Hoodlums

Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life

William L. Van Deburg

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780226104638
  9780226847191
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226109817
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. When you think of African American history, you think of its heroes—individuals endowed with courage and strength who are celebrated for their bold exploits and nobility of purpose. But what of black villains? Villains, just as much as heroes, have helped define the black experience.

Ranging from black slaveholders and frontier outlaws to serial killers and gangsta rappers, Hoodlums examines the pivotal role of black villains in American society and popular culture. Here, William L. Van Deburg offers the most extensive treatment to date of the black badman and the challenges that this figure has posed for race relations in America. He first explores the evolution of this problematic racial stereotype in the literature of the early Republic—documents in which the enslavement of African Americans was justified through exegetical claims. Van Deburg then probes antebellum slave laws, minstrel shows, and the works of proslavery polemicists to consider how whites conceptualized blacks as members of an inferior and dangerous race. Turning to key works by blacks themselves, from the writings of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to classic blaxploitation films like Black Caesar and The Mack, Van Deburg demonstrates how African Americans have combated such negative stereotypes and reconceptualized the idea of the badman through stories of social bandits—controversial individuals vilified by whites for their proclivity toward evil, but revered in the black community as necessarily insurgent and revolutionary.

Ultimately, Van Deburg brings his story up-to-date with discussions of prison and hip-hop culture, urban rioting, gang warfare, and black-on-black crime. What results is a work of remarkable virtuosity—a nuanced history that calls for both whites and blacks to rethink received wisdom on the nature and prevalence of black villainy.

1

Villainy in Black and White

Villains, by definition, are bad people. They are flawed beings whose negative moral attributes overshadow the positive. Lacking a well-developed social conscience, villains are prone to base behaviors and criminal acts. Typically opportunistic and exploitative, they are habituated to greed, treachery, and the ignoble desire to expand their power over others by any means necessary. Whether termed a rogue or scoundrel, knave or blackguard, the villain is a mean-spirited individual who, to varying degrees, lacks the average mortal’s requisite quotient of honesty, empathy, and compassion. Fully aware that evil lurks in every human heart, villains cherish this thought and seek to corner the market on immoral conduct.

From time to time, nonvillains exhibit certain of these same characteristics. We all have bad days. Each of us has said or done things that have diverged from group norms so tellingly that we have hurt others and embarrassed ourselves. Dyed-in-the-wool villains, however, feel no shame when they cause pain. Their bad habits are carried to excess and reinforced through constant repetition. Finding virtue in socially unacceptable acts, they do not view themselves as victims of circumstance nor do they spend a great deal of time in concocting alibis or in feeling remorseful. A true villain enjoys the work and has made evildoing a lifestyle choice. In an existential sense, villains do not become real until they are causing someone, somewhere, considerable trouble.

If the world’s first villain was the serpent who cajoled Adam and Eve into breaking God’s freshly minted moral code, inheritors of this Edenic tradition have been no less reptilian in character. Early on, Abel’s murderous sibling, Cain, proved that not all of us aspire to be our brother’s keeper. Other archetypal hard cases such as Judas Iscariot, Caligula, Attila the Hun, Lucrezia Borgia, the Marquis de Sade, Benedict Arnold, Rasputin, Adolf Hitler, Tokyo Rose, Idi Amin, and Charles Manson drive home the point and show that no nation, age, or ethnic group has yet managed to gain a monopoly on in-your-face immorality.

Most villains do not behave badly twenty-four hours a day, 365 days per year. Nor do they appear the incarnation of evil to every observer. Often, neither their most unsavory attributes nor their ultimate intentions are apparent. This is due, in part, to the fact that villains are masters of artifice and disguise. Indeed, throughout history they have adopted a maddening variety of physical forms. Particularly noticeable in the case of fictional, folkloric, and theatrical villains, each successive incarnation reveals some hitherto unexamined nuance of nastiness. As a result, the villain’s family album serves as a useful field guide for those who would seek to learn more about the attractive force of these chameleonic beings.

The villains who inhabit our popular culture frequently can be identified either by their given names or via familiar visual clues such as a shaved head, a curled mustache, or an eye patch. Because of their creator’s careful attention to nuanced nomenclature, it is difficult to conceptualize Sleeping Beauty’s foul fairy godmother Maleficent, Flash Gordon nemesis Ming the Merciless, or Sir Mordred, the wily traitor of Arthurian legend, as anything other than an evildoer.¹ The same goes for puppy-stealing fur fetishist Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians; Pinocchio’s fast-talking con artist, J. Worthington Foulfellow; and Vultura, a World War II-era serial film baddie played in prototypically arch fashion by Lorna Gray.²

Such characters often possess physical traits as thoroughly villain-specific as the blood-spattered butcher’s smock and flayed human-skin mask worn by Leatherface, the psychopathic butcher/cannibal of cult filmdom’s legendary Texas Chain Saw Massacre.³ For example, in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens described a hateful London ruffian named Bill Sikes as

a stoutly-built fellow of about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab breeches, lace-up half-boots, and grey cotton stockings, which enclosed a very bulky pair of legs, with large swelling calves;—the kind of legs, that in such costume, always look in an unfinished and incomplete state without a set of fetters to garnish them.⁴

