When the “Good One” is “Baaad”: Modern Racism in John Singleton's Shaft

John Singleton’s 2000 remake of the blaxploitation classic, Shaft (Gordon Parks 1971), provides an important touchstone for those tracking current tendencies in the representation of race in film. Aside from its coincidental appearance at the beginning of a new millennium, it is virtually unique among Black-themed movies in taking up racism as its explicit theme. Of course, racism is implicit in any film in which dramatic tensions intersect with racial difference, but the plot of Singleton’s Shaft concerns a progressive project— bringing to justice a virulent, upper-class ‘‘Race Killer.’’ In Parks’s Shaft, the ideological implications of Black–white conflict are submerged. Shaft’s white antagonists are mafiosi, whose villainy lies in their criminality rather than in any open racism (they have kidnapped the daughter of a Black crime kingpin). Singleton reframes the tale so that this iconic figure of Black masculinity takes up an actively anti-racist cause. In the process, Singleton deploys an extraordinarily comprehensive and acutely observed array of racial and ethnic types whom we meet in actual New York City locales intimately associated with racial and ethnic tension. It is hard to think of a film as closely and explicitly concerned with varieties of racial animosity, stereotype, and counter-stereotype as John Singleton’s Shaft.

The film remarkably combines a counter-stereotypical, anti-racist establishing scene with narrative strategies that go on to revive the entire range of ‘‘classic’’ racist denigrations, from ‘‘buck’’ to ‘‘buffoon. An array of racist characters is introduced, then systematically assimilated to the film’s core values. This paradoxical, multivalent, and self-contradictory treatment of racism merits attention as it points toward new patterns in the representation of race in film: patterns that articulate with the present occluded moment in the quest for racial justice and for deeper cinematic representations of minority life.

Anti-Racism

From its striking opening scene, Singleton’s Shaft demonstrates an extraordinary consciousness of the long-standing critiques of the media’s racial stereotyping and an apparent desire to formulate counter-stereotypical images. Shaft is called to investigate a murder at the Metronome, a fashionable club downtown on Manhattan’s East Side. There, a young Black man has been bludgeoned to death on the sidewalk. The victim’s girlfriend, a blonde white woman, tells Shaft what happened. Her recollection appears through deftly edited flashbacks, handled so that they seem to appear in Shaft’s mind’s eye. She and her boyfriend Trey, accompanied by another white couple, enter the club. Trey beams, relish- ing his participation in this hip, downtown scene. The panning camera shows us a room filled with sleek 20-somethings, all white. Wearing a tan leather jacket, his hair cut moderately close, Trey strikes no ‘‘cool pose,’’ sports no dress or jewelry that could code him as a ‘‘gangsta.’’ In all respects, he is cast and styled to appear anything but the threa- tening Black male. (Singleton casts Mekhai Phifer in the part, who often plays the role of the sympathetic, intelligent young Black man, as in 8 Mile and Spike Lee’s Clockers). Sitting in lounge seats nearby with four buddies is Walter Wade, son of a wealthy, politically connected New York real estate developer. Wade is played by Christian Bale, who was coming directly from his role as a psychotically murderous yuppie in American Psycho and carried corresponding coding as nihilistic and amoral. Wade bridles visibly at seeing a Black man with a blonde woman enter the club. He launches a sarcastic greeting in mocking imitation of African–American Vernacular English. This is no place for a Black man, he indicates; there is ‘‘no indo, no chronic, no forties—‘Aight?’’ He calls Trey, ‘‘Tupac,’’ and wonders aloud why ‘‘homey’’ doesn’t ‘‘holla back,’’ all this accompanied with street-style hand gestures.

Action-movie conventions here dictate a battle—and, more controversially—a racial confrontation rare in Hollywood, in which a sympathetic Black figure physically confronts a virulently racist white. And these expectations seem near fulfillment. A close-up shows Trey’s hands on the table, nervously fingering a steak knife and dinner napkin. That mere act triggers images of Black men with knives stretching back to the minstrel show figure of the razor-toting, urban dandy, ‘‘Zip Coon.’’ Trey rises and moves toward Wade, the knife and napkin in his hands, but Singleton subverts conventional expectations. Trey walks up to Wade, and, saying, ‘‘I think you dropped this,’’ releases the napkin over Wade’s head. He has cut eyeholes in it, decisively crowning Wade a Klansman, symbol of a presumably outmoded racism. The entire club, including Wade’s buddies, erupts in laughter. A Black man has decisively bested a racist, not with the stereotypical brute force, but with creativity, wit, and irony. Of course, this defeat motivates the murder. Trey leaves the club to calm down. Wade comes up behind him and clubs him, using, presumably with some symbolic resonance, the stanchion for the velvet rope dividing those allowed inside from those kept out.

