“They should have called Katrina ‘Gone with the Wind’”: Charles Burnett’s Quiet As Kept and the Neoliberal Racial State

Hurricane Katrina prompted numerous documentaries, most notably Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), that explore the malfeasance and atrocities committed by law enforcement and federal, state, and local governments before, during, and after the storm. However, as insightful as Lee’s and others’ films are it is the short film by black independent director Charles Burnett, entitled Quiet As Kept (2007), that offers the most critical commentary in the aftermath of the storm. Burnett’s short perceptively examines the complex dynamics of race and the neoliberal state revealed by the storm, while insisting upon the intersection of neoliberalism’s cultural aesthetics and political economy.[1]

Quiet As Kept has just three characters (The Father, The Mother, and The Son), and consists of hardly more than a single scene. The action’s minimal editing and straightforward direction invites spectators to focus on the dialogue between the characters. The simple plot centers around a black family exiled from their home by Hurricane Katrina. Living in temporary housing and subsisting off Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) checks, the trio discusses politics, culture, and the storm while The Father attempts to repair the motor of his car so he and his family can go out for dinner and a movie. He ultimately cannot fix the car—there is not enough FEMA money left for a new oil filter after buying groceries—and the family ends up stuck in their temporary home. The family’s conversation illuminates the manner in which the neoliberal racial state has rendered it, and communities of color more generally, immobile. Furthermore, the second part of the family’s conversation, in which they discuss Hollywood and representations of blackness within the culture industry’s history, reveals how the articulation of the racial project of neoliberalism is accomplished largely at the level of representation. In response, Burnett’s Quiet As Kept points to a politics of black independent cinema oriented to address the needs of black communities immobilized by neoliberalism.

Scholarship on neoliberalism typically frames neoliberalism as a political project framed by an economic philosophy.[2] Recent work has begun to explore the oppression of people of color, African Americans in particular.[3] Yet, what remains under examined is the cultural aesthetics of neoliberalism and its development through popular culture. Neoliberalism’s aesthetics and racial politics, and the ability of black independent cinema—Burnett’s work, in particular—to contest its antidemocratic and anti-black politics, are at the forefront of my concerns here.

The notion of mobility/immobility is central to this article. Ultimately, I argue we should view neoliberalism as a racial project through the binary of mobility/ immobility. That is, the neoliberal racial state operates, primarily, by mobilizing capital and wealth upward, and immobilizing poor communities of color. And while racial inequality is a hallmark of American history that long precedes the emergence of the neoliberal state, the unique forms it has taken since the 1970s are the product of social and economic policy specific to the neoliberal political project.

That Burnett’s work proved so perceptive, despite its length, is unsurprising. The filmmaker was part of the acclaimed “LA Rebellion,” a collection of UCLA-trained black independent filmmakers that included Haile Gerima and Julie Dash who came up in the 1970s and were, as Burnett put it, “concern[ed] about the images that were perpetuated by Hollywood movies, the stereotypes from Birth of a Nation on, and then vaudeville going back even further.” Members of the LA Rebellion sought to make films that “corrected” Hollywood representations of blackness and spoke to the needs of the black communities in which they lived.[4] Beginning with Killer of Sheep (1977), a film Burnett once described as “totally anti-Hollywood,” Burnett’s films offer, according to one scholar, “rich characterizations, morally and emotionally complex narratives, and intricately observed tales of African American life.”[5] Burnett’s oeuvre explores “ordinary” black lives and the noxious effects of white supremacy on them, often without any white characters.

The “Neo” in “Neoliberalism”

Neoliberalism is a term that is overused and under-theorized. It is commonly thrown around in criticisms of capitalism in the period since the dismantling of the Keynesian Welfare State in the 1970s. It is therefore necessary to clarify the term. The “neoliberal state” emerged in the early 1970s as embedded liberalism seemed inadequate to deal with the stagflating U.S. and British economies. The United States responded by deindustrializing its economy and deregulating its financial markets. Labor power was curbed and a largely service-based economy in the nation’s Sunbelt (built, it is important to note, upon massive state largesse) replaced the predominantly blue-collar Northeast. In addition, federal and state governments made massive cuts to social safety net programs like welfare.

