Essay on Menace II Society: Catching Up With You

A Bronx Tale depicts the everyday occurrences that used to happen in my neighborhood, in exception with the racism that occurred throughout the movie. The shootouts between gangs, and the drug dealers in the corner stores and also the respected/well known individual of the neighborhood all this used to happen in my neighborhood. The movie takes place during the 1960’s, a time where the civil rights movement was still occuring. Its setting takes place in Bronx, New York in a Fordham neighborhood which is populated by people of Italian Decent. Sonny the gangster of a mob is feared throughout the streets but also respected and looked up to. Calogero the son of a bus driver, who lived next to the bar that sonny always hanged out in, always used to copy all the moves and gestures that sonny did. One day Calogero witnessed sonny shooting a man in front of his house. When questioned by detectives and told to point out the shooter, he didn’t point out sonny. After that Calogero from a young age became sort of sonny’s right hand. Although many events happen throughout the movie, sociological forces and ideas are present in the movie. Forces that are shown include the groups that exist in this neighborhood, the micro- macro dynamics of the society that Calogero is living in, sociological imagination, and most importantly a problem between races. The sociological forces are needed in order to drive and

Menace II Society, a film about a young Black man who has lived the “hustler” lifestyle and is struggling to leave it, is a perfect example of deviance as the main character, Caine Lawson, and the characters around him violate many of society’s norms. Throughout the film, the characters swear incessantly, carry around guns and drugs as most people would carry around cell phones, commit street crimes, especially burglary and mugging, on a regular basis, and beat and kill people unscrupulously. The following quote captures just how deviant Caine and the other characters in this film were, “[Caine] went into the store just to get a beer. Came out an accessory to murder and armed robbery. It's funny like that in the hood sometimes. You never

The first example of society behavior is used through the story of a late thirties white man name Benhard Goetz who shoots four black youths on a subway cart in New York. This anecdote is significant to the novel because it takes place in the mid-80s where society is pointed by drugs, and violent brutality wreaks havoc through the city of New York. Leaving his Manhattan apartment, Goetz hops on the subway and notices four African American youths “horsing around,” and “acting rowdy.” According to the story, Troy Canty, one of the boys, asked Goetz for five dollars. Out of instinct James another one of the boys, “gestured toward a suspicious-looking bulge in his pocket, as if he had a gun in there.”

These stereotypes depicted “drug dealers, prostitutes, single mothers, and complacent drag queens” (Harris, 51). In the 1980s, African American filmmakers began to make a name for themselves. These films are “social commentaries, indictments of racism and depictions of ‘everyday’ American lives” (Harris, 51). Compared to the traditional representations of blacks and blackness, New Black cinema takes on this cultural intervention and the recoding of blackness. Harris describes this as “revising the visual codes surrounding black skin on the screen and in the public

This book is about two black children, Layfette and Pharaoh, who grow up in inner city Chicago. They are faced with racism and hardships because of their race and social class. They have different ways of coping, but are better at facing the worst the city has to offer than are many of the other young black children who live around them. During the story the boys are faced with many adversities that stem from the social system. They are faced with gangs, drugs and Chicago housing. However, they also must face their own inner demons that may lead to either of them giving up and giving in to the corruption of the inner city. One of the major turning points in the story is when Layfette gets arrested for vandalizing a car, even though he says he did not. He gets released and is gets off with probation and 100 hours of community service. After this incident the author gets both kids in to a private school where Pharaoh thrives and starts to make good grades instead of daydreaming. Unfortunately Layfette could not handle the pressure and returns to public school. During this time Rickey starts running drugs for one of the local gangs. He is later arrested for carrying a butcher knife. The CHA finally cleans out the horrendous mess in the Henry Horner basements and reclaims the buildings from the gangs. Dawn and Demetrius finally get an

While the 1970’s and 80’s marked a decline in movies featuring black actors and a lack of black directors, the mid 1980’s through the 1990’s invited a new generation of filmmakers and rappers, engaging with the “New Jack” image, transforming the Ghettos of yesteryears into the hood of today. A major director that emerged during this time was Spike Lee. According to Paula Massood’s book titled, Black City Cinema, African American Urban Experiences in Film, “…Lee not only transformed African American city spaces and black filmmaking practices, he also changed American filmmaking as a whole.” Lee is perhaps one of the most influential film makers of the time, likely of all time. He thrusted black Brooklyn into light, shifting away from the popularity of Harlem. By putting complex characters into an urban space that is not only defined by poverty, drugs, and crime, it suggests the community is more than the black city it once was, it is instead a complex cityscape. Despite them being addressed to an African American audience, Lee’s film attract a mixed audience. Spike lee’s Do the Right Thing painted a different image of the African American community, “The construction of the African American city as community differs from more mainstream examples of the represents black city spaces from the rime period, such as Colors…, which presented its African American and Mexican American communities through the eyes of white LAPD officers.”

There is a fine line between what American society looked like during World War II and contemporary America. The dilemma is that society has gone from patriotism and a fight for liberty to “everyone walking around with a chip on his or her shoulder” (Carr 2). This two distinct differences on America culture and society is manifested in, Howie Carr’s “Take $2000 and Call Me in the Morning” and Ronald Reagan’s speech, “The Boys of Point du Hoc”.

