John Singleton, who died yesterday of a stroke at age 51, had his landmark movie Boyz n the Hood released in 1991. That was just as I had started to homeschool my youngest daughter Gillian. As happens, the movie made its way into our homeschooling curriculum, as I later documented in my book, The Dan Riley School for a Girl: An Adventure in Homeschooling. Here’s the excerpt:
Gillian’s libertarian leanings led her to the American Civil Liberty Union’s side in opposing the City of LA’s ban on gang gatherings in city parks. This was a freedom of assembly issue she argued in a paper I asked her to write on the issue. I passed up the opportunity to simply reinforce that enlightened view. I asked her to consider the feelings of the residents of the neighborhoods surrounding these parks, who had paid for the parks with their taxes and were now unable to use them for fear of gang violence. I was encouraged by her consideration of that argument, but as a subsequent paper she wrote on the subject revealed, she was unpersuaded by it.
Persuasion, of course, hadn’t been the goal. The goal had been to make her see the complexity and relevance to her life of the freedom of assembly issue — and furthermore to make her deal with the issue of gangs intellectually, to consider them in an historical and Constitutional context.
In that miserable seventh grade year of hers, she’d dealt with the subject differently. She’d demonstrated a passing fascination with gangs, sending a real shudder down my spine by occasionally assuming gang walk, dress, and attitude on her way out the door. It was all pretend, of course; her world was far too insulated from the real thing for her to learn any of that lifestyle firsthand. It was also quite natural, according to my recollections of college anthropology and adolescent psychology. Adolescents crave group identity, and whether it be the code and colors of a cheerleading squad or a street gang, such identification is critical to their development. Gillian, of course, was not a cheerleader (although she could’ve been captain at The Dan Riley School for a Girl if she’d wanted), so she had to take her group identity where she found it.
For someone who perceived the home school, subconsciously at least, as a sort of hideout from the cruel world, I could have done a better job at keeping the demons at bay. I could have filled Gillian’s days with music from Mozart, passages from Shelley and Keats, day trips to the Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty museums, and nights gazing at the heavens through a telescope. Wonder and beauty…wonder and beauty…wonder and beauty. Certainly there was enough of both still extant in the world to occupy our time and energies for nine school months while Gillian got a breather from the harsher realities and some kind of appreciation for the finer things. But my instincts as a teacher stood up to my fears as a father, and we pressed on with the business of learning, wherever it would lead us.
One Thursday afternoon in late September it led us to Boyz N the Hood. Gillian had been campaigning for us to take in the film as part of a class field trip. I finally overcame my fear of being shot in a theater lobby, as news headlines about the film had suggested might happen, and overcame my even greater fear of listening to a soundtrack heavily laden with rap — a musical form which can almost arouse in someone as civilized as myself an uncontrollable urge to open fire on folks standing in line for popcorn.
As it turned out, Gillian and I had one of LA’s finest theaters all to ourselves for a matinee performance of the film and settled in for a movie going experience that was considerably different from any I could recall from my own childhood ventures to movies with my own father.
There we were, sitting all alone in a movie theater together — father and daughter from the white suburbs — while 20-foot tall, young black men on the screen in front of us talked dirt about whores, bitches, motherfuckers, and pussy. It was not language with which I was unfamiliar, nor was it, sadly, language with which Gillian was unfamiliar. Our mutual discomfort was palpable at first, despite our separate, but equal acquaintance with the language. Although it is quite impossible for me to imagine a film with such language in it when I was growing up in the 50s, it is not impossible for me to imagine my father taking me by the hand and leading me out of a theater where such a film might have been playing. But such are the times we live in, such is the course of human progress, such is the accepted openness of our society, and such is my commitment as a parent to raise children who use ideas and language judiciously themselves while not shrinking from the ideas and language of others that I made no such gesture to Gillian. We stayed and watched Boyz N the Hood.
Our steadfastness was rewarded. The film impressed me as an affirmation of strong, active parenting, especially fathering. The hero who saves the life of Trey, a black youth trying to grow up amidst the dangers and degradations of modern urban America is Furious Styles, the boy’s father, armed only with a sense of what’s right and wrong. Furious, like Otto Frank before him, essentially announces to the world: I have taken responsibility for my child. No matter how awesome the task may be. I accept ultimate responsibility for loving, protecting, and making my child better than the world he was born into.