David Harvey defines neoliberalism as a “theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade.”[6] Neoliberalism, in theory, posits maximizing economic efficiency by expanding, wherever possible, the influence of economic markets in order to reduce the wasteful inefficiency of the public sector. Stuart Hall explains, “neo-liberalism is grounded in the idea of the ‘free, possessive individual.’ It sees the state as tyrannical and oppressive. The state must never govern society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their property, regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-given right to make profits and amass personal wealth.”[7] While scholars like Harvey and Jamie Peck define neoliberalism as a political project aimed at the restoration of class power, I argue that neoliberalism is a racial project accomplished through the repurposing, rather than the elimination of, the state.[8]

Yet, many scholars lament the overuse of the term and the inability to distinguish the neoliberal logic of capitalism from capitalist ideology itself. Loic Wacquant, Jamie Peck, and others have asked: What is “neo” about neoliberalism? For Carolyn Hardin, the term often has no meaningful distinction from classical liberalism in much of its use. Instead, she argues that the “neo” in neoliberalism relates primarily to the supremacy of the corporation, whose importance, through, for example, Supreme Court decisions like 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, now supersedes that of the individual. Hardin contends, “It seems that the epistemological project of neoliberalism refigures society as an economic system of corporations. Individuals are refigured as corporations or entrepreneurs and corporations are treated as individuals.” Similarly, Colin Crouch argues that neoliberalism is characterized not by free market, but by the omnipotence of the corporation. Most recently, Wendy Brown distinguishes neoliberal reason through its conversion of “the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.”[9] The conduct of the business firm therefore becomes identical to that of the state and the individual. All other government responsibilities are secondary to economic growth. Consider Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address; Brown notes that while the president covered a multitude of topics that seemingly have little to do with the U.S. economy—expanding Medicare, eliminating sex discrimination, and education reform—each was advocated through its economic benefit. Creating classes in K–12 education that focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, for example, will better develop “the skills today’s employers are looking for.” Immigration reform will attract “entrepreneurs” and “grow our economy.” Economic growth would even cure domestic violence, offering battered spouses financial independence from their abusers, argued the president.[10]

Criticisms of neoliberalism focus primarily on its erosion of democracy and its manufacturing of unprecedented wealth inequality. Henry A. Giroux writes, “Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public goods, and non-commodified values.”[11] “Neoliberal ideology,” Giroux elaborates, “on the one hand, pushes for the privatization of all noncommodified public spheres and the upward distribution of wealth. On the other hand, it supports policies that increasingly militarize facets of public space in order to secure the privileges and benefits of the corporate elite and ultra-rich.”[12] Harvey, ultimately, summarizes neoliberalism as a system of “accumulation by dispossession,” which aims to privatize and commodify public goods, create markets where there previously were not, and task the state with the upward redistribution of wealth.[13]

In practice, the neoliberal state rarely comports with its espoused anti-statist freemarket fundamentalism. As Peck argues, “capturing and transforming the state was always a fundamental neoliberal objective.… Notwithstanding its trademark antistatist rhetoric, neoliberalism was always concerned—at its philosophical, political, and practical core—with the challenge of first seizing and then retasking the state.”[14] Neoliberalism, in other words and “in its various guises, has always been about the capture and reuse of the state, in the interests of shaping a pro-corporate, freer trading ‘market order…’”[15]

The Neoliberal Racial State

In the case of the United States, that reorganization of the state under neoliberalism has meant, as Wacquant explains,

“Small government’’ in the economic register thus begets “big government” on the twofold front of workfare and criminal justice. Between 1982 and 2001, the United States increased its public expenditures for police, criminal courts, and corrections by 364% (from $36 to $167 billion, or 165% in constant dollars of 2000) and added nearly 1 million justice staff. In 1996, when “welfare reform” replaced the right to public aid by the obligation to accept insecure employment as a condition of support, the budget for corrections exceeded the overall sums allocated to AFDC and food stamps, the country’s two main assistance programs.[16]

The attack on welfare and the explosion of prisons in the United States reveals the manner in which the neoliberal state is not merely concerned, as many contend, with the restoration of class power, but as a political project neoliberalism is equally if not primarily interested in white supremacy.[17] It is more accurate, therefore, to think in terms of the neoliberal racial state. While this characterization does not, on the one hand, contradict the understanding of neoliberalism as a political project, it marks an important distinction in highlighting white supremacy as central to the logic of neoliberalism. While neoliberal policies have decimated labor power and eroded social safety net programs that plenty of poor and working-class whites rely upon, those ends were accomplished through framing government spending not simply as ineffective, but as benefitting undeserving lazy African Americans. Consider cuts to welfare, for example. Certainly those reductions in state services hurt a significant number of whites who relied on those entitlements. However, mobilizing support to pursue punitive cuts was won through framing the recipients of those entitlements as, in the case of Ronald Reagan, lazy, Cadillac-driving black women. The neoliberal racial state, then, allows us to understand the ways in which larger class oppression is actualized through antiblack racism.

