Black Youth in Film: Racialized Anxieties About Black Urban Students in Lean on Me

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Eleven
  In Roundtable Session: Critically Analyzing Media Texts and Discourses (Table 11)

Abstract

Abstract. The U.S. schooling system as a hegemonic institution is a site for maintaining “an inherently inequitable and unjust organization of production and political power” (Carnoy, 1974, p. 3). The cultural industry is another space that uses “authentic” visual portrayals of Black youth in the inner-city school environment to craft narratives based on the racial anxieties projected onto Black youth (Fleetwood, 2005). This paper explores the discursive relationship between the material world and the filmic world using Michael Schiffer’s blockbuster hit Lean on Me (1989). Specifically, my work seeks to answer the following: how does white transgression in the form of state deprivation of educational resources become repositioned as innate deficiencies in Black youth?

Author

• Akua Nkansah-Amankra, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author