitai’s willing sacrifice to save their lives, but rather
Kitai’s refusal to accept his father’s brand of masculinity, and his refusal
to wear the mantra of hero. While his flight off the cliff should have been
the moment of Kitai’s budding manhood—the noble dedication to the
greater cause (saving their lives)—it instead plays like a willful child merely
200 D. OLSON
reacting against what a resented father told him to do. This flight off the
cliff also leads to another failed attempt at heroism—Kitai’s interaction
with the bird discussed above.
At the end of the film, while unsuccessfully fighting an Ursa, Kitai
miraculously (and unconvincingly) achieves a momentary “breakthrough”
and learns to control—erase—his fear. This allows him to defeat the Ursa
and subsequently set off the beacon, but this breakthrough does not pro-
vide the sort of closure Hollywood films usually produce. For, after their
rescue, the father–son bond is never reconciled, and Kitai regresses to his
previous state of childish petulance. The boy remains on his own, still very
fearful, and as immature as he was when he started. Though the momen-
tary self-control exhibited during the fight with the Ursa hints at a pos-
sible future, Kitai never makes it to full maturity. In contrast, at the end of
Ender’s Game, Ender takes the last surviving alien egg and sets out on his
own to try and save the alien species. Ender’s understanding and insight
surpass the adults around him. Despite Raige’s symbolic salute of his son at
the end, Kitai tells Raige he’d “rather work with mom,” verbally rejecting
the salute’s significance and rejecting the black masculinity he attempted
to attain throughout the film.
The first black male child hero, thus, ends by denying all that the film
defines as heroic and ultramasculine. After Earth, which could have pre-
sented a meaningful counter-narrative to the white child hero, or at the
very least established a strong black male child template for other films to
follow, rejects the black child as hero and rejects black masculinity as impo-
tent and flawed. In contrast to Fresh, Kitai does not demonstrate intuitive
moral insight that fuels his escape, and while the film tells us Kitai is intel-
ligent, we do not see any evidence of it. Unlike Dia from Blood Diamond,
Kitai has little bravery and few survival skills; instead, he stumbles through
the adventure in almost comic (Our Gang?) fashion. We are left with a
buffoonish, incompetent, pickaninny character who rejects the hero man-
tra (coded male) in favor of a secondary (castrated?) role as his mother’s
helper. Of course, an alternate reading could suggest that Kitai’s rejec-
tion of the ultramasculine-hero role is his advancement, his growth. By
rejecting violence and the negation of emotion, the film could be seen to
subvert the hero = male structure that lead to the earth’s near destruction
mentioned in the film’s beginning. Yet, the lack of any significant female
characters in the film renders such a conclusion unlikely. The only hero-
ism rewarded in After Earth is associated with men and coded masculine;
female attempts at heroism result in death (Senshi and the Bird).
As a rare black male child protagonist in a Hollywood film, Kitai occu-