Moreover, the draconian cuts to welfare spending coupled with the hyper-incarceration of poor blacks beginning in the 1970s illustrate the historical specificity of the neoliberal racial state. As Waquant demonstrates, until the middle of the 19th century, the oppression of African Americans was accomplished largely through their enslavement. From the hundred years between abolition and the end of the civil rights era, the racial terrorism of Jim Crow in the South and the ghettoization of the “Fordist Metropolis” in the North subordinated blacks.[18] The rise of the neoliberal racial state brought with it punitive cuts to welfare programs which led to “decoupling crime from punishment so as to establish that the irruption of the penal state…[as] a response not to criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the precarisation of wage labour and to the ethnic anxiety generated by the destabilization of established hierarchies.”[19]

It is important to note that the rise of the neoliberal racial state depended upon the racial project of colorblindness. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, “Neoliberalism was at its core a racial project as much as a capital accumulation project. Its central racial component was colorblind racial ideology.”[20] Colorblindness provides the racial logic of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism’s rise in the United States was built upon a foundation of anti-government sentiment that had increasingly solidified among Americans as the seventies progressed. The primary contributors to this ethos were, on the one hand, the stagflated economy of the 1970s that classical Keynesianism seemed incapable of curing. Perhaps more important, however, was a growing animus toward federal and state governments as a result of legal and social battles over civil rights programs—affirmative action and court-ordered busing, in particular. It is no coincidence, in other words, that a significant portion of the American public became sympathetic to neoliberalism’s small government ideology at precisely the moment when many of them, whites in particular, felt the government was doing too much to enforce black civil rights. Colorblind discourse provided the rhetorical ammunition for opponents of black civil rights. It allowed whites the opportunity to both oppose busing and affirmative action while aligning themselves with the legacy and language of the civil rights movement. They were not racists, so the logic went, they merely were supporting Martin Luther King’s dream of a society in which people were judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Yet, colorblindness provides more than a politically correct discourse to oppose racial equality. By prohibiting considerations of race in addressing racial inequality it aims to eliminate the government from racial matters altogether. In its place, as with neoliberalism’s prescription for economic policy, colorblindness offers white supremacy through race-neutral market logic as the solution to government intervention. As Milton Friedman insists in Capitalism and Freedom, the market supposedly punishes discrimination because the bigot who refuses to work alongside or sell or buy his goods to African Americans, limits his or her choice and therefore depresses his wages or artificially inflates the price he must pay for goods.[21] For Friedman, then, the free-market is a colorblind arbiter of equality. Thomas Sowell is even more adamant regarding the markets ability to eliminate discrimination. According to Sowell, discriminatory actions depend exclusively on the “costs of doing so. Where those costs are very high,” Sowell argues, “even very prejudiced or biased people may engage in little or no discrimination.”[22] In reality, neoliberal policies like those advocated by Friedman and Sowell have further impoverished black communities and by reframing the state as the protector of the market rather than of civil rights, have undermined racial justice. Take the 2008 financial crisis, for example. Decades of deregulation begat rampant recklessly high-risk investing by the financial industry which enabled predatory financial instruments like sub-prime mortgages to flourish. African Americans, already on the short end of rising wealth inequality, were far more likely to find themselves, or be deliberately driven into on the basis of race, in the case of Wells Fargo, the adjustable rate mortgages and other sub-prime loans at the center of the housing bubble. The colorblind market that neoliberal economists like Friedman and Sowell defend as, in theory, an arbiter of racial justice has in practice targeted those the market deems most vulnerable—poor communities of color—while avoiding race-conscious rhetoric.