Back in the movie’s present, Shaft’s jaw clenches in rage at this tale of recrudescent 21st-century racism. And the audience seems positioned at the edge of a novel anti-racist perspective. A super-sexual, Black ‘‘good guy’’ is pitted against an upper-class, white racist ‘‘bad guy.’’ Inflaming this opposition is the end of this opening sequence. Wade, who has been taken into custody, is being led to a police car. Trey, still barely alive, is wheeled toward an ambulance, and falls into convulsions, legs drumming on the gurney. Wade, in a final note that marks his racism as utterly despicable, quips, ‘‘Homeboy’s got riddim,’’ whereupon Shaft punches him in the nose. It is hard to think of another urban-action film that makes virulent racism so central a motivating force and so closely aligned with the film’s definition of villainy. Carried forward, the plot line and character values of this impressive opening scene could move toward the insurgent or politicized themes frequently sought by critics of racist representations in Black film and all too rare in Hollywood narrative Too rare indeed, for the significance of this film lies in the discursive strategies Singleton deploys precisely to displace any such opportunity, and in fact to actively protect racist discourse and reestablish and update conventional racist stereotyping

Anti-Racism?

Wade’s power and entitlement become evident when he jumps bail and mockingly phones Shaft from a ski slope in Switzerland. However, two years later, Shaft gets a tip that Wade is slipping back into the country and recaptures him. The recuperation of racism begins as Wade waits for arraignment in a holding cell, crowded with mostly Black and Latino men. Suddenly, a gigantic, hulking Black man, not cast for handsomeness, looms over him, the effect of his intimidating size bolstered by a worm’s eye camera angle.

‘‘Gimme ya shoes,’’ the man commands.

‘‘They wouldn’t fit you,’’ Wade responds scornfully, and indeed they wouldn’t, but, of course, that is not the point. The intruder’s bid for command over Wade’s property, is, by extension, a bid for command over his person. Particularly for male viewers, this threat would unerringly trigger fantasies of jailhouse anal rape. The audience is suddenly positioned to share a common nightmare with a character, who moments earlier, was isolated and rebuffed for racist villainy.

‘‘I only ask once,’’ the giant says, and with a backhanded sweep of his massive arm knocks Wade to the floor. But Wade collects himself into a crouch and throws an uppercut into his assailant’s groin, then when the man bends over in pain, knees him in the face, knocking him on his back. Now looming over his former assailant, he says, ‘‘You want my shoes? Here’s my shoes,’’ and the camera looks up at Wade’s shoe, coming down to stomp the Black man’s face.

No matter how despicable a racist Wade has been shown to be and no matter how deserving of retribution from the Black ‘‘side’’ of the film’s value structure, it is almost impossible not to identify with him in this turnabout, underdog victory over a stereotypical, nightmarish threat. The scene is remarkable in maneuvering the audience toward virtually inescapable identification with a despicable racist, whom we were guided to loath just a few minutes earlier. The film has swiftly carried us from sharing an enlightened critique of racial hatred to taking sadistic pleasure in the stomping of a Black man. Clearly, Singleton is pursuing no unitary, anti-racist theme.

Thanks to his family’s wealth and influence, Wade is freed on bail once again. Shaft is so disgusted that he quits the police force with a dramatic gesture, in which he throws his badge spinning through the air toward the head of the judge to stick in the wall like a martial arts throwing star. Now the plot moves forward through the search for Diane Palmieri, a waitress from the Metronome, who witnessed the murder. She has gone into hiding after Wade threatened her life. Wade wants to see her found and killed. Shaft wants to catch her so that she will testify against Wade. These simultaneous quests bring before us a panoramic array of white, African–American, and Latino characters, who are, again, situated within a realistic New York City cultural geography and who signify racial tensions in the contemporary city. I will proceed by discussing these dynamically opposed groups in turn, then examining the film’s rehabilitation of racism.

Racists

Singleton populates Shaft with a range of racist characters as well as characters who exude white privilege. Normative whiteness, associated with wealth and privilege, is on view when we meet Wade’s father and lawyer, planning his defense in his father’s richly appointed study. They make a perceptively realized range of ‘‘American’’ types, that yet hint at assimilated ethnic identities. In other words, Singleton declines to ‘‘unrace’’ his white characters. Wade’s father, Walter Wade Sr., a rich developer, is portrayed by an actor with jowly face and ulcerated red nose, quietly hinting at Irish-American roots (the judge who twice releases Wade on bail, played by veteran actor Pat Hinkle, has a similar physiognomy).

The homeliness of Wade’s father gains pointed meaning when his brunette, model-pretty trophy wife, easily 40 years his junior, enters the scene and perchs on his lap with a ‘‘hello, my darling!’’ It is all too clear: he has her because he has money and power. We are in the midst of the ‘‘White Power Structure,’’ the seat of institutional racism. Yet in its privilege the White Power Structure can injure its own. Wade is furious when he notices that his father has given the young wife a choker that belonged to his mother (and again we are invited to empathize with him: he is given a ‘‘psychology,’’ a humanizing touch, and an emotional disturbance that ‘‘anyone could understand’’ but one rarely granted to Black characters). Wade’s lawyer, on the other hand, is a picture of patrician Yankee elegance with smooth skin, a wavy silver coif, and handsomely tailored pinstripe suit. Both men are in cahoots with Wade to help him escape justice, but they make no open expressions of racism.

