Predator is now racist and its villain depicts a black man

What makes black people more likely than others to be killed, beaten, tortured and raped by white police officers and vigilantes? Although Black men are killed by the police more than any other group, Black women are regular targets of police violence even though this fact is often rendered invisible.

A culture and history of racist misinterpretation may have something to do with it. Why has there been considerable tolerance among the silent majority of white people for animal-like, demonic representations of Black people in media and popular culture?

The short answer is that we are dealing with a culture of domination. It is a culture that thrives on the sexualized demonization of Black people. Two examples of this are Ridley Scott’s Alien, which comports with the trope of Black women as alien breeders and Predator, written by brothers Jim and John Thomas, that riffs on images of Black men as dreadlocked, violent and superhuman.

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The Black man as predator

Black men and boys are imagined as dangerous, threatening, inherently criminal and superhuman — bigger, faster, stronger and less likely to feel pain. These views have roots in chattel slavery.

Canada is not innocent in the reproduction of this trope. Inspired by southern secessionists, Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, claimed the death penalty would deter Black men from assaulting white women. Scholars David Austin and Greg Thomas both demonstrate that in the 1960s and 1970s, the RCMP and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation were obsessed with Black men’s sexual prowess.

In the U.S., anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells and, subsequently, writer and scholar Angela Y. Davis documented how the myth of the Black-man-as-rapist undermined African-Americans’ economic, social and political position.

The idea that the late George Bush Sr. may have defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988 by promoting the Black-man-as-rapist trope shows how deeply this myth is embedded in popular culture. The idea of Black boys and men as super-predators was also expressed by Hilary Clinton in 1996. Clearly, the current culture of aggressive and militarized policing that kills Black people at three times the rate of white people in the U.S. crosses political lines.

In the context of racially charged white anxieties about immigration and social order, the historical demonization of Black men is a trope, a stereotype, that easily maps onto cinematic typecasting. The 1987 Hollywood film that launched the Predator franchise fits this pattern.

Predator depicted a Black, dreadlocked, large and super-virile male in a way that converged white art with white political history. A white man once said he thought it was cool that I had dreadlocks like the Predator. This is not a compliment.

The police rape, torture, castrate and murder Black men. The link between visual culture and anti-Black, racist, dog-whistle politics reveals that these violent, racist behaviours strikes deep at the heart of white psychosexual fears and pathologies. Black men are imagined as predators who must be controlled, if not eliminated with extreme prejudice.

Full article: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predator-movies-reinforce-anti-black-racism-127088