Colorblindness is, in other words, the racial ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, in the American context, is just as much a racial project as it is an economic one. Its discourse offered free-market colorblind “solutions” to the civil rights battles of the seventies just as it provided economic “solutions” to a sluggish economy. Neoliberalism is therefore a racial and project by which the upward mobilization of wealth and the immobilization of blacks at society’s bottom is secured through a discourse of “free market fundamentalism.” This belies the actual practice of what Jamie Peck describes as the “market as parasite,” as opposed to the “market as predator.” According to Peck, “Neoliberalism not only has, but must, parasitically coexist with (or off) other state forms and social formations…”[23] In highlighting the falsity of the state versus market dichotomy, Peck clarifies neoliberalism’s goal—not to eliminate the state, but to determine the uses to which the market puts the state and to what degree the state decides what constitutes a market. For example, in January 2013 both Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the nation’s two largest for-profit private prisons corporations, began converting from traditional class-C Corporations to Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in order to slash their effective tax rate to nearly zero.[24] What organization facilitated this transition? The Internal Revenue Service (IRS). CCA and the GEO Group had no intention to abolish the state, in this case the IRS (i.e., “market as predator”), in their pursuit of larger profits. Instead, the two corporations used the state to maximize revenue (i.e., “market as parasite”).[25]

In New Orleans, colorblind neoliberalism meant, as the Independent Levee Investigation Team concluded, that the levees at the 17th Street and London Avenue Canal were unable to hold because in their construction “safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs.”[26] As Adolph Reed explains, the failure of the levees “was largely the result of federal underfunding, partly the result of the Army Corps of Engineers’ skimping, partly state and local officials’ temporizing and lack of government oversight or, in neoliberal parlance, cutting government red tape.”[27] A year after the storm, basic city services barely existed, less than half the bus routes were in service, and less than half the schools in Orleans Parish had been reopened. Within a decade after the storm, the conversion of the entire public school system to charters was complete. The seizing of New Orleans by the private sector in the wake of the storm, as evidenced by the surge in charter schools and at the encouragement of government officials including New Orleans’s Mayor Ray Nagin, exemplifies neoliberalism’s “shock doctrine.”[28] As Reed surmises, “Demonizing government to cut public spending and regulation, plundering the public treasury through privatization and rationalizing both through the myth of magical market efficiency all underlie what happened to New Orleans. The storm exposed the consequences of neoliberalism’s lies and mystifications, in a single locale and all at once.”[29] The effects on the political climate of New Orleans would continue to punish the city’s black population long after the waters subsided. Hurricane Katrina proved the “nadir” of black politics, in Michael C. Dawson’s view. By exiling much of the city’s black population, “the hurricane destabilized the racial order in New Orleans” and “provided an opportunity for a more oppressive regime to be put in place, for black political power to be dismantled, and for the black counterpublic to be silenced.”[30]

Quiet As Kept (2007)

Burnett’s film deals with a fictional family victimized by the catastrophe in New Orleans wrought by neoliberalism. The short begins with a black screen and the voice of a teenager, The Son (Daniel Curtis Lee), explaining his father’s love of the word “ass,” which, to his mother’s umbrage, he uses both to comment on women of a certain size—“so and so and her big ass”—and to emphasize financial hardship—“his little ass check to buy groceries to put in his big ass ice box.” The action of the film opens with a shot of the driveway outside a modest ground floor apartment from outside the driver-side door of a car as The Father, Ellis, works under the hood and The Son watches from the front steps. After the prologue, The Father and the action move inside to the kitchen, where The Father asks The Mother for the change from food shopping to buy a new oil filter. “Change, what change?” replies The Mother, unloading groceries, before handing The Father the receipt. After taking inventory of the modest food items—a pound of sugar, a bottle of neon-red juice, a jar of peanut butter, Hamburger Helper, a cup of instant ramen, a loaf of bread, and some canned goods—the father wonders how one hundred dollars could buy so little food. “That little-ass FEMA check sure don’t go very far,” he complains.

The rest of the film takes place back in the driveway as The Father returns to his car and The Mother joins her son and husband outside. After learning that the family cannot go to the movies because of the cost of food, The Son asks if he can take the bus to the mall. He cannot, his parents explain, because of safety concerns in their neighborhood—“You better take it serious [sic] about what they say about us being an endangered species. That’s true stuff!” his father explains. The Mother then turns to the topic of Katrina, which has “showed [her] something about this country.” “People of color and poor folk, we better have a plan B,” she continues, “They should have called Katrina, ‘Gone with the Wind.’” For the Mother, the storm revealed that New Orleans’s white ruling class did not want people of color, or poor whites, in New Orleans and had no interest in them returning, either.