pies an important liminal space and could offer an alternative face to the
traditional white child hero in cinema. However, Kitai never achieves the
“authoritative assertiveness” that is the hallmark of a hero (as do Ender,
Katniss, and Harry Potter, for example), nor does he make that transi-
tory movement from child to adult necessary in order to come-of-age; in
fact, he pointedly rejects coming-of-age.30 According to Carl Jung, “It is a
striking paradox in all child myths that the ‘child’ is on the one hand deliv-
ered helpless into the power of terrible enemies and in continual danger of
extinction, while on the other he possesses powers far exceeding those of
ordinary humanity.”31 While Kitai faced “extinction,” he does not possess
powers that are extraordinary. Kitai embodies very few of the attributes of
the standard white child hero: boldness, nobility, determination, empathy,
mental and physical strength, courage, self-sacrifice, insight, and a moral
center. Unlike Katniss of Hunger Games, or Ender, Kitai makes impulsive
and careless moves that are framed by childish behavior—tears, whining,
or petulance—and are often reactions borne of fear, not out of insight or
intuition, or a sense of purpose. Kitai does not evolve into his innate hero-
ism like other white child heroes do; rather he embraces his childlike buf-
foonery, his inner pickaninny, and is discursively made unthreatening to
the long cinematic canon of strong white boy, and girl, heroes. He rejects
his father’s salute, rejects the invitation to his father’s masculinity, and
instead chooses to remain a child, to reject his father’s military heroism
in favor of his mother’s safer (we assume both physically and emotionally)
profession. While the film, rightly, foregrounds Kitai’s childness at the
beginning, his failure to mature, to learn, to “come of age” instead reifies
the marginal position of black youth in cinema as decidedly unworthy of
the hero label.
Conclusion
Though Jaden Smith did not fulfill the promise of his heroic role in After
Earth, he has paved new roads for black male youth in other progressive
ways. Now a teenager, Jaden challenges traditional sartorial symbolism by
establishing himself in the fashion world as a “gender fluid” representa-
tive. According to Jack Halberstam, gender fluidity is a “movement that
regards gender as ‘a spectrum rather than a set identity—and there are a
number of positions on that spectrum available to people to express who
they are.’”32 Smith dresses in both men’s and women’s clothing, often
202 D. OLSON
mixing the two. His inspired mixing of styles led Louis Vuitton to choose
Jaden as part of his spring 2016 campaign for women’s wear.33 Smith’s
artistic and gender-bending approach to fashion is both a unique and posi-
tive move away from the negative images of young black males that, as I
have shown, so often circulate in visual media.
Though Jaden Smith has not done a feature film since After Earth, he
has been active in television, playing a recurring role as Marcus “Dizzee”
Kipling on the Netflix series The Get Down (2016–) The show sports
an all-black cast and is about a group of teenagers set in 1970s South
Bronx, New York. Jaden’s performance has mixed reviews: Sonia Saraiya
of Variety.com calls it an “inspired performance”34 while Sam Ashurst of
digitalspy.com says “Jaden Smith’s Marcus ‘Dizzee’ Kipling is stiff, spout-
ing dialogue that feels like it should be in all caps on the actor’s Twitter
feed.”35 But an important aspect about Jaden’s role, whether well acted
or not, is that it is not stereotypical. In fact, all of the black youth in this
show are depicted in complex ways and they negotiate a variety of complex
situations. For instance, in episode 6, Smith’s character, dazzled by the
disco nightclub scene, kisses a boy for the first time. Indeed, television is
much more diverse and offers numerous depictions of black children in a
wide variety of complex and interesting roles, for example: That’s so Raven
(Disney 2003–2007), Moesha (UPN 1996–2001), Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
(NBC 1990–1996), Blackish (ABC 2015–), Empire (Fox 2015–), Lab
Rats (Disney 2012–2016), Pair of Kings (Disney 2010–), A.N.T. Farm
(Disney 2011–2014), How to Rock (Nickelodeon 2012), and True Jackson,
VP (Nickelodeon 2008–2011). These shows offer an uplifting variety of
black child stars in a wide range of roles that depict black children in ways
that align with depictions of white children. The shear variety and consis-
tency of the black child presence on the small screen stands in stark con-
trast to the limited, and limiting, film roles for black children and youth
offered by Hollywood cinema
This study’s goal was to investigate the role race plays in the cinematic
portrayal of childhood and how the cultural construction of the idea
of the child and childhood influence the ways Hollywood portrays, or
ignores, black children. My interrogation of the few Hollywood films that
feature black child protagonists suggests that, while there is some prog-
ress, there is still a long way to go in the ways black children are visually
and discursively framed, and publicly received in Hollywood cinema. In
the introduction, I asked what preexisting ideas about children and child-
hood did those viewers of The Hunger Games have that elicited such racist
reactions? The answer we have seen in these analyses suggests that the
historical notions of “the child” are firmly rooted in how our culture dis-
cursively connects childhood, race, and innocence. Why does the image of
the black child seem to negate empathy and compassion? Indeed, the film
image of the black child, particularly black male children, is often fash-
ioned so that their characters elicit reactions of ire or fear, not empathy. As
we have seen, black childhood is constructed in Hollywood films within
the narrow and limiting frameworks of crime, urbanity, savagery, or dark