Other white characters, however, fill out a picture of pervasive racism. By making the key witness Diane Palmieri a cinematic Italian-American, Singleton deepens his social portraiture. Shaft’s search for Diane leads to her family home in Marine Park, an actual New York City neighborhood. The Palmieri house stands across the street from a marine salvage yard and an expanse of water with a view of the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Although it is a rather inside reference for New Yorkers, Singleton is making a knowing visual allusion to such other waters-edge New York neighborhoods as Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and Howard Beach, Queens: Italian-American neighborhoods notorious for brutal attacks on African–American interlopers

And, in fact, leaping to the home’s defense come Diane’s two brothers Frankie and Mikey. Thickly muscled men in tight T-shirts, they storm out of the house, one wielding a baseball bat, an instrument used in actual attacks on African Americans in these neighborhoods. The scene freezes, with Shaft and his partner Carmen Vasquez (Vanessa Williams) pointing their guns, each at a different threatening brother. The stand-off, featuring two people of color defending themselves against Italian-American residents of an outer-borough neighborhood, evoke the common news narratives of Italian-American racial hate crime visited upon Blacks. Although Diane herself displays no racism, her family’s geographical position carries clear racist associations, though nothing comes of them beyond the stand-off just described. The brothers and mother insist that Diane is not home. Shaft and Carmen leave.

Shaft’s supervising officer, who appears only in a couple of scenes, is also a racist, a first indication of institutional racism in the police department. Of course, although it is conventional in crime/detective films that the free-wheeling hero stands at odds with his bureaucratically bound superiors in the case of Shaft’s commander that tension is aggravated by racism and a hint of official corruption. Lt. Kearney (note the Irish- sounding last name), we learn, will soon be retiring to a house on Long Island. Shaft asks how he can afford such a place on a policeman’s salary. Kearney ducks the question and simply tells Shaft how eagerly he awaits retirement to his ‘‘restricted’’ community, sealed off from the likes of Shaft.

One of Shaft’s fellow police officers more precisely represents the institutionalized racism that has raised criticisms of police conduct in the Black community. He is a red-haired, white cop on Shaft’s team, who, with heavy appropriateness is named ‘‘Luger,’’ recalling the World War II German handgun. Thus Luger’s identity carries associations with both German and Irish nationalities. When we recall as well the ‘‘Irishness’’ of Wade’s father, Kearny’s name, along with the Italian-American Palmieri Brothers, it becomes evident that Singleton has declined to place these three in ‘‘unraced’’ whiteness. They carry specific national and ethnic identities associated with antiracist feeling.

When Luger calls a Black prisoner, ‘‘Cornbread,’’ Shaft protests, and the cop asks smartly, ‘‘your problem is what?’’

Shaft responds, ‘‘Nazis with badges.’’ ‘‘Oh, you got to lighten up, Shaft,’’ Luger says. ‘‘I talk like this all the time.’’ He suggests sarcastically that maybe he should take an ‘‘ethnic sensitivity workshop,’’ mocking any notion of institutional anti-racist initiatives.

Shaft: ‘‘Maybe, I should workshop my foot up your ass.’’

Luger: ‘‘How about you pick a color, black or blue.’’

Shaft: ‘‘How about I make you both.’’

Luger: ‘‘Anytime, anywhere.’’

Shaft: ‘‘Ain’t nothing between us but air and opportunity.’’

This crisp ominous dialogue marks yet another confrontation between a ‘‘good’’ Black man and a virulent racist, and, significantly, it results in nothing at all. The men are kept apart, and Luger leaves. Open conflict between Black heroes and white racists is not something that Singleton (and Hollywood narrative in general) can easily permit. But we then get an indication that Shaft is not quite a full-fledged anti-racist advocate himself. When the prisoner who Luger had originally insulted with the name, ‘‘Cornbread’’ compliments Shaft—‘‘I like the way you handled that, Brother’’—Shaft responds, ‘‘Shut the fuck up!’’ Shaft may be Luger’s enemy, but he is not this Black man’s ‘‘brother’’.

African Americans

Just as Trey bears none of the signifiers of the threatening Black male, so Singleton carefully calibrates the appearance of his girlfriend (whose function in the plot is really to characterize Trey) so as to delicately navigate around potentially inflamed reactions to this quintessence of ‘‘race mixing’’—Black Man With Blonde White Woman. Certainly, the young woman is made attractive, but she is distinctly not ‘‘hot.’’ She wears little makeup and a sensible brown cloth coat. Her requisite black cocktail dress bares only her arms. Together, their being and bearing communicates the message, ‘‘there is nothing threatening in an interracial couple like this. These are both just good people, drawn to each other.’’ And ‘‘good people’’ is what Trey represents. We learn later that he is an honor student at NYU, and, again, his character is generally crafted to deflect associations with stereotypes of Black masculinity. Given his style and education, he is perhaps the most distinctly middle-class character in the movie, a point that will prove significant later in this discussion.

