Boyz n The Hood
The movie Boyz n the Hood follows the lives of three black youths living in South Central,
Los Angeles. Tre, Doughboy, and Doughboy’s brother Ricky all grow up together in the
same neighborhood but all end up taking very different paths by the end of the film.
Throughout the movie, there are several messages about life in California that are
conveyed through various scenes.
The first and perhaps most obvious message the movie is black-on-black violence. Boyz n
the Hood was released in 1991, a while after the Watts Riots of 1965 but the same year that
Rodney King was beaten by the police, so there was definitely a lot of racial tension and
violence in the black community at the time. The movie opens with two sentences: “One
out of every twenty-one Black American males will be murdered in their lifetime”,
followed by “Most will die at the hands of another black male”. The first actual shot of the
movie is a zoom-in on a stop sign, which sends an obvious message that the violence must
stop. At the end of the movie, we see one of the main characters, Ricky, fall victim to these
statistics when he is shot and killed by a car of black gang members. Throughout the rest
of the movie, we constantly see instances of black on black violence, and when Furious
Styles almost shoots the burglar, but then says it would have only “contributed to the
killing of another brother”. Finally, the movie closes with the words “Increase the Peace”,
which is a plea to end the violence. By having this as a main theme of the movie, it calls
attention to the problem of black on black violence in California and also calls for an end
to it.
Another aspect of California that the movie portrays are is the race relations of the time. In
the very beginning of the movie, Tre gets into trouble at school. When the teacher who is
white calls his mother, the teacher asks if she is employed and if Tre has a father. These are
common stereo types of the inner city black culture, and the teacher’s ignorance is used to
represent how some people viewed blacks at the time. Also, at one point in the movie
Furious is talking about drugs and how the drug problem wasn’t acknowledged “until it
was in Iowa, and showed up on Wall Street, where there are hardly any black people”. This