WWII: was it destiny, devastation, or a devious mind? WWII had a big effect on the United States population. If we would not have had WWII, our un-employment rate would be higher. Without WWII, the culture in the United States would be less diverse than it is today. In conclusion the world as we know today would not be the same if WWII had not occurred; it played a major role in the changing of population, economy, and culture in the United States.

On December 7, 1941, with Japanese attack on Perl Harbor, all debate over avoiding war and the policy of American isolationism was gone. It was the beginning of a great war that brought death, devastation and finally the victory and power to United States. At the time of Roosevelt’s appointment in 1933, historically crucial events were taking place in Japan, Italy and Germany which had to shape the future and the fate of United States. This paper studies and analyses the major factors which contributed to American success both at home and abroad during WWII in addition to world’s view about American participation in war and bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

RACISM AS A CAUSE FOR CRIME AND VIOLENCE: CINEMATIC ANALYSIS OF “BOYZ N’ THE HOOD”

In the town of South Lake Tahoe, children played safely outside, the sun always seemed to be shining, and laughter was a common sound. Everyone knew one another and crime ratings were close to zero. Due to the town’s “child-friendly” nature, the Dugard family called this place home (Hawkins). However, on June 10, 1991, a fiery nightmare exploded into reality for eleven year-old Jaycee Dugard. Walking towards the bus stop, Jaycee was dragged into a grey sedan (Hawkins). Jaycee’s stepfather Carl Probyn witnessed this gut-wrenching act from down the street and tried unsuccessfully to trail the car on a bike. (Tresniowski). Jaycee’s mother, Terry, lost control of her emotions after her daughter’s

D.W. Griffin dramatization of racial propaganda is adapted from The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, a novel and play by Thomas Dixon, Jr. used to affirm the persistence of racial segregation through the savage portrayal of black people as barbarian toxic to the functioning of American society. “The film portrayed “a most sordid and obviously distorted story of Negro emancipation, enfranchisement, and debauchery of white womanhood. And it did more than any other single thing to nurture and promote the myth of black domination and debauchery during Reconstruction. (Mask, 183)” Through the use of fictitious narrative Griffin devises historical accuracies in order transpose “the national myth of the South into terms congruent with the mythology of White American nationalism” (Bernardi, 20). Birth of a Nation juxtaposes opposing Northern and Southern families, vulnerably positioned as the victims of newly freed black people in the landscape of the Civil War. Griffin hypothesizes a world in which black people to attain cataclysmic political, social, and sexual power throughout society exploit the gift of racial desegregation. By the virtue of cuts and intercuts, the direction is able to accelerate the duration of his shots, bringing the pain and destruction at the hands of black people to a suspenseful climate thereby heightening the evoking fear and anguish within the films viewers. The Ku Klux Klan is established as a savior to the tyrannical black rule, and subsequently creates falsified justifications for their actions both on screen and off. Essentially, Griffin reconstructs the historical context of American race relations by virtue of factual opposition in order to show how the world is stable when black people do not poses

Bellowing out the oversized rough looking man showed his gun at Abram, ‘Get the hell out of my sight you piece of shit!’ Stepping backward Abram nodded, although overwhelmed silently pledging a new chapter in life, and began the journey home. Flowing gust of wind blew endlessly, dressing the scene with dark moving clouds, within each ruffling leaf his heart sang. The idea of danger bypassed his soul entering into the darkest area, on the edge of the once crowed park. Previously empty streets are lined with vehicles of all sorts, tall aging street lambs offer no help, most are in need of repair while a few stay dimly illuminated. Reading the signs along the way, “No Parking” increasing his pace realizing this is not a good position to be in. There are no apartments close by, the park is too dark, he could not see anyone, or for that matter hear any noise whatsoever. Little did Abram know, there are people, many dangerous people watching his every step! Two middle aged men keep their stranger under observation from a building a distance away. Communicating to another set of men sitting in a van with tinted windows along the parkway. Passing a large truck Abram had no idea the graffiti truck held many more people with high

The weather is sizzling hot and tensions are slowly coming to a boil in this Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn neighborhood. Slowly but surely we see the heat melt away the barriers that were keeping anger from rising to the surface. The Blacks and the Hispanics own the streets the Koreans own the corner store and of course the Italians own the pizzeria, the Cops who happen to be all Caucasian, prowl the streets inside out, looking for anyone to harass. Toes are then stepped on and apologies are not made. Spike Lee creates the perfect set-up for a modern day in Bed-Stuyvesant. Without fail Spike Lee is transformed into an anthropologist. Spike Lee’s goal is to allow viewers to glimpse into the lives of real people and into a neighborhood they

What is going on in the world today? Are there any similarities with how the world was run 65 years ago? The 2002 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers was created and produced by a crew with numerous amounts of well known Hollywood names. Two men with some of the biggest names in Hollywood that backed this miniseries with their talent were Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. The miniseries was released in 2002, only a year after the events of September 11th. The show was aired on HBO during prime time hours, aimed at Americans who may not have had a strong sense of this era in history. Band of Brothers stresses the bond between men who have willingly come together to fight for their country because they felt it