“exotic” jungles so that the black child in Hollywood cinema functions
really only to normalize white middle-class childhood, and not to infuse
blackness with innocence.
The portrayal of children of color in Hollywood cinema is discursively
connected to historical notions of black children as non-children, not inno-
cent, and decidedly knowing, particularly sexually. This study has shown
the ways in which these limited portrayals of black children are dissemi-
nated globally via the transnational flows of media content, how these por-
trayals connect historical beliefs about Africans and African children and
connect them discursively to the ways our society, and the West in general,
views black children. Such visual representation raises concerns that the
notion of black children as non-children seen in Western media can have
a negative impact on the ways dominant institutions also view these chil-
dren. Such persistently derogatory images of black children as Other can
have far-reaching negative effects in the ways social policies, in all areas,
are created and enacted; for instance, in the ways drug laws are targeted
toward people of color and the poor, or the ways the media discourse
continually foregrounds the “black thug” criminal, or the black “welfare
queen.” In the United States, schools in predominately black and brown
communities receive less funding than schools in white areas. Educational
policies like “No Child Left Behind” that connect federal education funds
to standardized test results (tests constructed by predominantly upper-
class white educators) disproportionately hurt schools in black/brown
districts. In the case of Butter, which, on the surface, appears to coun-
ter this trend, the film instead affirms whiteness with is exclusively white
bourgeois framework and its discourse of normalcy equated with white-
ness. For Destiny, indeed the “destiny” for all cinematic black children,
the only hope for being seen as a “Child”—innocent, non-threatening—is
to be positioned within the framework of the “norm” of whiteness.
And so, like Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, black chil-
dren do not often see themselves in positive ways in Hollywood cinema.
204 D. OLSON
When black children are present on the big screen, they can only see them-
selves the way cultural discourse constructs them to be: non-innocent,
hypersexual, animalistic, doltish, or criminal. Black children in Hollywood
film are depicted in limited ways so as to position them as “just some black
girl [or boy].” For Hollywood, the black child image disrupts the age-old
Western fantasy of infallible and angelic white childhood innocence; hence
contemporary cinematic images of black children continually function to
negate their own childness and instead work to validate white childhood
as the standard for what childhood is or should be. And while black chil-
dren proliferate in a variety of ways in other visual media, the Hollywood
“dream machine” continues to construct their visual fantasies within the
limiting framework of whiteness. Will there ever be an African American
Harry Potter? Or an African American Matilda? Out of the list of upcom-
ing films for the rest of 2016, only two star black children: Morris from
America starring Markees Christmas (Chad Hartigan 2016, August
release), and Queen of Katwe starring Medina Nalwanga (Mira Nair 2016,
September release).36 The fact that there are two Hollywood films in one
year starring black children is unusual and hopefully suggests a change
in the white-washing of child-centered stories in cinema. A change that
would allow black children, and all children of color, to be seen; and more
importantly, to see themselves as part the Hollywood dream.
“Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the
ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers
and classmates alike … It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes,
those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were
different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different … Pretty eyes.
Pretty blue eyes. Big blue pretty eyes.”
Pecola Breedlove, The Bluest Eye37
Notes
1. Alejandro Pardo, “Digital Hollywood: How Internet and Social
Media are Changing the Movie Business,” Handbook of Social
Media Management, Mike Friedrichsen and Wolfgang Mühl-
Benninghaus, eds. (New York: Springer, 2013), 327. See also
Frank Rose’s The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is
Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories,
New York: W.W. Norton, 2012; Tino Balio’s Hollywood in the New
Millennium, London: British Film Institute, 2014.
2. Ibid. 340–341.
3. Linden Dalecki, “Hollywood Media Synergy as IMC,” Journal of
Integrated Marketing Communications (2008): 48.
4. Stacy Takacs, Interrogating Popular Culture: Key Questions (New
York: Routledge, 2015): 124.
5. Karate Kid 2 (2015) was just announced with the same production
companies and producers. Borys Kit, “Karate Kid 2 Lands New
Writers,” The Hollywood Reporter 25 June 2014, http://www.
hollywoodreporter.com/news/karate-kid-2-lands-new-715027
6. “Jaden Smith net worth,” The Richest.com, accessed 19 July
2015, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celeb/actors/
jaden-smith-net-worth/
7. Noah Gittell, “China Rules the Weekend with After Earth and
Pacific Rim,” Reelchange (15 January 2013) http://reelchange.
net/2013/07/15/china-rules-the-weekend-with-after-earth-
and-pacific-rim/
8. “Karate Kid: The Numbers,” TheNumbers.com, accessed 18 July
2015, http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Karate-Kid-The-
(2009)#tab=summary.
9. The film did not perform well domestically and opening weekend,
31 May 2013; it came in 3rd ($27 million) against the sequel Fast
and Furious 6 (1st with 120$ million) and Now You See Me (2nd
with $28 million), a magician bank heist film.
10. Jeremy Kay, “After Earth Edges out Fast & Furious 6 at