Charles Burnett’s first, and most noted film, Killer of Sheep (1978), also uses the trope of a broken-down family car to serve as a metaphor for the immobility of black families. The neo-realist aesthetic Burnett achieves in Killer of Sheep shows the landscape of a black community stranded in a desolate landscape blighted by federally subsidized freeway construction, white flight, and deindustrialization in the early stages of the neoliberal revolution. The soundtrack, which includes Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” and Paul Robeson’s “The House I Live In,” accentuates the juxtaposition of beauty and struggle Burnett holds in tension throughout the film. Killer of Sheep centers around Stan, a black slaughterhouse worker determined to stave off the debilitating numbness of life and work in the blighted Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Stan’s children and their friends throw rocks at each other in a dirt field for amusement. Stan’s wife struggles to keep Stan interested in her physically and emotionally. Only brief moments of pleasure—the warmth of a freshly poured cup of coffee against his cheek or the embrace of his daughter, for example—interrupt Stan’s joyless existence. When he is not working on the slaughterhouse floor, Stan spends much of the movie, like Ellis, trying to repair a car so he can take his family away from the desolate landscape of deindustrialized Watts. Eventually, Stan gets the car running, gathers his family and friends, only to find himself broken down again by a flat tire shortly after leaving.

The broken-down family cars in both films, released nearly four decades apart, provide a central feature of Burnett’s aesthetics that offer a compelling metaphor for the immobilization of black lives in the neoliberal era. The use of the car and the juxtaposition of the inability to repair it and the opportunity its repair offers, distills Burnett’s criticism of the neoliberal racial state throughout his oeuvre into a single trope. Historian Daniel Widener similarly asserts that Killer of Sheep characterizes the black community of Watts “by the inability to escape.”[31] With Quiet As Kept, Burnett updates his view on black immobility, pointing to the continuity between the black population of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 and the black community of Watts in the late 1970s. These two cinematic representations pull from the bookends of the neoliberal era, from its onset in the 1970s to the present. The juxtaposition of the two films highlights the maturation of neoliberalism. Killer of Sheep depicts the blight of a black community in the early years of the neoliberal era. Quiet As Kept reveals the immobilization of an entire black city at the hands of a mature neoliberal state the product not simply by the residue of the dismantling of the welfare state but also of the upward mobilization of capital through the privatization of the state in the decades since Killer of Sheep. In this way, Burnett represents the vanguard of filmmakers exploring the intersections of neoliberalism and antiblackness.

Let’s Go See a “Black” Movie

After his mother’s remarks about the abandonment of people of color by the state, The Son begs his parents to allow him to go to the movies. Besides being too expensive, “They ain’t no good no more,” his dad replies. “I want to see Star Wars,” The Son responds, before his father answers that there are no black people in the film. Instead, The Father wants his son to see “classics” like The Mack and Superfly that have “plenty of black folks in there.” This begins an argument between The Mother and The Father over what constitutes a “black movie.” “Something to make [black kids] proud,” The Mother insists, like The Cosby Show. “That’s like de-caffeinated coffee,” jokes dad. “Good” black television for The Father are shows like Beulah and Amos n’ Andy. There were a multitude of all-black movies and television shows for a young Ellis to watch growing up in the South, and African Americans could go to the theater and watch them from the segregated balcony for black movie patrons called the “crow’s nest,” “whole lotta fun if you can get over the lynchings,” The Father insists.

The Father’s remark regarding the constant threat of physical violence Southern blacks faced during Jim Crow dovetails with the psychological violence blacks experience through the representations of their bodies on the Hollywood screen. Taken together, the representations of blackness listed by The Father and The Mother exemplify the wide range of dehumanizing images of African Americans throughout Hollywood history. Ellis begins with Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s—The Mack and Superfly. As Burnett himself has commented, alluding to his time in film school, “In the sixties we were all influenced by the idea that either you’re part of the problem, or you’re part of the solution. And to us it was quite obvious that exploitation films were part of the problem.”[32] As cultural theorist Cedric Robinson argues, Blaxploitation amounted to a “degraded cinema,” one that “in lieu of a deliberate interrogation of the political and moral dilemmas which attended the failures of an integrationist activism…trivialised [sic] the troubled activists of the [Black Power] movement into the now familiar male counter-revolutionary creatures.”[33]

