In the introduction to Frederick W. Gooding Jr.’s book, Race and Media Literacy, Explained (Or Why Does the Black Guy Die First?), James A. Banks writes that Gooding’s book is about “depictions of race within contemporary mainstream movies and their influence on society.”
Race and Media Literacy, Explained (Or Why Does the Black Guy Die First?)
By Frederick W. Gooding Jr.
Teachers College Press, 192 pages
Release date: May 24, 2024
Banks also explains why this is important to examine and critique because of incidents such as the historical power of the deeply racist and misleading 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. That film, screened at the White House by then President Woodrow Wilson and embraced by many other white leaders in the United States, set the table for a wider acceptance of this country’s white supremacist underpinnings. Hollywood, especially through its most profitable films and its big productions, hangs onto these racist ideals, or the conceptualizing of persons of color through “the white gaze.”
Race and Media Literacy, Explained is the work of an academic who studies popular culture and African American culture, two disciplines that naturally have deep connections in the United States. This book feels like a continuation of the great film critic Donald Bogle’s work. Bogle’s 1973 book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, remains the gold standard on the topic of African American representations in cinema. And it is, as Gooding admits, but so much more.
Gooding is providing a new roadmap for viewers and critics. Racism has changed, morphing into “Racism 2.0,” according to Gooding, so new clues and analysis are necessary. Racism in cinema, once “overt, obvious, and offensive,” is now “subtle, suave, and sophisticated.” But the movies have also changed. Bogle’s book appeared before the age of blockbusters and billion-dollar franchise films; Gooding focuses on those blockbuster types of films to keep things simple (he uses the top ten grossing films of all time from Hollywood).
Teachers College Press
Gooding’s book is detailed, meticulous, and formulaic; his thesis is scientific but rooted in the humanities. The book is a scholarly work that is accessible, but it is designed for teaching. Each character follows a careful model of analysis, followed by questions at the end for students. In chapter one, he begins by asking the question “Why does the Black guy always die first?” while discussing a 2022 film called The Blackening, a “comedic spoof” on the horror genre where all the characters are Black. The humor is that somebody Black is going to have to die first. His question reminds me of how I felt when Duane Jones, the actor who played the hero, was shot and killed by police at the end of the 1968 cult film Night of the Living Dead after he saved a number of white people from being eaten by zombies.
Mostly, though, Gooding is able to shed light on racism in cinema and the industry by shining a bright light on the persistent stereotyping of non-white characters and roles, as well as by examining white characters. He uses archetypes to show how the industry devalues non-white characters and prototypes to demonstrate how white characters are presented as superior.
He begins with the “Angel” archetype, which Gooding dismisses as nothing more than a subservient role or a “Mammy.” Everyone from Octavia Spencer in The Help to Jennifer Lopez in Maid in Manhattan fits this role. According to Gooding, modern Hollywood still does not value non-white lives as much as it does white lives. This remains part of Hollywood, just as it did when The Birth of a Nation was released.
Another archetype Gooding lays bare is the “Utopic Reversal,” one he admits is hard to detect. In the past, this role would have been a “Jezebel” type character, or some kind of false prophet according to literary folklore.
Gooding’s extensive discussion of archetypes is juxtaposed with prototypes—the white characters in the big films who advance a cultural narrative in society. Here is where the white characters in films are almost always uplifted to superior status, especially in these widely distributed blockbuster films. Two examples of the prototypes that dominate these films are the “Intellectual” and the “Manipulator.” The “Intellectual” role is the perfect contrast to the archetype Gooding discusses known as the “Physical Wonder,” which Gooding dismisses as nothing more than a modern-day Mandingo character. This again is the change from overt to subtle in Gooding’s critique.