Similarly, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery classic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the flawed moral character of Louisiana planter Simon Legree could be assayed in a single glance. Undoubtedly, it was hoped that virtuous readers would join gentle, upright Uncle Tom in feeling “an immediate and revolting horror” when confronted with the nightmare vision of Legree’s “round, bullet head” topped by “stiff, wiry, sunburned hair,” his “large, coarse mouth . . . distended with tobacco,” and his pair of “large, hairy, sunburned, freckled, and very dirty” hands.⁵ Stowe and Dickens were describing neither choirboys nor handsome maiden-rescuing heroes, and they wanted to be sure that their readers could distinguish between vice and virtue before proceeding further.

Of course, not all pop culture villains have been drawn as unkempt, ill-formed individuals who, like Ian Fleming’s Auric Goldfinger, look as if they “had been put together with bits of other people’s bodies.”⁶ Some are real charmers. In this group one would find Alain Charnier, aka “the Frog,” a suave heroin smuggler played by Fernando Rey in the 1970s French Connection films; “the Jackal,” novelist Frederick Forsyth’s debonair but deadly six-foot-two blond assassin; Ben-Hur’s Messala (Stephen Boyd), poster boy for Rome’s iron-fisted rule of occupied Judea; and countless silicone-enhanced she-creatures of late-night cinema.⁷

Other villains possess brilliant intellects but place their considerable gray matter in the service of evil. The cunning Dr. Fu Manchu (a mental giant said to possess the brainpower of any three men of genius) matches this rarified profile. So, too, does James Bond’s eggheaded adversaries Ernst Stavro Blofeld (a famous allergist plotting to destroy the world’s food supply), Hugo Drax (Moonraker’s orchid-loving, genocidal mad scientist), and Dr. No (a criminal genius who heads SPECTRE—Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion).⁸

Still other villains are neither terribly good-looking nor Phi Beta Kappas, but nevertheless occupy positions of trust that demand a variety of specialized skills. Here, one can identify villainous law enforcement officers (Robin Hood’s nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham; foxlike Citizen Chauvelin, head of the French Republic’s Secret Service, in The Scarlet Pimpernel novels), health care professionals (Big Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; the manipulative, mentally unstable asylum director in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and businessmen (Sweeney Todd, the “demon barber of Fleet Street”; industrialist Stanford Marshall, aka Lamont Cranston’s slouch-hatted foe “the Black Tiger,” in the 1940 film The Shadow). These deceptive disguises make it more difficult to determine exactly what sort of evil lurks in the hearts of such characters.⁹

Some villains are solitary sorts who prefer to work their wiles in relative isolation, unaided by co-conspirators (Dracula, The Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter, and burly badman Bluto in the Popeye cartoons).¹⁰ Conversely, a fair number are team players and can be identified by the corrupt company they keep (the tobacco-chewing, hippie-hating bullies in Billy Jack; the muttering, inbred mountain men of Deliverance; and the various combinations of super-baddies who constantly plot against Batman and Robin).¹¹ Loyal assistants or apprentices in evil are common, too. Oddjob and Jaws of the James Bond films, Dr. Frankenstein’s Igor, and the squadron of Oz-based flying monkeys controlled by the Wicked Witch of the West add dimension to the portrayal of each head villain even as they warn of evil’s many seductions.¹²

For better or for worse, consumers of American popular culture tend to ignore these warnings. Transfixing us with their lustful leers, the many variants of both real-world and fanciful villains fascinate endlessly. As noted by veteran Hollywood “hissable” Claude Rains in 1941, “Good men, while slated to inherit the earth and the kingdom of Heaven, too, are rarely as captivating to the eye as a polished blackguard. Or to the mind, for that matter. People can’t help saying, ‘My, my. If only the rascal had turned his talents in the proper channels—what a power for good he would have become!’”¹³ Why is this true? Does their hypnotic appeal more accurately reflect the villains’ strength or our susceptibility to salacious suggestion? Beyond sending cold chills down our spines, what social purposes are served by these malevolent beings?

Villains specialize in providing upright individuals with a variety of vicarious experiences. Brash, thrill-seeking masters of the guilty pleasure, they understand that vice excites far more than virtue. Like an antisocial alter ego, they offer the law abiding an opportunity to participate in audacious acts without fear of punishment. Here, the villain becomes a societal safety valve, purging us of repressed tendencies and unwanted feelings. It is the villain who hates and lusts, is arrogant, uncaring, and at times quite mad, we say nobly, happy to declare our comparative rectitude. Both fascinated and repulsed by these characters, people love to hate villains because by doing so they can claim to have their own wicked impulses under control.

