On the Backs of Blacks and Sorrowful Black Death Is Not a Hot Ticket :: Sorrowful Black Death Is Not a Hot Ticket Essays

On the Backs of Blacks and Sorrowful Black Death Is Not a Hot Ticket In both Toni Morrisons On the backs of blacks and bell hooks Sorrowful Black Death Is Not a Hot Ticket the authors attempt to analyze the role and treatment of blacks in motion pictures. Morrisons essay deals with what she calls race talk, and defines as the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than crush African Americans to the lowest level racial hierarchy (Morrison, 1993). Hooks essay similarly analyses the issue of death for blacks in movies to which she concludes that there can be no serious representation of death and dying when the characters are African-Americans. (hooks) In both these essays there are huge errors made in their thinking, and their analyzation. Hooks, in her opening paragraphs attempts to compare the impersonation of black vs. white death in films. In her comparison she blows all future credibility with critical reade rs by using examples that obviously dont have any(prenominal) baring on the point she is trying to make. The example she gives for a white death is that of Tom Hanks character in Philadelphia, a homosexual lawyer with back up who had taken his firm to court because of their bad treatment towards him because of his disease. For this case she points out that even before tickets are brought and seats are taken, everyone knows that tears are in order. (hooks) Hooks then goes on to explain that There is no grief, no remembrance for the deaths of blacks. She uses the film The bodyguard for her example of black death, citing the scene where the sister of Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston) is by luck assassinated by the killer she has hired to kill her own sister (Hooks). These two examples have nothing in common. The character in Philadelphia deserved philanthropy when he died because he was treated unfairly for a condition he had no control of. The character in The Bodyguard n either deserved nor accepted recognition for one reason. It had nothing to do with her blackness, that was a non-issue, it was because she was a murderer who in an ironic twist was murdered by the assassin she had hired.