Boyz N The Hood and Black Masculinity

ED NOTE: The death of director John Singleton prompted Kwest On Media contributor Travis Johnson to reflect on how Boyz N The Hood impacted him as a teenager in suburban Nashville, yearning for the affection of a popular classmate. 

“Did you cry when Ricky died?” my junior high school crush asked, his mouth already twisted into a crooked pout of pre-disbelief. 

Boyz N The Hood had been out for months – most of the summer, in fact. But, well into the school year, the movie about three young Black men in South Central Los Angeles, was still all anyone could talk about. For me, a 13 year-old Black boy enduring eighth grade in Nashville, Tennessee, it felt like one’s coolness and even one’s Blackness (which were increasingly synonymous) revolved around whether or not you had seen the movie, whether or not you loved the movie, and whether or not you had the right answer to the ultimate question of junior high school Black masculinity:

 “Did you cry when Ricky died?”

That my crush was even speaking to me was its own miracle. We did not run in the same social circles. In all honesty, we barely attended the same school. He was an extremely popular Black (cool) athlete. And, I was a very gay (not cool) Black nerd. My gayness and my nerdiness were treated like some kind of cultural betrayal by most of my Black classmates who often accused me of “acting white.” Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside) and wannabe (wants to be white) were two of my more popular nicknames. 

So, one day in homeroom, when my crush noticed I had on a shirt very similar to the one Cuba Gooding, Jr. wears in the poster for BoyzN The Hood, he had to investigate. Was this solid fashion choice a mere coincidence? Or, had I, despite my lack of coolness and deficient Blackness, actually seen the movie and liked it enough to emulate the main character’s style?  

Did we have something in common?

The beauty of that moment isn’t just the bridge a popular movie built between two Black boys on opposite ends of the junior high school popularity continuum. More than that, with Boyz N The Hood, John Singleton gave Black youth growing up in the 80s and 90s their very first coming of age film. 

Up until then, I remember trying to wedge my perspective into films like Stand By Me and The Breakfast Club, movies I loved, but which clearly weren’t made with me in mind. Even though a movie about gang violence in South Central wasn’t a perfect fit for what I knew in the suburbs of Nashville either, it wasn’t completely foreign. 

By late 1991, when my crush was asking me if I cried when Ricky died, Rodney King had been beaten for the world to see. The battle lines of the war on drugs were clear and many of our loved ones were on the losing side. Gangs like the Bloods and the Crips were more than a scary, whispered rumor in our city. 

LA no longer seemed like another planet from Nashville.  

By late 1991, characters like Trey, Doughboy, and Ricky were mirrors. They looked like people we knew. Their slang was a little different, but their accents more than echoed our southern twang. They were the older boys we knew and admired and worried about and mourned when they died far too soon. 

They were the young men we were becoming. Their paths had the same obstacles we were starting to face.  

Boyz N The Hood gave us permission to talk about things I don’t think we’d have had the courage to discuss otherwise. Having separated parents. Being a dysfunctional blended family. Experiences with the police. The temptation to sell drugs. Watching loved ones addicted to drugs. 

My crush, in later conversations, told me about losing a cousin to gun violence, wanting to go away to college in Atlanta after high school or maybe the military and, to my devastation, that he dreamed of losing his virginity to the closest thing our school had to a Nia Long. 

But, before any of that he asked, “Did you cry when Ricky died?”

“A little bit,” I lied. That scene was the most traumatizing movie death I’d experienced since Bambi’s mother. I full on sobbed in the movie theater. My crush pretended to believe me. 

 “Good,” he said. “Me too. You’d have to have something wrong with you to see that and not feel something.”

At 13, John Singleton made us feel something. He made us feel seen and understood. He gave us permission to cry for ourselves, and hope. I can’t think of a stronger testament to a storyteller’s legacy.