Other African–American characters in the film are treated more negatively, and in fact conform to the two branches of overt racist figuration: the criminal and the clown. On the comic side, Shaft is provided with two sidekicks who are classic Black buffoons. Rasaan (played by rapper Busta Rhymes) and Leon are weak-minded, feckless, lazy, and, though both are strongly built men, useless in the fighting that is integral to the action genre. Shaft’s relationship with them has him playing the role of beneficent plantation owner, coddling incapable slaves. We meet Leon as he has been posted as a lookout in a car. He settles into the driver’s seat with a box of doughnuts and a carton of milk, from which he helps himself continually. He asks Shaft petulantly when the detective is going to get him admitted to the police academy. Shaft responds with a series of questions that outline his steady beneficence to this ‘‘coon’’ figure in modern dress.

Shaft: ‘‘Who lost your rap sheet for you?’’
Leon: ‘‘You did.’’
Shaft: ‘‘And who got you the tryout with the Jets?’’ Leon: ‘‘You did.’’
Shaft: ‘‘And who got you the gig at the club?’’ Leon: ‘‘You.’’
Shaft: ‘‘And who delivers ten times out of ten?’’ Leon: ‘‘You do.’’
Shaft: ‘‘So shut the fuck up!’’

Rasaan, proprietor of the ‘‘Island Hopping’’ car service, is Shaft’s driver. When we meet him he is ensconced with a nubile young Black woman in his colorful but messy apartment. Rasaan’s coon figuration carries slightly exotic overtones. Both he and the young woman sport the multicolor knit caps that hide the uncut hair of the Rastafarian. Only with great protest does he respond to Shaft’s request for help in apprehending Wade on his return to the U.S. When later Shaft, Diane Palmieri, and one of her brothers hide out in his place, the Italian-American brother, borrowing Black vernacular, terms the place, ‘‘nasty.’’ Shaft agrees, calling it a ‘‘biohazard,’’ and adds, ‘‘this is some repugnant shit.’’ Managing an orderly domestic establishment is beyond Rasaan, and Shaft and Diana’s brother are aligned in recognizing this.

Shaft provides for Rasaan too. In the film’s last scene, Shaft and his uncle (the original Shaft, played by Richard Roundtree) are leaving the police department to launch their new career, teamed as private detectives. Rasaan meets them, whiningly complaining that Shaft has ruined his life. After the car chase and gunplay of the adventure’s climax, he says, ‘‘I ain’t got no car, no business, can’t eat...,’’ plus his landlord wants to evict him. But not to worry—Shaft has bought him a spanking new limo, and Rasaan overflows with fawning effusiveness: ‘‘you always take care of me. I love you Shaft, baby.’’ The trio rides off into the New York City sunset, with Rasaan proclaiming that he wants to work in the detective agency too, but only with cases involving cheating spouses, the sort that involve taking incriminating photographs. ‘‘I just want to hold the camera, dog,’’ he says. Thus the film closes with one last chuckle over the buffoon’s fecklessness.

On the criminal side, we have already met one predator type in the hulking giant who confronts Wade in the holding cell. He is a ‘‘jailhouse predator,’’ the chief imagined horror of prison in the consciousness of white American males (a unique situation in which men feel the fear of sexual assault that women confront habitually). The second is Malik, head of a corner drug gang, whom Shaft encounters when a waitress friend of Diane Palmieri’s offers to give Shaft information if he will do her a favor. Her 12-year-old son, Tony, ‘‘a good boy,’’ has begun running errands for Malik, a local drug dealer. She fears Tony is being drawn into gang life and wants something done about it. Malik and his crew are just over there on the corner. As the camera takes them in, we can hear Malik proclaiming, ‘‘I want everybody on drugs.’’ Although he is a gang leader, Malik is played by a slender young man of perhaps 19—incongruously shorter than all the members of his gang. He wears a drug dealer’s urban flash—a red baseball cap perched sideways on his head and a leather and red fabric varsity jacket, all oversized. Despite being invested with a some- what ridiculous air, Malik’s associations recall the feared, young Black males of urban ‘‘wilding’’ sprees, who, like the character O-dog in the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society, are ‘‘young and black and [don’t] give a fuck.’’

Shaft moves up on him and immediately bashes his face with his pistol, meanwhile countering the rest of the gang by pointing the gun at them and ordering them down on the ground. A patrol car cruises by, and the driver takes in the scene and does nothing but give Shaft a nod of acknowledgment. Apparently, this is effective police work. Kneeling over Malik, Shaft instructs him that he is to always remember the name of John Shaft and is to no longer know who Tony is. He punctuates each point with blows. In abject terror, Malik’s bloodied mouth gapes and his eyes grow wide until we recognize the lineaments long banned from racial imagery. Shaft has performed a kind of alchemy of racial stereotyping; he has transformed a fearsome ‘‘predator’’ into a craven ‘‘coon.’’ Even more significant, though, is the equivalency the scene creates between Shaft and Wade, the presumably mortal enemies. Two Black savage types have appeared in the movie. The audience has been offered scenes in which each of them receives a ‘‘justified’’ savage beating, and the aggressors are the racist Wade and the supposedly anti-racist Shaft. However strong the animosity between Shaft and Wade, they share their superiority to these Black low-lives.

