Blaxploitation Never Died – thebannercsi.com

The Banner Newspaper
For the students by the students
By: Samuel Geronimo
An exhibit is defined by Oxford’s dictionary as a public display (a work of art or item of interest) in an art gallery or museum or at a trade fair. The amalgamation of Black men as aggressive, ferocious exhibits, and the Black woman as nothing more than a sexual exhibit is nothing new. Namely, the first film ever shown in the White House was Birth Of A Nation. A film in which Black men are depicted as aggressive sexual creatures who have a thirst for white women.
Correspondingly, Lebron James made history in 2008, being the first African American man to grace the cover of Vogue Magazine. He is seen cradling supermodel Gisele Bundchen, while in an aggressive manner, seemingly yelling at the top of his lungs, in an almost barbaric, savage-like pose. Eerily reminiscent of the King Kong movie poster. Journalist Jemele Hill had this to say “A black athlete being reduced to a savage is, sadly, nothing new. But this cover gave you the double-bonus of having LeBron and Gisele strike poses that others in the blogosphere have noted draw a striking resemblance to the racially charged image of King Kong enveloping his very fair-skinned lady love interest.” She goes on to say, “LeBron is just the third male ever to appear on Vogue’s cover, but it’s hard to believe Vogue would have made Brett Favre, Steve Nash or even David Beckham strike his best beast pose.” Unfortunately, this is just a microcosm in the world of sports and entertainment pertaining to Black men and their white contemporaries.

Blaxploitation was a term used in the 70s referring to movies that featured Black pimps, sex workers and drug dealers as heros. While the term may have fizzled out, the ‘aggressive black guy,’ or the ‘hot black girl’ tropes have remained a staple in popular culture. “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.” A direct quote from Karl Marx in Capital Volume One. Black people, woefully, are viewed as sexual commodities. Look no further than Sarah Baartman. A woman who was stolen from South Africa and exhibited in Europe in the early 19th century. She was advertised as the Hottentot Venus, audiences would pay to see her large buttocks. Baartman passed away in 1815, her brain, skeleton and sexual organs remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974. Forbye, her remains weren’t buried until 2002. Subsequently, in an article by Abena Gyampo, she says “Cardi B fell victim to the hyper sexualization of black women when she dropped her song, “Be Careful”-about her relationship. People did not want to hear it. Her sales increased when she returned to rapping about sex, twerking and money.” She goes on to say this about ‘twerking’, which is rooted in an Ivorian dance called Mapouka, “black artists all over the world have become rich off of the sexualization of the dance while ignoring where it came from, and while continuing to enrich the predominantly white music industry.” Is Cardi B to blame for self commodifying? Would Cardi B have seen the success she’s seen if she never sexualized herself and played her “role” in this acrimonious world that vilifies Black intelligence and confidence unless it has a mini skirt and tube top on?

In Algorithms Of Oppression, by Safiya Umoja Noble, she notes a time she looked up the term “Black Girls” on google search. Google, being the largest and most used search engine in the world, gave her the following results. “Sugary black pussy .com-Black girls in a hardcore action galleries(black pussy and hairy black pussy, black sex, black booty, black ass, black teen pussy, big black ass, black porn star, hot black girl).” Noble then has this to say, “how “hot,” “sugary,” or any other kind of “black pussy” can surface as the primary representation of Black girls and women on the first page of a Google search, and I suggest that something other than the best, most credible, or most reliable information output is driving Google. Of course, Google Search is an advertising company, not a reliable information company. At the very least, we must ask when we find these kinds of results, Is this the best information? For whom? We must ask ourselves who the intended audience is for a variety of things we find, and question the legitimacy of being in a “filter bubble,”when we do not want racism and sexism, yet they still find their way to us.” Sentiments echoed internally by most if not all Black women. This is not something Black women have asked for, this is an additional boulder placed on the shoulders of Black women. Moreover this is greater than just hearsay, or old practices that Black women just need to get over. These are present-day Algorithmic tactics based on nasty vitriol passed down from centuries ago. How do these practices affect the way Black women view themselves?
Have Black people succumbed to being sexualized? Have Black people embraced these stereotypes put on them and embedded them as truths? As Vladimir Lenin once said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Black men often take pride in being viewed as the aggressor and dominant(bell hooks writes about this in the will to change) and Black women often take pride in a false sense of sexual agency and feminism. In Bell hook’s book, Black Looks: race and representation, she has a chapter titled, “selling hot pussy”. Inside said chapter, she goes on to read an excerpt from Tina Turner‘s book “I, Tina”, in which Tina Turner is describing her first sexual encounter. Turner describes a rather rough and painful first sexual experience, however she closes out by saying, “but I did it for love. The pain was excruciating, but I loved him and he loved me and that made the pain-less. Everything was right, it was so beautiful.” bell hooks retorts saying, “Turner is able to retell this experience in a manner that suggests she was comfortable with sexual experience at an early age, yet cavalier language does not completely mask the suffering evoked by the details she gives. However, this cavalier attitude accords best with how her fans “see” her. Throughout the biography she will describe situations of extreme sexual victimization and then undermine the impact of her words by evoking the image of herself and other black women as sexually free, suggesting that we assert sexual agency in ways that are never confirmed by the evidence she provides.” Time and time again in the Black community it is taught that love is pain. Furthermore, you should be able to withstand said pain if you truly love someone. This runs parallel with the notion that black men are the aggressor, leaving sex as nothing more than a conquering ritual, not an act of love. All while championing the idea that Black women should succumb to the aggressive nature of the white patriarchal system in the name of love. A lose-lose game Black men and women partake in, often without knowing the origins of why things are the way they are.
Black representation in the news and mass media is constantly at the forefront, consistently receiving scrutiny. In a Pew Research study of nearly 5000 black adults, almost 2/3 of black adults say news about Black people is often more negative than news about other racial and ethnic groups. This is important because this is not a new issue, nor an issue that seems to be changing anytime soon. Some blame the journalists, others blame the type of journalists covering black issues. “Many black Americans see instances when it is important for the news they get to come from black journalists, particularly and getting news related to race and racial inequality as noted earlier, many see hiring more black journalists, and newsroom leaders as ways to improve coverage of Black people.” This racial gap in newsroom coverage is just one piece of the puzzle.

According to a recent census poll, Black Americans occupy about 13% of the population. A majority of the black population is spread out amongst big cities in America. This means that the average American in their day-to-day life will only encounter but so many Black Americans. This is why representation is so important, in the same breath stereotypes play a huge role in our preconceived notions about a particular group of people. Walter Lippmann had this to say about stereotypes, “We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien.” This is in part what makes it so hard to gauge what a potential solution would be to the issues of black perception. Even with proper representation, better news coverage and less hyper sexualization of Black people, hundreds of years of stigmatization would be hard to erase. Unfortunately, these stigmatizations are how people make what they think are useful connections to what they don’t understand. Changing the narrative is the first step, however as said in an excerpt from Lippmann, “Great activity kills time rapidly, but in memory its duration is long”.
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