Flashback Friday: The Black Male Identity in the Early 2000s (A Paper)

It's Flashback Friday!!! And today we are throwing it back to a little something different- a paper I wrote when I was fresh, new, and ready to dissect what feminism looked like for me. My path started with trying to understand more about black masculinity. What started as a joke...turned into a whole paper dissecting black men intertwined in one of my favorite things-Black films. This paper below was submitted to my Advanced Composition class during my college career at Claflin University, in 2017. Enjoy!

Black Masculinity in the film industry has been defined by drugs, capitalism, violence, and self-hatred. Black men became the primary focus of the film industry, beginning in the 1970s into the late 1990s, to sustain the industry and capitalize off the emotions of the black man after the civil rights movement. A content analysis of urban films in the early 2000s was conducted to compare if the portrayal of the black man differed from popular urban films in the 1990s. This study concludes that black men exhibit more signs of “maturation” and “success” in the early 2000s, as opposed to the 1990s. This shift pushed an ongoing, positive perspective and portrayal of “black masculinity” and what it means to be a black man in America today.

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