International Box Office,” Screen Daily, 9 June 2013, http://
www.screendaily.com/news/box-office/after-earth-edges-out-
fast-6/5057155.article; Guy Lodge, “Shyamalan’s latest tops the
charts in UK and multiple other territories,” 11 June 2013,
http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/international-box-office-
for-after-earth-proves-theres-life-after-america#jS3zMmdR2Hk9
rtK4.99; “After Earth,” BoxOfficeMojo.com, accessed 18 July
2015, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&cou
ntry=AU&id=1000ae.htm
11. Peter Bradshaw “After Earth Review,” The Guardian, 6 June 2013
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jun/06/after-earth-
review; also see David Edwards, “Calling Will Smith’s After Earth
the Worst Film Ever Made May be Overstating Things, But it is a
Total Disaster,” The Mirror, 7 June 2013. http://www.mirror.
co.uk/lifestyle/going-out/film/after-earth-review-smiths-
film-1935532.
206 D. OLSON
12. Christopher Tookey, “Scientologists do sci-fi again,” Daily Mail

(June 6, 2013) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-
2336867/After-Earth-Film-Review-Scientologists-sci-fi—-Xenu-
stinker.html
13. Luke Hopewell, “After Earth Review: The Best Looking Bad

Movie You Will Ever See,” Gizmodo (17 June 2013).
14. Abena Agyeman-Fisher, “Is Will and Jaden Smith’s ‘After Earth’
being Sabotaged by Racists?” News One: for Black America (13
June 2013) http://newsone.com/2530136/after-earth-movie-
review-racism/
15. Noel Brown, “‘Family Entertainment’ and Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema,” Scope 25 (2013): 11.
16. Debbie Olson, “Last in Space: The ‘Black’ Hole in Children’s Science
Fiction Film,” The Galaxy is Rated G. edited by R.C. Neighbors
and Sandy Rankin. Jefferson (NC: McFarland, 2011).
17. See Daniel Belton “Blacks in Space.” The American Prospect May
20, 2009. Web; Isiah Lavender Race in American Science Fiction.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011; Adilifu Nama Black
Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2009.
18. Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono, editors, Critical Rhetorics of
Race (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 6.
19. “Ender’s Game,” TheNumbers.com, accessed 26 July 2015, http://
www.the-numbers.com/movie/Enders-G ame#tab=summary:
Ender’s Game, Boxofficemojo.com, accessed 26 July 2015, http://
www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=endersgame.htm
20. Vincent M. Gaine, “Ender’s Game: Military Heroics/Heroic

Military?” Thinkingfilmcollective.com, 3 December 2013, http://
thinkingfilmcollective.blogspot.com/2013/12/enders-game-
military-heroicsheroic.html#uds-search-results
21. Manohla Dargis, Review of “After Earth,” New York Times (30
May 2013): page? Or url?
22. Roni Natov, “Internal and External Journeys: the Child Hero in
The Zabajaba Jungle and LInnea in Monets Garden,” Children’s
Literature in Education 20, no. 2 (1989): 94.
23. Christine Doyle, “Orson Scott Card’s Ender and Bean: The

Exceptional Child as Hero,” Children’s Literature in Education
35, no. 4 (2004): 308.
24. Weaver, “Together but Unequal,” 340.

6. Jennifer Gillan, “No One Knows You’re Black!”: Six Degrees of
2
Separation and the Buddy Formula,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 3
(2001): 48.
27. Helene Charlerly, “Burning Mississippi: Race, Fatherhood and the
South in A Time to Kill (1996),” Miranda: South and race 5
(2011): 143–152.
28. Michael E. Connor and Joseph L. White. “Fatherhood in

Contemporary Black America: An Invisible Presence,” The Black
Scholar 37, no. 2 (2007): 4.
29. Lincoln Geraghty, American Science Fiction Film and Television
(New York: Berg, 2009): 105.
30. Gertrude Mander, “The Absent Father and his Return: Echoes of
War,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 16, no.1 (1999): 18.
31. Carl G. Jung, The Archtypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed.
(New York: Princeton University Press, 1959): 170.
32. Jack Halbertstam, quoted in “Jaden Smith’s Adventure’s in Gender
Fluidity: What it Means, Who Profits,” thewrap.com, accessed
August 8, 2016.
33. Vanessa Friedman, “Jaden Smith for Louis Vuitton: The New Man
in a Skirt,” The New York Times, January 6, 2016.
34. Sonia Saraiya, “TV Review: The Get Down,” Variety.com 4 August
2016. http://variety.com/2016/tv/reviews/tv-review-the-get-
down-netflix-baz-luhrmann-shameik-moore-justice-smith-
1201829116/
35. Sam Ashurst, “The Get Down review: Baz Luhrmann’s ambitious
Netflix show is a beautiful mess,” Digitalspy.com, 12 August 2016.
http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/review/a804573/the-
get-down-review-on-netflix-tv-show-jaden-smith/
36. IMDb.com
37. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 60–61.
Erratum to: Black Children
in Hollywood Cinema
Erratum to:
Chapter 2 in: Debbie Olson, Establishing the Discourse of the Child
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_2
Permission statement regarding the content of chapter 2 has been included.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The online version of the original chapter can be found under
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_2
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Debbie Olson
Department of English
Missouri Valley College
Marshall, Missouri, USA
Debbie Olson, Establishing the Discourse of the Child
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
© The Author(s) 2017 E1

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_7
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Select Filmography
After Earth (dir. M. Knight Shyamalan, 2013)
Akeela and the Bee (dir. Doug Atchinson, 2006)
Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir. Benh Zeitlin, 2012)
Black Girl (dir. Ossie Davis, 1972)
Blood Diamond (dir. Edward Zwick, 2006)
Butter (dir. Jim Field Smith, 2012)
Coach Carter (dir. Thomas Carter, 2005)
Cool Runnings (dir. Jon Turteltaub, 1993)
Cooley High (dir. Michael Schultz, 1975)
Dope (dir. Rick Famuyiwa, 2016)
Fresh (dir. Boaz Yakin, 1994)
Good Burger (dir. Brian Robbins, 1997)
Imitation of Life (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Imitation of Life (dir. John M. Stahl, 1934)
Invisible Children (dir. Bobby Bailey, Laren Poole, Jason Russell, 2004)
Lean on Me (dir. John G. Avildsen, 1989)
People Under the Stairs (dir. Wes Craven, 1991)
Polly (dir. Debbie Allen, 1989)
Precious (dir. Lee Daniels, 2009)
Selma, Lord, Selma (dir. Charles Burnett, 1999)
Set It Off (dir. F. Gary Grey, 1996)
Sounder (dir. Martin Ritt, 1972)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (dir. Melvin van Peebles, 1972)
The Color Purple (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 1985)
The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete (dir. George Tillman, Jr., 2013)
The Princess and the Frog (Disney, 2009)
The Watson’s Go to Birmingham (dir. Kenny Leon, 2013)
The Wiz (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1978)
Yelling to the Sky (dir. Victoria Mahoney, 2012)
Index
A adulthood, 5, 14, 32, 82, 123, 126,

