In Memory of John Singleton on His Birthday

Let's reflect on the impact of the late 'Boyz N the Hood' director's work

January 6th is writer-director John Singleton’s 56th birthday, or it would’ve been had he not tragically died far too young four years ago. I want to use this moment to share some thoughts about the impact of his work on me and others.

Singleton’s debut film BOYZ N THE HOOD was released in 1991, but I didn’t see it until early ninety-two after it landed on VHS. I was in high school at the time, only fifteen years old, and I think it would be fair to say all 112 minutes of it blew up my consciousness with something like nuclear force.

The film itself is raw and revelatory and so brilliant Singleton was nominated for both Best Screenplay and Best Director at the Academy Awards. It was also significant — at least for me — because it was the first time this Michigan-born white boy had seen a film about Black people. Not starring Black people (plenty of examples of this). Not featuring Black leads who struggle with racism, or exist to service white people’s stories, or are there to make white people feel better about their own racism (such as GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, GLORY, or DRIVING MISS DAISY).

No, I’m talking about a film about Black people and only Black people. About their experiences, their community, their everything. And, most importantly, told by them.

It’s worth noting it would be a few more years before I fully understood the systemic U.S. studio and network racism that had ensured I and tens of millions of others had been kept so ignorant for decades and, for that same stretch of time, had prevented Black Americans — or, really, any marginalized demographic — from seeing themselves represented wholly on screen. It would be another decade and a half before I broke into the film/TV business and witnessed it firsthand.

BOYZ N THE HOOD. Source: Sony

For context, I had many Black friends at this point in my life — all temporary locals by virtue of nearby military housing — and we went to the movies together and we all camped out in front of the TV for double and triple features together. But it had never dawned on me that the films we were watching together — that they were watching — were not really made for them.

For them, I suddenly realized, Black cinema in America was almost only the cinema of the other — which is how all white people experienced BOYZ N THE HOOD when it landed like a Molotov cocktail in American culture.

It’s worth giving this Essence article a read: “'Boyz n the Hood' Still Holds A Cultural Impact 30 Years Later”.

I don’t want to take anything away from Spike Lee here. He immediately preceded Singleton, and his impact on American cinema and Black American culture is certainly far greater than Singleton’s. Charles Burnett, Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, etc; I am not suggesting Black directors did not exist, nor that they weren’t significant. But at fifteen years old, trapped in the borderlands between rural Michigan and Detroit (a city few wanted to visit in the eighties and nineties), dependent entirely on what AMC would screen in my area and what my local video shop carried, I still had no real idea of who Lee or Burnett or Van Peebles or Parks were.

Singleton fixed that, opened my eyes, opened my heart.

Without him, how many more years might I have only watched American films made exclusively from the white perspective?

How much more calcified might my limited Midwestern understanding of film as a white person’s artistic medium have become in my creative imagination?

Would I have made it to adulthood utterly disinterested in the wider American experience or convinced that experience wasn’t worth navigating and exploring or even worth acknowledging?

Might I have moved to Hollywood, as I ultimately did, and become that ubiquitous asshole who insisted for years there wasn’t really an audience for Black films, or films about women, or films about anyone other than white men (and still would be if the diversity movement hadn’t told him to shut up already)?

John Singleton made sure that didn’t happen to me. He was my gateway drug to a much, much wider and honest world.

Before I conclude, I want to acknowledge that I have almost entirely left out the impact Singleton had on Black Hollywood, Black American culture, and, most importantly, the Black Americans and Black people around the world he inspired as much by succeeding in a racist system by being so brilliant. That is not my story to tell, nor would I know how to tell it. But what I do know is, in my life’s experience, he is all the proof you need that the moving image can change lives…

…because he changed mine.

I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet him and tell him as much. I’m sure many other people feel that way, too.

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