"This Is What's Real": The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s

©2022 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois three decades ago, a group of blackdirected films began to appear in theaters, addressing issues of over-policing and social justice. These “hood films,” as they came to be called, were directed almost exclusively by young African American men and challenged media discourses about black lives, the inner city, and the causes of poverty and violence. From 1991 to 1995, over twenty films were released as part of the hood-film cycle. The genre focuses on the lived experiences of African Americans in the inner city and emphasizes aspects of black culture. Keith M. Harris grounds the genre as part of a larger shift in black aesthetics, arguing that the films “recode the existing coding of blackness, informing the symbolic with the social and culture sensibilities of black culture, Afrocentrism and the everyday experiences of black people” (94). Despite crafting nuanced narratives that pushed back against stereotypes in dominant culture, hood films surprisingly replicated rhetoric around one of the most enduring vilifications of black neighborhoods: drug addiction. In the hood films addiction is treated as both symptom and cause of crime and poverty. Blame is conferred on the addicts themselves and street-level dealers, with the films mostly hiding the architecture and hierarchy of criminal enterprises that reach beyond the confines of the inner city. Cultural critics have long maintained that films and other media play a role in constructing popular concepts of minority groups. Robin R. Coleman, for instance, argues, “African Americans and Blackness have, in part, become defined within the symbolic media culture and hence are a product of American mass media” (3). Scholars argue that the representation of groups within the media impacts public perception of those groups. The media create a shared concept of minorities through the “transmission and maintenance of cultural identity,” which is then reinforced and identified as “truth” (Ross xix). Such critics rightly contend that these representations must be examined and deconstructed to identify the political and social ideology they contain. In fact, one of the main qualities attributed to the hood genre was realism. The films attempted to function almost as ethnographies. The tagline for the film Menace II Society sums up this impulse: “This is the truth. This is what’s real.” Through textual and discursive analysis, this present study analyzes how key hood films show “what’s real” when it comes to the representation of black addiction.1 For the purposes of this study, I address four films from the hood genre that prominently feature addicts and addiction: Boyz n the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), Menace II Society (1993), and Clockers (1995). The first three films met with significant box office success and, as a result, can be presumed to have had a greater effect on constructing popular perception. The film Jungle Fever (1991) appeared the same year the hood cycle began and is also covered, as I argue it informs and influences the genre. “This Is What’s Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s