abducted, 167, 168 139, 194, 195, 198
ability, 98, 101, 153n13, 198 adultification, 148
abject, 76, 81, 83, 85, 88, 99, adultified, 40, 165
115n34, 163, 167, 169, 170 aesthetic, 43, 44, 50–2, 73, 84, 89,
abjection, 76, 115n34 91, 95, 133, 177, 182
abnormality, 64, 114n17 aesthetically, 51, 95
absence, 3, 4, 7, 8, 19, 52, 66, 103, Africa, 3–5, 7, 8, 10n9–11, 13–18,
107, 121, 143, 146, 165, 175, 20–4, 27, 30, 32, 34–7, 40, 41,
176, 199 43, 53, 55n13, 56n36, 57n51,
abuser, 75, 86, 92 58n63, 58n66, 58n69, 58n70,
acculturation, 139 58n73, 59n77, 60n87, 63–120,
activism, 167 123, 128, 131–3, 135–8, 143,
adolescence, 127, 199 144, 146, 151, 155n32, 156n38,
adult, 1, 4, 5, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 156n49, 157n58, 158n71,
26, 30, 32, 34–8, 40, 43, 50, 159–88, 197, 203, 204
59n77, 65, 68, 75, 82, 93, agency, 23, 93, 97, 99, 146, 162,
94, 98, 123, 124, 126–30, 175–7
133, 139, 143, 147–9, alcoholism, 90, 95
152n1, 154n20, 165, 167, animalistic, 39, 65, 67, 70, 74, 79, 83,
170, 182, 183, 194, 195, 88, 90, 97, 119n78, 122, 129,
198–201 137, 204
Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to footnotes

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6
224 INDEX
antislavery, 83 159–63, 164–6, 168–70, 176,

Apartheid, 164 190, 202–4
Apocalypse, 91, 173, 180 childness, 3, 40, 128, 129, 139, 148,
Arabic, 15, 39 150, 163, 201, 204
archetypes, 36, 167, 168 Chromophobia, 69n99
atrocity, 168, 171, 173, 181–3 cinematography, 86, 96, 141
auroch, 91–4 cityscape, 89, 148
autonomy, 52, 67, 140, 148, 176 civilization, 27, 50, 72, 73, 82, 84, 89,
90, 97, 175, 176
civilizing, 139, 177, 180
B cognitive, 84
barbarism, 175 collectivism, 132
beastliness, 30, 40, 122 colonial, 16, 19, 25, 28–30, 36–7, 40,
bildungsroman, 139, 193, 194 55n13, 63–6, 121–2, 131, 135,
blackface, 61n105, 185n14 159, 163, 168–70, 175, 176,
blackness, 5, 7, 11n17, 19, 37, 43, 45, 180, 182, 184
53, 60n87, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81, colonialism, 17, 25, 30, 63, 66, 159,
84, 99–101, 120n37, 122, 129, 163
130, 133, 136–9, 141, 144, 149, colonization, 172, 194
151, 156n36, 173, 203 Colony, 37, 58n73
blaxploitation, 122, 131–5, 155, colorism, 77
156n38 comic, 40, 200
bourgeois, 16, 20, 27, 45, 46, 98, commercialized, 131
137, 139, 203 commodification, 30
Breedlove, Pecola, 77, 78, 203, 204 commodity, 167, 189
brutality, 35, 36, 123, 177 consumer, 20, 149, 189–95
consumption, 43, 63, 121, 189
convergence, 50, 77, 93, 189–90
C coon, 32, 35, 41, 42, 44–5, 53,
Cajun, 87 59n80, 83, 197, 198
Cannes, 85 criminality, 52, 64, 122, 137–9, 141,
capitalism, 5, 50, 149, 195 145, 159, 165, 168, 183, 199
caricature, 40, 45, 59n77, 66, 67, 83, criminalization, 122
84, 96, 116n49, 163, 197 Cypher, 194
castrating, 74, 199
castration, 72
cherubs, 126 D
childhood, 3–4, 7–34, 49, 52–4, Darfur, 186n34
54n5, 57n53, 58n61, 59n77, Darwinism, 30
70–2, 75, 77, 82–5, 93–6, 97–9, dehumanize, 40, 75, 175
101, 103, 107–10, 112, 121–40, delinquent, 126, 146
143–4, 146, 148–51, 154n22, demeaning, 35, 37
INDEX 225
democracy, 118n38 ethnographic, 30, 63, 73, 165

