To: media%nyxfer@apc.org, activ-l%nyxfer@apc.org, racism%nyxfer@apc.org,
        paul%nyxfer@apc.org
Subject: MIM Review: "South Central"
From: mim%nyxfer@igc.apc.org (Maoist Intl'ist Mvmnt)
Message-Id: <o3mBwB4w165w@nyxfer.uucp>
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 92 23:45:35 EST
Organization: The NY Transfer News Service
Status: RO
 
Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM)
 
MIM Notes, Issue 70: November, 1992


                         "South Central,"
                    Directed by Steve Anderson

Revolutionaries are always skeptical when Hollywood claims to
solve the problems of the Black nation. Even when the filmmaker is
Black, funding and guidance (ideological enforcement) come
directly from the capitalist mass media.

The timing of the anti-gang message of South Central is obvious.
Why does Hollywood speak out against gangs just after the Los
Angeles uprising has fueled an unprecedented gang truce in that
city? This truce has moved the Bloods and Crips away from killing
each other and toward focusing their organized power against the
police and the white nation. Police figures show that gang-related
homicides in South L.A. dropped 88% in the month after the
rebellion.(1)

One good moment is where a leader of the fledgling Deuce gang
tells his followers they must organize into a powerful force to
retake control of their neighborhood from parasitic forces such as
drug dealers from outside of their community. It doesn't matter if
the cops throw them in jail, because then they'll just build the
Deuce organization behind bars, too. He plans to finance this new
force by taking over the drug-selling in their neighborhood once
they kick out the outside dealers.

While drug-selling shows the self-destructive and capitalist side
of gangs and must be eradicated, the rest of his talk could be a
Maoist speech about building power of the oppressed to seize
power. He points toward the importance of gaining
self-determination and self-sufficiency in oppressed nations by
expelling foreign capitalists, and he realizes that this can only
happen through an armed power struggle.

South Central posits gangs as the problem, and implies that absent
fathers are the main source of this problem. Single mothers are
assumed to be incapable idiots who will degenerate into
vegetable-like deadbeats without a man around.

South Central does not point to the capitalist economic system
that has caused the breakdown of the family structure in the Black
nation. Misogyny is evident as the single mother's character is
not developed at all, and she is blamed for passively allowing her
son to get into gangs. She is only shown as a helpless drug
addict. But this woman-blaming flies in the face of the reality
that single mothers are successfully bringing up a great number of
Black children under state terrorist and neo-colonial conditions.
This is incredibly hard work, and while a few women do break under
the pressure, most don't.

The big secret of the movie is this: to bring about change, the
only thing you have to change is your attitude; then things will
magically start working for you. But to have any chance of
reaching angry youth with this accommodationist message, it had to
be dressed up with a little "pro-Blackness." So now they say that
as long as you know a few quotes from Garvey and King, then its OK
to accommodate yourself to the white supremacist system.

MIM sees the potential for advancing the liberation of the Black
nation in organizing collectively, not in individual attitude
changes. "Thinking positively" won't get rid of oppression, but
properly organizing oppressed and angry youth for armed revolution
can. By presenting the organizations of angry Black youth as a
problem, South Central is working against the revolutionary
movements of oppressed youth.


Notes: 

1. LA Times 7/17/92, p. B1. (For more info on the gang truce, see
MIM Notes 67, August 1992) -- MC251

 
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