By functioning as a cultural yardstick with which to measure an individual’s adherence to group mores, villains simplify moral choices and help shape the ritual drama of American social life. They teach us how not to behave, make clear the possible consequences of engaging in foul play, and greatly enhance the typological vocabulary (brute, fiend, hoodlum, ogre, outlaw, renegade, reprobate, roughneck, traitor, troublemaker, tyrant) through which we attribute relative degrees of good and evil. Moreover, just as the crude folkways of medieval peasants (villeins) served to define the civility of the court and bourgeoisie, villainy gives definition to heroism. While not exactly the relationship established by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, heroes and villains maintain a complex interdependence. Through their bad behavior, villains create a variety of crisis situations to which the hero must respond. When faced with the choice of death or dishonor, a champion of the established order typically springs into action, saves the day, and thereby promotes a greater good. But without the villain’s challenge to the status quo, there would be far fewer occasions for heroic endeavor and a corresponding decline in socially beneficial resultants. No stranger to paradox and irony, villains often unwittingly strengthen accepted community standards by deviating from them.¹⁴

A somewhat different moral universe is established when a villain defeats a hero. Even if only temporary, the hero’s eclipse may prove to be more than a dramatic way of galvanizing the communal spirit in response to a threat posed by villainous outsiders. Such a precipitous event may signal a splintering of the group consensus—a sign that the natives are restless and have selected a new champion to represent them in presenting their grievances to the world. Telling evidence that one person’s hero can be someone else’s villain, this disruptive turning of the tables often is the work of a disaffected societal subgroup questing for freedom. Here, establishment pariahs become rebel heroes and reflect anti-institutional tendencies present within the oppressed population.

Perhaps better placed within the folk heroic tradition of social banditry, such individuals are the proper villain’s first cousins. But they also display attributes—strength, courage, loyalty to cause—normally associated with fully accredited heroes. Social bandits like Robin Hood, for example, are highly selective in their villainy. Their cruelty is legitimized as vengeance. “Feared by the bad, loved by the good,” as the theme song of the 1950s CBS TV show would have it, Robin and his Merry Men were hunted as outlaws by representatives of a usurpations political elite. But to poor peasants long consigned to the lower depths of the social order, this troublesome band of scofflaws seemed an army of liberation—selfless agents of justice whose moral compass pointed in the same direction as their own. In such cases, the social bandit/villain provides a useful counterpoint to skewed, imposed, or outmoded conceptualizations of morality and heroism. Both fictional and real-world representatives of this wrong-righting guild can be of considerable use in helping us distinguish just from unjust societal relationships.¹⁵

Villains, then, entice, excite, and entertain. In doing so, they help assuage our natural desire to feel good about the values we hold dear. Remarkably malleable in a cultural sense, part of their attractive power can be traced to a willingness to be placed just about anywhere on anyone’s personalized moral continuum. They are capable both of enabling and of dethroning reigning nobility. While terms such as “evenhanded,” “fair-minded,” and “incorruptible” are best reserved for use in describing the essential nature of traditionally conceptualized heroes, it often is the case that major differences between specific villains, heroes, and social bandits are difficult to ascertain. This is especially true in regard to methodology as opposed to motivation. At such times, we are forced to stop and ask hard questions of these enigmatic figures. Certainly, it would be useful to know the villains’ views on the root causes of their morally challenged condition; whether they believe themselves to have been made malicious by nature or nurture; and how wicked folk explain the presence of evil in the world. Straightforward responses to such queries would enable us to address a number of existential concerns that have vexed moral philosophers for centuries. But given what we know about villains, how could we trust them to tell the truth? And even if they did, whose favorite outlaw, cheat, or bully would we choose to believe? In light of such problems, it might for the moment be best to conduct an independent investigation of these issues.

It is well known that villains tend to reject the values that heroes operating in the same sociocultural setting promote. Also obvious is the fact that they take considerable pleasure in posing either a physical or moral threat to the hero’s core constituency. Less well understood is why a villain does these things. Certainly, heroes are more easily fathomed. Exemplary personifications of predominating ideals and culturally sanctioned achievement, heroes are highly esteemed because they stimulate common people to do better, to reach their potential, to innovate. After being elevated to the status of group champion, they gird their followers for battle against formidable foes. They offer consolation when unpleasant realities block the realization of dreams. Heroes aspire, inspire, and offer support because people need them to do so. They serve as loyal allies in the ongoing struggle with the challenges of everyday life.¹⁶ But beyond providing a useful foil for heroes, is there a comparable need for villains that certain individuals attempt to meet through their wickedness? If so, are their acts of selfishness, perversity, and criminality largely volitional or shaped by biological inheritance? Are the determinants of villainy and heroism to be found in a genetic or a moral code?

Humanists tend to believe that villains are so essential to art that writers would have to invent them if they didn’t already exist. Social scientists, however, are far less concerned about crafting compelling story lines and personifying societal evils. Instead of worrying about when, where, and how the wolf confronts Little Red Riding Hood, they fret about the possibility that some people are “born bad.” Finding little utility in the creation of huma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Villainy in Black and White
• 2. Slaves as Subversives
• 3. Blacks and Social Banditry
• 4. Gangland: Crime and Culture in Contemporary America
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index