BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN!

Burn Hollywood Burn,
I smell a riot goin’ on,
Now they’re guilty now they’re gone,
Yeah, I’ll check out a movie,
But it’ll take a black one to move me.


For those of us old enough to remember the old PE Jam Check it out on YouTube
Not anymore.

The classic Public Enemy rap jam had the right idea. Hollywood needs to Burn. Burn in Hell. The recent trend in movies depicting African-Americans as po’ desperate nigras is so racist and offensive I want to head to L.A with some torches.

Seriously, movies like The Green Mile, Monster’s Ball, Precious, The Blind Side, and the upcoming Frankie & Alice make me mad.

Scratch that, they ENRAGE ME.

Why? This new trend of movies featuring images of po’ downtrodden nigras™ make me sick to my stomach. In allegedly enlightened White liberal Hollywood there seems to be a patronizing attitude towards African-Americans showing up onscreen lately. In the undertones of the films I’ve mentioned is an underlying message that African-Americans aren’t intelligent people capable of making their own way in life without a white savior. It’s a condescending view of Blacks and black life that the rest of the world should have outgrown in its media when Diff’rent Strokes was cancelled.

I thought America was moving past these types of exploitative movies when The Cosby Show debuted to blockbuster ratings in 1984 when I was 11 and filmmakers like Spike Lee, Robert Townsend and Mario Van Peebles were crafting films with more balanced images of Black life a few years later when I was a teenager.

Unfortunately, instead of their work ushering in a new golden age of Black cinema that takes brothers and sisters to the next level cinematically and elevates the black consciousness, Hollywood is turning the clock back to the good ol’ pre-1984 days of hustlin’ jive ass-niggers, pimps, hoes, big fat loud mouth mammies, shufflin’ uncle toms and every other racist stereotype ever depicted featuring African-Americans onscreen in the past century in brand new shiny packages.

Hollywood 2010 feels a lot like Hollywood back in 1930.

It’s frustrating to watch as black people who should know better like Lee Daniels, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey make and produce this nonsense.

It’s more frustrating to watch as film critics hail these racist movies as well-made films and laud them with praise.

It’s even more frustrating to watch as black actors and actresses proudly win industry Awards for playing embarrassing and degrading roles.

But what angers me most of all are the masses of brothas and sistas PAYING MONEY TO SEE THIS SHIT INSTEAD OF PROTESTING IT.

Is black America as a group so broken and dysfunctional that it doesn’t stand up and speak out anymore? Do black people have any dignity? Or has BET sapped it all away with its ignominious portrayals of black life?

It hurts my heart to watch as a generation of young brothas and sistas drink in the poison within narrow-minded images in these movies as a picture of what black life should be. I’m mortified knowing many will grow up believing these stereotypes and institutionally racist pathos are how “normal” black people live.

It saddens me that a generation of brothas and sistas won’t grow up like I did and be blessed to watch a Cosby Show, a Fresh Prince, a Roc, a Sister, Sister, or a Smart Guy and see that there’s a world of hardworking, competent, functional black people who don’t live in a ghetto. What’s worse is that because brothas and sistas don’t have these images in front of them they won’t come to think that anything is possible if they set their mind to it.

Almost two years after helping to elect the first African-American president, the liberal hypocrites in Hollywood refuse to promote any new, positive images of African-Americans in their movies or TV shows. Instead of “changing” of their images of blacks in media to reflect the man they helped put in the White House, they arrogantly they continue to perpetuate a blackout of African-Americans on network TV and perpetuate the most racist stereotypes in feature films and cable television.

All while stating they’re “not racist”.

Fuck Hollywood. Let’s make our own movies.