depiction, 2, 7, 14, 23, 25, 27–8, 32, ethnological, 30
35, 38, 42, 43, 45, 49, 64, 66, Eugenicist, 81
67, 69–72, 83, 94, 112, 123, eugenics, 81–2
129, 131, 133–5, 144, 159, 160, Eurocentrism, 61n103, 185n18, 185n22
163, 171, 175, 176, 184, 202 exemplify, 39, 43–5, 122, 130
desexualize, 66 exoticize, 37, 40, 96, 159
disability, 116n37
discourse, 3–9, 13–62, 66, 70, 71, 73,
77, 81, 82, 95, 97, 100, 107, F
112, 121–3, 126–31, 136–40, fakelore, 137
144, 149, 151, 159, 160, 163, famine, 31, 169, 185n14
168–70, 175, 182, 183, 191, fantasy, 65, 74–5, 80–1, 83, 92–3,
193, 197, 199, 203, 204 100, 204
discursive, 8, 13, 19, 23, 37, 39, 40, fatherhood, 199
54, 65, 66, 70, 81, 98, 100, fatherless, 146–7
107–9, 121, 131, 133, 145, 160, femininity, 63, 66, 67, 82, 92, 96
168, 184, 193, 194, 201–3 feminist, 45, 53, 72, 73, 199
disempowering, 6 fetishize, 100
Disney, 95 folklore, 137, 164
duality, 65, 75 fractured, 146, 160, 193
dysfunctional, 78, 79, 97, 99, 165, 199 freak, 72–3
dystopian, 35, 36 Freakery, 112n1
freedom, 16, 47, 74, 79, 82, 85, 90,
96, 143, 147, 148, 170
E
education, 3, 4, 6, 26, 44, 46, 48,
54n12, 61n89, 61n94, 61n95, G
82, 86, 133, 146, 182, 203 gangsta, 7, 135, 178
educational, 26, 203 gangster, 122, 131, 134, 137,
elite, 67, 181 139–40, 143–6, 148, 149, 151,
elitist, 166, 169 175, 177
emasculate, 53, 135, 193 gangsterization, 190
embody, 111, 112 gender, 4, 19, 21, 40, 45, 50,
Empire, 202 52–3, 87, 97, 115n36,
enfreaking, 75 194, 201
enfreakment, 72 genderless, 40, 83–4
entitlement, 198 generational, 73, 90, 165, 193
environmental, 180 genocide, 164, 173, 188n70
epidermalized, 7, 11n17 ghetto, 45, 49–50, 52, 72, 79,
eroticization, 94 121–59, 181
ethnicity, 2, 21, 52 globalization, 7, 121, 189
226 INDEX
H 126–8, 131, 137–41, 145–51,