For all this apparent alignment with racist views of the Black underclass, Shaft also offers a militant Black separatist critique. This emerges through Shaft’s uncle, the original Shaft played by Richard Roundtree, who warns his nephew that Wade’s wealth and influence mean that he will never go to jail. In effect, he says, ‘‘the black man can get no justice in the white man’s court.’’ And Singleton essentially gives that view the last word in the plot’s development. As Wade is being brought to the courthouse, Shaft tells Trey’s mother that finally Wade will face justice. Trey’s mother says she is certain he will, but, it develops, she is certain because she is going to kill Wade herself, as she does. Although vigilantism is a frequent feature of the action-adventure genre it can cut two ways, here between Black separatist and right-wing views. The patrol car driver who cruises by as Shaft pistol whips Malik can give an approving nod because Shaft is meting out exactly the ‘‘gloves-off’’ justice demanded in right-wing tabloids and talk radio.

Racialized Latinity

In Singleton’s panoply of urban racial/ethnic types, Latino identity takes on central significance: it is used to deflect the ideologically dangerous opposition between a Black anti-racist hero and a white racist villain. The key figure in this maneuver is Peoples Hernandez, a colorful, eccentric, drug gang leader (played by the talented actor Jeffrey Wright). Peoples is a Dominican drug king-pin, heading a gang in Washington Heights, Manhattan around W. 181st Street (which, as another part of the films precise racial/ethnic geography, is in fact a Dominican neighborhood). Peoples boasts: ‘‘I point my finger on one-81 and three people die on Riverside Drive.’’

When Wade hires Peoples to hunt down Diane Palmieri, the racial dimensions of the ‘‘good guy/bad guy’’ binary shift. A figure ‘‘of color’’ becomes the active villain, set to confront Shaft in the film’s ‘‘showdown,’’ and spare the audience the presumably unbearable sight of a white racist villain meeting defeat at the hands of a Black hero. Correspondingly, Singleton’s particular construction of Latinity through the person of Peoples takes on considerable significance.

Two interconnected key elements of Peoples’s characterization are a pathological exaggeration of family closeness and symbolic diminutions of his masculinity, even though he is a dangerous killer. When we first meet him in his home (duly over-decorated with crystal chandeliers, artificial stained-glass windows, golden sconces, flocked wallpaper, and plastic-covered velvet couches), he is stroking the near-term pregnant belly of an attractive, dark-haired woman. His wife? His lover? It doesn’t matter; we never see her again. She functions solely to associate Peoples with fertility and family (although in another room of the apartment, three curvaceous young women process cocaine, clad only in underwear and face masks, we never see Peoples express erotic interest in any female character). Rather, when we next encounter Peoples, an infant is napping on his shoulder as he paces and talks baseball on the telephone. A baby towel protects his shirt from spit-up. Of course, by cinematic standards of masculinity this situation renders Peoples absurd (in Hollywood patriarchy generally, male parenting is inherently comical). Peoples under- goes another form of masculine diminution through his trademark weapon, an ice pick, filed down to about five inches in length, a clear symbol of phallic insufficiency.

Peoples’ intense devotion to family is not limited to his offspring. On his neck he wears a tattoo of a cross entwined by five serpents, signifying, he explains to Wade, ‘‘five brothers, one love.’’ Peoples’s gang is virtually identical with his family, three strapping men and his ‘‘hermanito,’’ a younger brother, Lucifer. Two other brothers are massive, both taller and heftier than Shaft, but their toughness is nothing but show. As Shaft turns to leave a coffee-shop meeting with Peoples, they rise menacingly around him. Shaft throws a feint at one of them, and the man ducks backward with a whimper. Shaft leaves, and Peoples asks contemptuously, ‘‘Puta, why you flinch?’’ The brothers may be big, but they are ‘‘bitches.’’

Morbid family closeness is further expressed in Peoples’s over-protection of his hermanito. When he and his gang are closing in on Shaft and Diane, he refuses to let Lucifer leave the car to join the pursuit. When a stray bullet penetrates his forehead killing him anyway, Peoples is totally and bizarrely unmanned. Where we might expect white-hot vengeance directed toward the killers, Peoples’s fury is given a curious masochistic twist. He strides toward Shaft and Rasaan, weeping and repeatedly shouting, ‘‘you killed my little brother! You best kill me, motherfucker,’’ as he stabs himself again again in the chest with his little ice pick.

This curious involvement in a family structured from babies and brothers (no parents, wives, girlfriends, or older children appear) represents what might be called ‘‘creative stereotyping.’’ Family closeness may be broadly associated with Mediterranean cultures but does not figure in the usual stereotypical Latino lexicon of bandito-spitfire-Latin Lover. We do encounter incestuous closeness in Scarface (1983), where Tony Montana (Al Pacino) displays an unhealthy fondness for his sister, but we also find it with a European-American character in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). The point is that Singleton uses minor prior hints to create a characterization that evades standard stereotype but is still dehumanizing.

