Straight Outta Compton: Revealing the History of Racism and Stereotypes of Black Men in Popular Music Culture

For those who don’t know, Straight Outta Compton (2015) is a movie and true story about a group of African American men in 1987 who were a part of the famous hip-hop and rap group N.W.A. Using their music, these men were able to shed light on their life in Compton, arguably one of the most “dangerous places in America”, and revealed their experiences of institutionalized racism even as they were on the rise to fame. According to Universal Pictures, “their voice ignited a social revolution that is still reverberating today”.

Straight Outta Compton revealed the history of 5 famous black men and how they experienced institutionalized racism and stereotyping in recent American history.  In order to analyze how racism and stereotyping of these men happened, we must first define stereotypes. According to my professor, Jennifer McClearen, we learned that stereotyping is when individuals are “reduced to one dimension” and it is applied to a whole group. Usually, stereotypes tend to “judge or focus on difference” and are “repeated in media and culture”. What I learned is that it is often hard to identify the source of these stereotypes because stereotypes come to be based on certain things that happened in the past and are held to be fact or evidence.

This is an example of inferential racism. In media and our culture, we often see, according to Stuart Hall in The Whites of Our Eyes, “naturalized representations of events and situations” in relation to race “wither factual or fictional, which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions.”  What he means by this is that inferential racism is a lot like stereotyping. We have these naturalized images or representations of people, events, situations, in relation to their race and they may or may not be fact, but still have racism as a base, and are assumed or treated as fact.

 

 

Members of the music group N.W.A. 

In analyzing the movie Straight Outta Compton, we see firsthand how the members of N.W.A., Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren, experience this form of racism and stereotyping. There is a point in the movie where all of them are outside their recording studio and then police officers show up, thinking that the N.W.A. group are drug dealers or gang members because 1. They were black men, and 2. They “looked suspicious and dangerous”. This is a form of racial stereotyping. When told they actually work there at the recording studio, the police officers scoff and continue to yell at the men, telling them to put their hands up and lay down on the ground so they could be searched for drugs or weapons. Each man is forced to follow the order of the police because they are surrounded by multiple officers who make it known that they (the police) are armed as they motion to their weapons, keeping their hands ready on them to use (because they feel threatened that these black men are questioning why they are being detained and searched…? *queue questionable expression on my face*). In addition, the police don’t exactly wait for the men to lie down; they actually push the men down onto the ground and corner them so that they obey. These police officers were exercising their power to discriminate against these black men and reduced them to their stereotypes as “typical gang members and drug dealers” without any good evidence to suggest N.W.A. was even doing anything remotely illegal other than eating their food on the sidewalk and looking the way they look.

While watching this scene, it was interesting to see how the main officer ordering the black men to lie down, was also black. It was a sort of profound moment for me because it made me think about how this black officer doesn’t realize how much he is perpetuating the stereotyping of black men, of his own race, as drug dealers or gang members. Even when proven wrong that N.W.A. worked at the recording studio by their white manager Jerry later on as he came out of the studio and saw what was happening, the police officers continued to act aggressively and didn’t allow the men to stand up unless they specifically commanded them to. The police didn’t believe the members of N.W.A. because they were black and “looked like thugs” until a white person, their manager, was there to vouch for them. This form of oppression by the police, is a great example of how racism is institutionalized. The police force is a social institution, and when they exercise their right to power against a race in a negative way, it is a form of institutional racism. By definition, “institutional racism is a pattern of social institutions — such as governmental organizations, schools, banks, and courts of law — giving negative treatment to a group of people based on their race.” These things are still happening today too. You hear the stories about young black men being targeted by police and wrongfully detained or killed based on the premise that they are/were a threat. One of the more recent movements to date is the Black Lives Matter movement.

Even though this movie was based in the time period of the 1980s and early 90s, we can see how these black men, who are all relatively popular music icons today, grew up and experienced this type of negative racial stereotyping in recent history. Straight Outta Compton was an entertaining movie that I felt was very blunt and to the point when showing the truth about what these people went through, and is an important part of our media culture because it allows us to see what happened (albeit in an extreme way). Through this movie, we see the powerful use of music that “ignited a social revolution”. Racism is not a thing that happened a long time ago. The year 1987 was only 29 years ago, and considering the fact that I am 20 years old right now, this happening 9 years before I was born is still a short time, too short of a time for racism to be considered a thing of the past.