Harlem, 50, 115n33 159, 160, 162, 183, 197,
hegemony, 39, 77, 159 203, 204
hero, 2, 71, 132, 134, 193, 196–201 institutional, 79, 98, 107, 151
heroism, 193–6, 198–200 interpellation, 160
hierarchy, 15, 26, 97, 103, 121
homelessness, 136
homicide, 127, 153n9 J
homogeneousness, 3 jezebel, 1, 65–71, 75, 79, 94, 112
humanitarian, 160, 164, 167, 170, justice, 85, 122, 128, 178
184, 186n34 juvenile, 4, 83, 126, 128, 146, 152n7
hunger, 1, 3, 6, 8, 102, 121, 175,
196, 197, 201, 202
hunter, 20 K
hypergangsterized, 172 Kafir, 14–15
hypersexed, 53, 67, 68 kindergarten, 154n26
I L
iconography, 68, 113n13, 160, 184n2, literary, 2, 11n18, 19, 27, 35–6, 40,
184n4, 186n37, 187n48 88, 118n66, 186n31, 188n72
idealized, 16, 82, 141, 151, 162, 195 literature, 2, 7, 19, 27, 35–6, 39, 52,
ideological, 21, 28, 44, 72, 82, 98, 113n13, 135, 159
132, 136–7, 162, 176, 181 lynching, 152n1, 156n36
idyllic, 131
illusion, 57n51, 117n54, 147, 168
imagery, 4, 7, 19, 25, 32, 33, 45, 49, N
84, 121, 122, 159, 163, 165, naiveté, 166
168, 170, 173, 178 naturalization, 19, 23, 73
imperialism, 58n67 naturalize, 20–3, 30, 53, 74, 88, 97,
incarceration, 127 133, 136, 177, 183
incest, 17, 77, 81, 82, 115n35 negro, 4, 10n9, 19, 40, 42, 53,
indentured, 23 59n79, 62n109, 65, 79, 81, 86,
indoctrination, 182–3 101–4, 107, 112, 120n92,
industrial, 5, 20, 26, 133, 186n25 131–5, 146
inequality, 15, 23 neighborhood, 43, 47, 137, 140, 142,
infancy, 54n5, 126 146, 181
infanticide, 17 neocolonialism, 164
inhumanity, 150, 199 neorealism, 50
innocence, 5, 6, 8, 16, 23, 24, NGO, 31, 160, 162, 163, 168,
26–34, 47, 52, 53, 70, 82–5, 184n4, 184n7, 184n9
91, 95, 98, 109, 112, 123, Nickelodeon, 202
INDEX 227
nonchild, 23, 129, 151, 160 137, 140, 141, 148, 160, 162,
nonsexual, 65 163, 167, 169, 170, 173, 181,
norm, 4, 8, 15–17, 25, 26, 32–4, 44, 185n11–12
46, 52, 76, 99, 139, 145 predator, 152n1, 191
normalized, 103, 137 prelapsarian, 26
primitiveness, 170, 176, 180
primordial, 27
O production, 21, 34, 43, 44, 49–51,
Obama, Barack, 98 71, 86, 98–100, 112, 121, 122,
Oedipal, 199 182, 190
ontological, 26, 138, 148, 183 propaganda, 36
othered, 40, 53, 83, 159 psychoanalysis, 17, 115n29
othering, 23, 34, 48, 53, 65, 72, 88, Puppetoons, 44
112 purity, 26, 29, 32, 47, 53, 70, 83,
otherness, 16, 29, 32, 34, 37, 46, 49, 142, 160, 197
58n73, 72, 74, 100
Q
P quest, 82, 119n85, 194
parody, 27, 59n75, 145
pastel, 92, 95, 99
paternalistic, 54, 79, 163, 197 R
patriarchy, 72, 149 racialized, 23, 137, 175
pedophilia, 17 racism, 43, 50, 52, 53, 58n67, 66, 77,
performance, 38, 61n100, 85, 98, 79, 119n86, 146
114n23, 144, 148, 149, 181, realism, 92, 93
190, 194, 202 reconstruction, 21, 23
perpetuate, 7, 78, 122, 137, 138, 140, redemption, 79, 101, 107, 137, 172
144, 147, 163 reform, 4, 5, 26, 79, 152n7, 162
perversity, 175 reformers, 6, 22
phallocentric, 72 renaissance, 14
phenomenon, 76, 100, 122, 167 resistance, 45, 96, 134, 167, 183
pickaninny, 23, 32, 38–42, 44, 45, revolution, 5
57n53, 59n77, 65, 70, 75, 83–7, rhetoric, 5, 6, 14, 26, 28, 30,
97, 112, 131, 134, 193, 197, 57n53, 107, 168, 181,
198, 200, 201 188n66, 206n18
pornography, 94, 162, 183 Rhodesia, 172
postbellum, 21 rituals, 145
postcolonial, 8 romantic, 26, 30, 35, 68, 92, 143
postwar, 46 romanticize, 72, 88, 91, 95, 96, 151,
poverty, 4, 45, 73, 81, 84–6, 88, 90, 163
92, 97, 99, 119n78, 131, 136, rurality, 52
228 INDEX
S T
salvation, 78, 117n62 Tarzan, 163
Sapphire, 71, 115n27, 116n37 teen, 46, 68, 70, 74, 144
sartorial, 87, 97 temporal, 15, 136
savage, 4, 14, 15, 17, 19, 27, 31, 32, terrorism, 167
35–7, 40, 45, 47, 70, 86, 89, 90, terrorists, 173
112, 131, 135, 141, 149, 151, tolerance, 63
169–88 torture, 17–18, 168, 177
savior, 2, 137, 156n47, 166–71, 173, tragic, 96, 103, 126, 145, 164, 180
177, 186n25, 186n36, 195 trajectory, 7, 32, 121–2, 147, 150,
scholarly, 7, 8 172, 196
scholarship, 4, 6, 13, 17, 40, 69 transcendentalism, 87
schooling, 20, 198 transculturation, 56n42
segregation, 15, 66 transformation, 22, 26
semiotic, 52, 65 transnational, 7–8, 39, 159–88, 190–2
sentimentalism, 6, 167, 168 transregional, 5
sexuality, 35, 66, 68, 70, 76, 81, 82, tribal, 165, 173, 177
133 trope, 74, 77, 89, 90, 122, 135, 138,
sexualized, 66, 68, 69, 76 141, 172, 179, 181, 193, 197
slavery, 4, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28–30, tumblr, 1
33, 66, 70, 83, 115n33 Twitter, 1, 108, 121, 190
slum, 99, 119n78, 185n12 tyranny, 82
spectacle, 76, 94, 177, 180, 181
spectator, 88, 98, 149, 164, 173,
181, 183 U
spirituality, 73, 87, 88, 107, 197 unchildlike, 128, 129, 140
stereotype, 19, 30, 35, 36, 39, 40, uncivilized, 31–2, 35, 70, 75, 91, 159,
42, 44, 52–4, 65, 67, 68, 70–2, 163, 165, 176
74, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 96, unconscious, 112, 183, 193
98–100, 104, 107, 112, UNESCO, 16, 54n12
114n17, 122, 130, 131, 133, unfeminine, 53, 74, 97
134, 137, 144, 146, 147, 151, UNICEF, 161
163, 164, 166, 169, 174, unseen, 37, 132
175, 193 uplift, 82, 137
suburbia, 49, 134, 139 urbanity, 136, 203
Superheroes, 119n85 utilitarian, 23
supernatural, 73, 100, utopian, 27, 36
119n85
Superpower, 119n85
symbiotic, 159 V
symbolism, 97, 201 verisimilitude, 50
synergy, 189, 190, 192 victimhood, 5, 75, 160, 163
INDEX 229
victimized, 5, 94 womanhood, 65
voyeurism, 167 worldwide, 117n63, 164, 171
wrath, 78, 140, 141
W
warrior, 39, 52, 169, 170, 176 Y
warscapes, 186n28 youngster, 16, 45, 127, 134
whiteness, 3, 5, 18, 21–2, 26, 33, 34, youth, 4, 21, 45–50, 52, 54, 70,
38, 82, 84, 98, 100, 121, 165, 100, 122–3, 129, 131–4,
180, 203 136–40, 146, 151, 177, 180–3,
Winfrey, Oprah, 71 199, 201