Peoples is further invested with a certain pseudo-intellectualism—he flaunts his knowledge of terms like ‘‘habeas corpus’’ and expressions like ‘‘releasing the dogs of war.’ He is also a bit of a dandy, dressing in white top and pants, which, he boasts to Shaft, are sewn from ‘‘Egyptian cotton, motherfucker—220-thread. This is like half your whole shitty ass paycheck, okay?’’ Against this background, it is striking when in a particular scene Single- ton invests him with extraordinary coarseness. When the money that Wade was bringing to Peoples for Diane’s murder is stolen (more on this below), Wade is reduced to agreeing to deal drugs for Peoples among his elite downtown circles. As they are settling the arrange- ment, Peoples, without interrupting the conversation, moves into a toilet, leaving the door open. He lowers his pants and seats himself. Saying ‘‘keep in touch,’’ he tosses Wade a beeper—and we hear his stool plunk into the toilet water. This extraordinary grossness is inconsistent with Peoples’s larger character as drug lord, dandy, pseudo-intellectual, or even absurdly caring brother. But, as is frequently the case with deviations from common sense realism, inconsistency has significant ideological motives. With central facets of his behavior enmeshed in biological process—the birthing and tending of babies that spit up, bowel movements, infantilizing his brother—Peoples’s Latin ethnicity is so closely associated with organic process that it is in effect racialized. His character is made to seem the effusion of distorted biological essence. Thus Shaft’s ultimate victory over him is doubly distanced from providing a victory over a representative of racism. We are being treated to the extermination of a presumably deficient being.

The dehumanization of Latino identity in the film is further supported through the use of an unusual form of cross-racial ‘‘brownface’’ casting, in which two (Afro-) Latino roles are played by African–American actors— Jeffrey Wright as Peoples and the former Miss America, Vanessa Williams, as Shaft’s police partner, Carmen Vasquez Appointing African–American actors to play Latino parts is virtually unprecedented and under- standing the effect of this discursive tactic requires a moment of digression on ‘‘strategic essentialism’ and a consideration of the effect when actors ‘‘are’’—or are not— ethnically or racially the parts they play. If the audience believes that the actor ‘‘really’’ possesses the identity depicted, e.g., that Jeffrey Wright is Latino, the coherent signifier of actor/role carries a quality of ‘‘personal’’ or ‘‘human’’ depth that can counterbalance a script’s possible attempt at denigration. Contrariwise, casting an actor of a different racial or ethnic background consigns the depiction to a sense of being totally controlled, ‘‘bracketed,’’ or distanced. The control of the mode of representation imparts a degree of caricature, as if the media creator said, ‘‘I will tell you what you are.’’ The details of the script or performance might bring any number of qualities into the work, but deploying an actor of a different race undermines the audience’s sense of essence in the representation, usually with the broad effect of mockery (consider the inherently insulting effect of imitating another person to his face). Moreover, casting by ‘‘face,’’ whatever the race or ethnicity, forestalls the chance that the actor might in performance by skill or charisma burst the intended boundaries of the stereotypical representation. Ramirez-Berg points to a number of interesting instances in which such actors as Raul Julia, Gilbert Roland, and Lupe Velez find ways to defeat or exceed stereotypical limitations written into a given script Contrariwise, casting Jeffrey Wright as Latino drug lord places an implicit racial distance between his person and Latino identity. The resort to ‘‘brown face’’ casting ‘‘empties out’’ his character and contributes to our ability to regard him as ‘‘less than human.’’

Racism Recuperated

Key characters in the film who are openly racist or associated with racism, namely the Italian-American brothers Frankie and Mikey and Luger, the ‘‘Nazi with a badge’’ are ultimately drawn within the circle of the audience’s sympathies, coming over to ‘‘the good guy’s side.’’ Even Wade receives softened treatment. For the symbolically racist Italian- American brothers from Marine Park this is accomplished when, near the film’s climax, Shaft and Diane flee Peoples and his gang. The brothers in turn chase Shaft and Diane to their getaway car. Trying to wrest Diane away, Frankie himself is pulled into Shaft’s car as it speeds off. Frankie can now see that Peoples, not Shaft, is the true danger to his sister. Thus he effectively becomes Shaft’s ally (recall too that he and Shaft bond in their shared disgust at Rasaan’s housekeeping).

An even more impressive turnabout, dramatically underscoring the film’s ultimate inability to condemn racism, occurs when Wade, delivering $40,000 to Peoples to pay for the murder of Diane Palmieri, is waylaid by a pair of thieves, unrecognizable in black ski masks. They chase Wade, who ducks into an alley, where they overpower him and run off with the money. The thieves get into a car and remove their masks. One, of course, is Shaft, but who will the other be? In class screenings of the film, I pause here and ask that question. The most frequent suggestion is that it will be Rasaan, a not unreasonable thought since Busta Rhymes is a muscular fellow, but it neglects the effect of the stereotype that Rasaan carries. As a Coon figure, Rasaan is cowardly and useless in a fight. Another common suggestion is Shaft’s uncle, the original Shaft. There is some distinct appeal in this idea too. Teaming the two Shafts would create a kind of all-star duo of anti-racist Black masculinity. But, again, strengthening the image of Black anti-racist power is precisely what the film is avoiding. This limitation becomes crystal clear when we see who Shaft’s ally is: none other than Luger, the ‘‘Nazi with a badge.’’ The conversation between the two men concisely reveals the film–s paradoxical stance toward racism.

