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The film Boyz in the Hood is a 1991 film directed by John Singleton. It is about three young men named Tre, Ricky and his brother Doughboy who grow up in South Central Los Angeles, a dangerous area in Los Angeles, California. While Ricky and Doughboy grow up in a single mother household, Tre lives with his mother at the beginning of the movie. But after Tre gets in trouble for behavioral problems at school, he is sent to live with his father, a strong-willed man with a tough as nails approach, who teaches Tre about responsibility and being a man.
One element the movie examines is the importance of family relationships.
While Tre has a relationship with his father and mother, most of his friends were raised in single parent households. Growing up in an environment such as South Central Los Angeles, children need to have a stable structure in their household. The relationship between Tre and his parents is an interesting play on the basic family unit.
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While his parents are not living together, either by divorced of break-up, he manages to maintain a close relationship with both of them.
Early in the movie, Tre’s act of disobedience in elementary school has led his Reva to send him to live with his father Furious in the violent neighborhood of South Central L. A, where theft and homicide are very common. Most African-American men raised in areas with a high-crime rate grow up never knowing their father, often walking out on the family between the ages of 1 and 11. These men grow up never knowing how to be a man and accepting responsibility.
The situation with Tre and his father present an alternative for average environment children grow up in. Read about growing up without a father
Tre grows up with a father figure to teach him important life lessons that that will shape him later in life. An example from the movie is the scene where Tre, Doughboy and their friends are driving around their neighborhood to find Ricky’s killer. During the drive, Tre decides that he is making a mistake and asks doughboy to let him out. If he didn’t have his father’s guidance, he probably would have continued to go. The film’s epilogue states Tre went to Spelman College in Atlanta. Tre also has a strong relationship with his mother. The situation of Tre’s mother is the exact opposite of most black mothers.
During a conversation with his teacher, it is revealed that she is educated and is pursuing her master’s degree, surprising the teacher. She also has complete control of her son, disciplining him when he got in trouble. This is not the case for most black mothers. Most mothers have little to no control over their sons. Mothers are often ignored or denied by their sons, resulting in bad outcomes, such as arrest, injury, and even death. As opposed to Tre’s family, Ricky and Doughboy were raised in the stereotypical black home: One mother with multiple kids.
While Ricky is well behaved and polite, she has no control over her son Doughboy. Since there is no father figure present, Doughboy spent a lot of time on the streets, basically being raised by the streets. Because of the lack of stability within his household, Doughboy didn’t learn the life lessons of manhood, and he paid for it too. He ended up joining the notorious Crips street gang, went to prison for stealing, and becoming a drug dealer. He also ended up getting murdered at the end of the movie (this is stated in the film’s epilogue, not visibly shown).
Dan Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” states, “As a direct result of this high rate of divorce, separation, and desertion, a very large percent of Negro families are headed by females. If he had a good relationship with his father, he might not have ended up going down the violent and destructive path. When children growing up in these types of conditions don’t have a father figure in their lives, they spend a lot of time with their friends and they surround themselves with violent people, they will become violent themselves.
They end up getting involved with street gangs and they get themselves into very dangerous predicaments, often ending up with disastrous results. Doughboy is a representation of what happens to a majority of black males living in a fatherless home. His fate is the fate of many black males growing up in these areas without a father. In the film, Tre saves a child from being run over by a car. The child was born to a mother who was addicted to crack cocaine. According to the book “Educating Drug-Exposed Children” by Janet Y. Thomas, “ The amount of crack babies is increasing at an alarming rate.
Boyz in the Hood Film Review. (2020, Jun 01). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/boyz-in-the-hood-film-review-essay
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