The Problematic Post-Industrial City

I am electing to respond to the first prompt. As we discussed in class today, the post-industrial city is a space that became recognizable in the late 1980’s through the 1990’s, a place that had once financially centered on a factory driven industry and since had experienced demise as a result of the industrial units shutting down. Set It Off identifies with the concept of the post-industrial city most noticeably because L.A. provides the setting for the movie. It helps to shape the plot because the four girls who comprise the cast of main characters are driven to rob a bank out of financial necessity, coming to the decision through a series of events that make them feel victims of the system.
The post industrial city constructs gender into binaries. Evidence of this can be seen through the continual perpetuation of man/woman relationships throughout the film. Although Cleo is a lesbian, her relationship is very much defined through masculine/feminine. Class is interpreted as below the poverty line. Literally all of the aspects of the girl’s lives are affected by their residency in a post-industrial location.
Addressing the first part of the prompt, that “the role of blackness shifts in relation to urban spaces” I find troubling. So because someone is black and they live in an urban space they are then shaped, defined, and ultimately products of their urban environment? What I find problematic with this is the blackness part of the equation. I would argue that any person growing up in these conditions would be shaped by the urban arena. In addition, I question the validity of the urban arena as the only catalyst – allow me to site an article written about the place where I grew up, it’s called “to live and die in Oceanside”

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2008/feb/20/cover/

This is not a town that is dealing with a post-industrial setting, yet it constructs and influences minority identity. I think what the authors are looking to explore and explain is why is the black community is marginalized and negatively constructed within society, and since I am speaking to this point allow me to address the dismissal of the connection to the black liberation movement. I strongly disagree with the comment that it’s all about where you’re at and not where you’re from. Keeling makes it sound as if the characters, and in reality blacks, are living in a place that is so “ghettocentric” that they no longer have a connection to their “roots.” Life is all about guns, boos, drugs, and woman. Why then did they even bother to have a 1970’s party at the beginning of the movie?? Why did her brother allow Acorn projects to be cut into his hair?? Why did the woman who was doing it make a fuss about the fact that he wasn’t from the Acorn Projects?? I would argue that they care very much about where they’re from, people die because of where they’re from. They wear blue and red colors to denote where they’re from. This is an issue about over three centuries of displacement and marginalization. This is about the fact that regardless of the black panther movement great leaders such as Bobby Seale and Malcom X are taught about (if at all) in American classrooms as radical, crazy, and dangerous zealots. This about the fact that for years blacks have been marginalized to neighborhoods where they only have access to (speaking proximity wise) jobs that pay them next to nothing, access to deplorable schools that rely on property taxes to fund them, access to liquor stores for food because grocery store chains don’t build where they can’t make safe money……and the list goes on. Is the gangster rap black identity shaped because of factories shutting down? The poverty that the lack of jobs inflicted upon the communities sure had its impact, but to make the assertion that it’s all about “where you’re at and not where you came from” sells short the centuries of hardship and displacement that the African American community has been subject to in this country. This problem is in fact so complex and convoluted at this point that to suggest that a certain modern identity, race, and movement stems from one source is problematic to say the least.