‘‘How did I sound?’’ Luger asks.

He had threatened Wade with the words, ‘‘give me that before I bust a cap in your dome.’’ Now he seeks Shaft’s approval for the comically incongruous picture of him imitating Black dialect.

‘‘How did I sound?’’ Luger asks.

‘‘Real Notorious P-I-G,’’ Shaft quips, alluding to rapper Notorious B-I-G, and suggesting how well Luger had fused the two roles of imitation Black and police white man (though he remains a P-I-G, as is Shaft, more or less).

‘‘How much did we get?’’ Shaft asks.

In mock complaint, Luger tells him not to be so impatient, adding a teasing, homoerotic quip, ‘‘You’re so controlling,’’ as if talking to a long-term intimate.

‘‘Anyway,’’ Luger continues, ‘‘it’s a one-time favor, okay?’’
Shaft: ‘‘I owe you one. You’re still a motherfucking cracker, you know that, right?’’ ‘‘Fuck you too, Cornbread,’’ Luger says, repeating the epithet that had earlier almost brought them to blows.
They high-five.
Without emotional or social logic the two men assert their continuing racial animosity, framed within a friendship that accommodates playful homoerotic overtones. The two strike a sort of bargain that paradoxically both institutionalizes and compromises their racial opposition. This lapse from ‘‘realism’’ is a clear indication of the film’s ideological pressure to maintain an implicit alliance with racism (even as it critiques it!). This pressure becomes blatant when, during the climactic gun battle with Peoples’s gang, Shaft gives the astonishing battle cry, ‘‘It’s Giuliani time!’’ This triumphant affirmation of official sanction for police brutality was, of course, originally attributed to the sadistic white police officer who sodomized Haitian Black man Abner Louima with a toilet plunger. Louima ultimately retracted the claim but Singleton resurrects it and puts it in the mouth of a Black hero who presumably represents indomitable, anti-racist spirit.

Wade is too irredeemably racist to be as fully rehabilitated as Frankie and Luger. But the film’s remarkable recuperation of racism finds a number of ways to invest him with more character than is typical of melodramatic villainy and also tempers the ‘‘come-uppance’’ that Hollywood logic requires the villain to face. We have already noted that he and Shaft achieve a kind of equivalency when they are each shown relishing the beating of a Black predator figure. Wade is further invested with a kind of personal integrity amid his racist animosity. When Peoples asks Wade to deal drugs for him it initially sounds as if the dealer wants Wade to introduce him personally into his social world. ‘‘Take me’ wit’you,’’ Peoples says, and he claims that he is essentially trapped in his neighborhood. When he goes downtown to make some legitimate society, his stomach ties in knots.

‘‘You mean like take you to Lutéce or the Harvard Club?’’ Wade asks scornfully.

Wade might be expected to act more accommodating, given that he is dependent on Peoples to eliminate Diane, but he is completely resolute in rejecting the idea of any social contact with him. He spits his answer back word by word: ‘‘No. Fucking. Way.’’ Here is a man who stands by his (elitist) principles. Peoples defuses the disagreement by flipping his meaning. Taking ‘‘him’’ actually means dealing his drugs downtown. Here again, Wade firmly declines this proposal until the theft of his money leaves him no choice. Also (as noted earlier) he is physically capable and brave. Besides his underdog victory over a much bigger Black assailant in the holding cell, when Shaft and Luger pursue him into an alley to take his money, he gamely puts up his fists to fight the two masked thieves until they overpower him. A racist Wade may be, contemptible from one point of view, but the film does not allow him to slip into the sharply polarized villainy of melodrama. The film functions as if market research had revealed sizable racist segments in the potential audience that must not be alienated.

Insulating Wade from vengeance at the hands of a Black hero brings the problem of how his ultimate punishment is to be meted out. Wade ‘‘gets his’’ as he comes up the courthouse steps to finally be tried. He cries out, ‘‘No’’ and puts his hands up protectively. We cut to a hand holding a small pistol and hear shots. Wade falls, and the shooter is revealed: Trey’s mother, solemnly holding the pistol and letting the police take her into custody (the crowd chants, ‘‘let her go, let her go’’).

