Film & Television Rhetoric - Projecting Race and Ethnicity

The text that I have selected for my discussion of projecting race and ethnicities is the 2015 biographical drama film, Straight Outta Compton (Gray, 2015). There are multiple reasons for my decision, the primary one being due to the film's overt representation of African American’s during a time of violent oppression (1980s). ‘You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge’ is a statement that occurs both at the start and end of this film (Collin, 2015, [online]), immediately providing us with a stereotypical 1980s portrayal of African Americans and their link to the “streets” (Boyd, 2008, p.201).

Before diving into how Straight Outta Compton conveys race and ethnicities, it is worth briefly discussing the history of race and its representation in early cinema. Two of the most prominent figures in black history and the fight against oppression and segregation were Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King (Banks, 2012, p.683). Their combined efforts spurred the Civil Rights Movement which eventually brought an end to segregation in the United States (Crosby, 2011, p.411).

In early cinema, race was represented through biological determinism and racial essentialism (Teslow, 2014, p.2) and this is somewhat evident within Straight Outta Compton. Throughout this film, we see the main characters involved with guns, drugs, violence and sex; all features which we can associate with early stereotypical constructions of African American males (Graham & Hall, 2013, p.55). Despite this film being set after the Civil Rights Movement it still portrays white supremacy through discrimination from the police, most of which are white, and even their own manager, Jerry Heller who essentially deceives the entire NWA collective. 

This motion picture is also a strong example of both black empowerment and blaxploitation. Weissberg outlined black empowerment as how African Americans saw political control as a way to ‘remedy their plight’ (Weissberg, 1999, p.191). Although it doesn’t always, Straight Outta Compton does convey this. The NWA group depicted within the film arguably have political power through their fame, meaning that discrimination against them is lessened and they can rival against sources of white supremacy like the police (hence the lyric “f*** the police…”). 

In contrast, Straight Outta Compton does portray themes of blaxploitation as well. Gates argued that blaxploitation took ‘Hollywood stereotypes of black masculinity as violent, dangerous, and hypersexual… and blew them out of proportion’ (Gates, 2011, p.195). Now although this film revolves around music; themes of violence, sex and danger are heavily evident to the point of one character contracting HIV. It represents this “ghetto life” which exploits blaxploitation and constructs the African American characters as “gangsters”, not to mention that the film has underlying political messages within its crime and drug representation.

To conclude, I believe that Straight Outta Compton provides a very strong and complex representation of race. On the one hand, we sympathise with and like these characters but on the other, they are involved in things we are intended to disapprove off. Even though this film gives of a mixed representation of race, it is worth noting that it was attempting to accurately portray life for African Americans in Compton during the 1980s.

Bibliography:

Banks, J. (2012). Encyclopedia of diversity in education. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Boyd, T. (2008). African Americans and popular culture. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

Collin, R. (2015). Straight Outta Compton review: 'the real American Hustle'. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/straight-outta-compton/review/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2015].

Crosby, E. (2011). Civil rights history from the ground up. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press.

Gates, P. (2011). Detecting women. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Graham, C. and Hall, K. (2013). The cultural context of sexual pleasure and problems. New York, NY: Routledge.

Teslow, T. (2014). Constructing race.

Weissberg, R. (1999). The politics of empowerment. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.