The Mother, in response, cites The Cosby Show as an example of “good” black representations. While the “positive” images Cosby offers serve as a counterpoint to the “negative” ones of Blaxploitation, they ultimately fail to sufficiently critique white supremacy. As Michele Wallace argues, among many problems, the positive/ negative approach to cultural criticism “means that the goal of cultural production becomes simply to reverse already existing assumptions” of blackness.[34] This is not only an inadequate black cultural politics, in Wallace’s view, “it also ties AfroAmerican cultural production to racist ideology in a way that makes the failure to alter it inevitable.”[35] Henry Louis Gates echoes Wallace’s point. Writing in 1989 as the show aired, Gates explained, “As the dominant representation of blacks on TV, [Cosby] suggests that blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgment of the severely constricted life opportunities that most black people face.”[36]

Later in the conversation, The Father offers Beulah and Amos ‘n Andy as examples of “good” black television. Yet, as Herman Gray writes, “In the early 1950s, programs such as Amos ‘n’ Andy, Beulah, The Jack Benny Show, and Life with Father presented blacks in stereotypical and subservient roles whose origins lay in eighteenth and nineteenth-century popular forms.”[37] The entirety of the representations of blackness The Father offers then, are “degraded” images that represented African Americans as intellectually, culturally, and physically inferior in order to justify their de jure and de facto discrimination. Here Burnett offers a tragic look at the consumption of popular visual culture for African Americans. The argument between The Father and The Mother points, on the one hand, to the range of ideas of what representations of African Americans “should” look like. The Father’s preference of Blaxploitation suggests he wants more images of black masculine agency, while his fondness of Amos ‘n’ Andy, combined with his critique of Star Wars, indicates a desire simply to see African Americans on screen. The Mother, on the other hand, in offering The Cosby Show, indicates the central role of popular culture in shaping self-esteem, especially in children. Her admiration of The Cosby Show aligns with the politics of respectability. The show’s representations of a highly educated, socio economically advantaged, loving black family offers a source of “pride” for young black kids, as opposed to “inappropriate” Blaxploitation films.

Yet, as Burnett himself attests, none of the representations of blackness debated in this film, or in Hollywood film or television period, are adequate. Hollywood has proven itself incapable of revealing the nature of white supremacy and offering a path of black liberation from the bonds of neoliberalism. The conversation between The Mother and The Father highlights both the manner in which Hollywood has played a fundamental role in the devaluing of black life and the need for an alternative, in form, content, and image. As Burnett reveals in the second half of the couple’s conversation, black independent cinema can and must fill the void of Hollywood.

Toward a Politics of Black Independent Film

Just as with the first half of their conversation, The Mother concludes her family’s debate about black images in Hollywood and the film itself with insightful clarity, this time about the relationship between popular culture and social reality. None of the films and television shows they list constitute a “black movie,” The Mother insists. “A black movie” she argues, “would have told us what was going to happen when Katrina hit. It would have told me where I stood in this country. Just like Emmett Till told my father where he stood….I’m serious, and I’m scared.” The inability of movies to speak to the experiences of African Americans, in New Orleans especially, speaks not only to the role of Hollywood in reproducing racial inequality under neoliberalism, but how, as Lester K. Spence argues, neoliberal “governmentality” is reproduced “within, and not simply on black communities.”[38] For Spence, the impact of neoliberalism on black politics has produced a climate in which many of the problems black communities face, “problems that have political roots and political solutions, have been taken out of the realm of the political because blacks increasingly present these problems as technical problems that should be treated with very specific practices rather than as political problems that call for political organization and mobilization.”[39] Under neoliberalism, political organization that highlights the interconnectedness of varying strands of racial oppression under white supremacy gives way to technical, market-based solutions to individual problems. In New Orleans that meant that, for example, the complex political problems facing New Orleans public schools had an economic solution— converting the entire Recovery School District into Charter schools. Here Burnett, through The Mother, re-inscribes racial politics into the issues facing the black residents of New Orleans, refusing to allow market logic to subsume that knowledge.