Black Children in Hollywood Cinema - Debbie Olson

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Black Children in Hollywood Cinema - Debbie Olson

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Debbie Olson

ISBN 978-3-319-48272-9 ISBN 978-3-319-48273-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962192

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

2 Establishing the Discourse of the Child 13

3 African American Girls in Hollywood Cinema 63

4 Boys in Black and the Urban Ghetto Child 121

5 Soldier Bo(d)y: The Transnational Circulation of

6 The Black Child Star 189

Erratum to: Black Children in Hollywood Cinema E1

Fig. 1.1 Lewis Hine: girl in cotton factory. Courtesy Library of

grab (The film is not available on DVD, but can be viewed

Children-Lionel-Tate; “When Life Means Life,” St. Petersburg

On 23 March 2012, the much-anticipated film version of Suzanne Collins’

© The Author(s) 2017 1

In a spacious bedroom decorated with white muslin curtains, an alabaster

children within the problem frame of “victimhood.” Duane convincingly

were not considered a positive part of the changing discourse of childhood.

films, and are such constructions influenced by a transnational flow of

9. Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1933

Establishing the Discourse of the Child

© The Author(s) 2017 13

textual specificity”3 in ways that inform broader discursive practices. Such

Kidd’s 1906 study of “Kafir” children, Savage Childhoods, in which Kidd

even treat[ing] them in an idolatrous manner.’”15 It is this assumption that

of ­“horrifying” practices of child abuse as widespread when such prac-

happens to white children. Such absence of, indeed, negation of black

the historical periods Cunningham explores. There is no mention of the

local childhood experiences within a non-Western culture. Such a research

Jennifer Ritterhouse, in Growing up Jim Crow, explains that children

To overcome [the] division among [Northern and Southern] whites, reform-

The image of black children performing similar or more physically intensive

Children and Non-children in the Popular

Innocence and Modern Visualization of Black

1. Wild Man. Four-footed, mute, hairy.

As demonstrated by the previous images of slaves, in visual depictions of

Fig. 2.3 “Age of

Reynolds’ painting became the “commercial face of childhood” and has

­ on-­children.”46 Such representations of blacks during colonialism, slav-

in order to reinforce the notion of innocence as inherent and “closer to

denoting purity of heart, innocence, or closeness to the spirit of nature,

Childhood Spaces and Race

One of the ways race is visually articulated is through spatial associa-

contestation.” Childhood in the United States in particular is intricately

The Black Child Image in Modern Popular Culture

beliefs about Africans advanced alongside the plundering of West Africa

public gaze... dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-like

Fig. 2.6 Pygmy natives

nineteenth-century depictions of men featured a “direct correlation

Medical Service. The majority of Bannerman’s writings feature Indian

Other pickaninny characters could be found in newspapers and comics.

Black Children in American Film Scholarship

history of blacks in American Cinema. What makes Cripps’ study unique is

The Black Child in American Film

The Blackboard Jungle (1955), directed by Richard Brooks, is a Hollywood

neighborhoods as jungles and people of color (despite The Blackboard

Fig. 2.10 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab

Fig. 2.11 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab

ketball behind a chain-link fence—a fence that connotes a less volatile

Dadier: With these kind of students, why bother?

This exchange firmly characterizes the inner-city youth as animals in

Fig. 2.12 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab

2 Establishing the Discourse of the Child 13

3 African American Girls in Hollywood Cinema 63

4 Boys in Black and the Urban Ghetto Child 121

5 Soldier Bo(d)y: The Transnational Circulation of

6 The Black Child Star 189

Erratum to: Black Children in Hollywood Cinema E1

of “horrifying” practices of child abuse as widespread when such prac-

on-children.”46 Such representations of blacks during colonialism, slav-