Thus Wade technically receives capital punishment but his punishment has been extra-legal. He and the racism he represents do not face the condemnation of society at large. More to the point of action-movie emotional logic, Wade is ‘‘let off easy.’’ In having Wade’s punishment come at the hands of a woman, his defeat is situated out- side the patriarchal order. And the manner of his execution is tempered. He could, for example, have been shot between the eyes (many an action-movie villain has suffered worse), but Wade simply falls and expires. We are not allowed to revel in physical vengeance on him, but, that is not the point. Dominant racial ideology does not permit Singleton to show us a racist getting a violent ‘‘come-uppance’’ from another man, particularly not a Black man, even as Singleton’s own premises for the beginning of the movie raised that possibility

Modifying Modern Racism

In Shaft, Singleton brings to the contemporary cinematic discourse of race a subtle but significant variation on the trope of ‘‘modern racism.’’ In modern racism, an idealized minority figure wins audience acceptance as a ‘‘good one,’’ who stands as an exception to the general stigma carried by the minority group at large. Typical examples of the ‘‘good one’’ are Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, or the articulate and amiable minority group members of a TV news team This acceptance demonstrates that our just and equitable society has overcome unfortunate early episodes of racism. Now, clearly, any minority with talent and motivation can succeed. Any minority who has not succeeded, we can infer, must be lazy, ignorant, or irresponsible. The ‘‘beauty’’ of modern racism—its ‘‘modernity’’—lies in the way it holds conventional, overt racial condemnation discreetly sim- mering in the background. Nothing much need be said about the ‘‘other,’’ ‘‘bad ones’’; they are understood by implicit contrast with the idealized reference figure.

Singleton’s Shaft expands the modern racist paradigm in two respects. Previously, the reference figure won acceptance through a tightly maintained respectability. Poitier was an ‘‘ebony saint.’’ Cosby’s Huxtable family even earned criticism for closing its scope to the social ills that plagued African Americans in the ‘80s—AIDS, drug problems, homelessness, poverty. But Singleton’s Shaft is a tough, sexual Black man, steeped in the ways of the street. The ‘‘good one’’ is now ‘‘baaad’’—a hero who consciously and skillfully accomplishes his own ends, unintimidated by (white) authority.

There is, secondly, a shift in the depiction of the ‘‘other ones.’’ No longer are they held discreetly unseen but understood in the background. Now they become central to the ‘‘entertainment,’’ and Shaft plays beneficent plantation master to the comical Rasaan and Leon, beats Malik bloody, and defeats the bizarre Latino, Peoples. A despicably racist villain can even win our pleasure by stomping a Black predator figure.

Expanding the ‘‘good one’s’’ character might momentarily seem a transformative revision of traditional Hollywood roles for Black men. But Shaft’s identity still largely takes shape between the twin poles that constrain depictions of Black masculinity: libidinous- ness and violence. His anti-racism is permitted only in so far as it is balanced with reinvigorated overt racist stereotypes and recuperated racist characters. If we performed a thought experiment by imagining the film as a racist might view it, there is really nothing here to offend or confound, even if the hero is Black. Thus, if our endeavor is to ‘‘have black life admitted to the full range of human characterization, to eliminate the ‘race link- ing’ of vices and villainies. . .this reconfiguration of the racist/anti-racist polarity does not take us very far at all.

Conclusion

Singleton’s creation of a single paradoxical text fusing progressive counter-stereotyping with reactionary racism arguably reflects ironies and quandaries in the dominance of neo-liberalism. The ‘‘invisible wedge’’ between relatively mobile Black clerical and professional workers, on one hand, and the ‘‘structurally underemployed, underpaid, and unemployed in the inner cities,’’ on the parallels the distance between Trey, whose murder is treated as a racist abomination, and the film’s underclass criminals, who merit vicious beating by anti-racist and racist alike—all for the presumed pleasure of the movie’s audience.

If we can judge by Shaft, the pervasive dilemma that confronts attempts to critique racial injustice in public discussion emerges in media culture as well. Howard Winant points to a current condition of ‘‘abeyance’’ or ‘‘stasis’’ in the quest for racial equality. Claims for social and racial justice become just one ‘‘side’’ in a series of irresolvable polarities: Is the significance of race ‘‘declining’’ or increasing? Is racial equality ‘‘colorblind’’ or color-conscious? Do attempts to institutionalize racial justice represent affirmative action or ‘‘reverse discrimination’’ In the same vein, Lee Baker points to the political and discursive stalemate of the ‘‘color-blind bind,’’ a racial regime that ‘‘idealizes black celebrities in sports, politics, and popular culture while devastating the regular black citizen.’ In Shaft, we have seen that symbolic ‘‘devastation’’ of the ‘‘regular Black citizen’’ can accompany the idealization of a popular culture icon like Shaft. It becomes difficult to know how to situate critique. Manning Marable illustrates the dilemma when he reflects on the ironies of the NAACP making an award to Condoleezza Rice. What does it mean to celebrate the personal achievements of a Black person who ‘‘works overtime to reverse the historic gains of the Black Freedom Movement, simply because she shares the color of our skin?’

Again, Shaft propounds its own paradoxes of this sort. Shaft objects when Luger calls a Black prisoner, ‘‘Cornbread,’’ but angrily rejects the prisoner calling him ‘‘brother.’’ Shaft seems primed to battle this racist, but later teams up with him, their racial opposition inexplicably transformed into friendly razzing.

Further research seems warranted to more precisely delineate larger patterns of racial idealization and denigration in American film during this period of retrenchment and reaction.