The Mother’s plea for a “black movie” demonstrates an implicit understanding of black oppression under the neoliberal racial state and its effects on black political organization. Yet, her appeal also emphasizes the possibility of film, of “black film,” to address this dynamic. A black movie, must, in the Mother’s view, do what no Hollywood representation of black people has done, or is capable of doing, in fact, because Hollywood comprises an integral component of the neoliberal racial state. Hollywood’s renderings of racial conflict in the neoliberal era have privileged questions of prejudice and obfuscated issues of racism. Moreover, Hollywood has consistently imagined and inserted colorblind white heroes at the center of black freedom struggles, and has even developed distinctly colorblind neoliberal genres. Colorblind neoliberalism in Hollywood is a project defined not simply by new content but by a uniquely colorblind aesthetics that has emerged in the past four decades. Most importantly, this project has played an integral role in the rise of neoliberalism as a racial and political project.[40]

For Burnett, black independent filmmakers must make films that reveal the machinations of white supremacy and of the immobility of black communities at the hands of neoliberalism, specifically, just as Emmett Till revealed the racial terror of Jim Crow. Quiet As Kept offers not only a call for a politics of black independent film in the neoliberal era, it provides a model. In this short film, Burnett articulates the dehumanizing representations of blacks in film and television, to the social, political, and economic oppression of African Americans in the neoliberal era, revealed by Hurricane Katrina. The Father asks his wife, “Why you gonna blame all our problems on a little ass movie?” Because, The Mother responds, their family and the rest of exiled black New Orleans cannot go home; they do not have the resources or the government support to do so. Moreover, by linking the dehumanizing representations of blackness to the lived experiences of black people, The Mother insists on holding Hollywood accountable. The Mother’s assessment of representation as constitutive of meaning and “formative” in “social and political life,” demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the relationship between culture and ideology outlined by cultural theorists like Stuart Hall.[41]

In pairing a conversation about the struggles a black family faces after Hurricane Katrina with one about the representations of African Americans on screen, Burnett links cultural production with material reality. Moreover, Burnett’s use of simple shots, minimal editing, and camera movement, enhances realism and eliminates distraction, thereby encouraging the viewer to focus on the testimony of this family. Their statements place the lived experiences of black New Orleanians on a screen that has proven a fundamental component of their oppression. In so doing, Burnett offers filmic images that contest the ideologies of blackness in Hollywood in hopes of producing racial justice for blacks in reality.

When asked directly about the role of black independent filmmakers in solving the problems facing black communities, Burnett responded,

Self-esteem has to be rebuilt. And very few films contain things that could inspire their audiences—such as real heroes—everyday people who accomplish something and make sacrifices, real people you can applaud, and not basketball players. Commercial movies are escapist. Not everybody has fantasies about judo-chopping someone to death. We need stories dealing with emotions, with real problems like growing up and coming to grips with who you are; movies that give you a sense of direction, an example.[42]

Here, Burnett situates black consciousness within the current conditions of neoliberalism. This is more than just a timeless call for “self-esteem.” Challenging the particularities of the neoliberal racial state and its immobilization and dehumanization of black communities is a prerequisite to the larger “rebuilding” of self-esteem. For Burnett, the “solutions” of the neoliberal racial state must address not just public and economic policy, but must also tackle the representations of blackness that have justified the racial inequality it has produced.

After ruling out a movie, and after Ellis warns of their forthcoming eviction because of his family’s inability to pay rent, The Mother suggests a family stroll around their temporary block. An absurd idea, The Father snaps back, “this is drive-by shooting country.” The film ends where it begins; the car is still broken, The Son still bored, the family still stuck. All this family can do is wait; wait for a more racially just and democratic country, and wait for, in Burnett’s eyes, a politics of black independent film that can help get them get moving. Neoliberalism has wreaked havoc around the globe. In the United States that has taken the form of the consolidation of class power, the evisceration of labor power, rapidly rising wealth inequality, and the subsuming of democracy and social justice by free market logic. Yet, viewing neoliberalism strictly through the lens of class obscures the deliberate ways it targets and preys upon poor black communities. In a post–civil rights era that precludes race-consciousness, both in the production and alleviation of racial equality, the colorblind logic of the free market has proved incredibly effective at impoverishing, criminalizing, and immobilizing black communities. Therefore, any thorough critiques of neoliberalism must attend to the centrality of race within it. Colorblind neoliberalism has furthermore relied on the long history of devaluing black life in popular culture, Hollywood in particular, to win consent, and Hollywood movies are a key site in which colorblind neoliberalism is shaped and reinforced. Criticism of neoliberalism must also take seriously the cultural aesthetics that inform, reproduce, and disseminate its logic. Insisting upon the framework of the neoliberal racial state and placing cultural concerns at the forefront of analysis better equips us to continue to explore neoliberal ideology and seek more just solutions to its immobilization of black communities.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Christopher Petrella for his help conceiving and editing this article. In particular, Petrella’s insights on neoliberalism were integral to framing that portion of this article.