Black hawk down and racism in cinema

Given Hollywood's chronic tendency to withhold good roles from African-American actors, we should celebrate last week's Oscar nominations for Halle Berry, Denzel Washington and Will Smith. As if to demonstrate that the movie business takes two steps backward for every stride in the right direction, however, the Academy has also chosen to recognize "Black Hawk Down" with four nominations. Has there ever been a more racist movie? Critics have praised its gritty depiction of the street battle in Mogadishu on Oct. 3, 1993. We've heard less commentary, however, on the astonishing double standard in the movie's depiction of that day's horrible violence. The camera follows each U.S. soldier (all but one of whom seems to be white) and captures his injury or demise with wrenching empathy. The Somalis, however, don't seem to bleed and conveniently disappear when they're shot — helping us to forget that perhaps a thousand were killed that day, fifty dead Somalis for each American fatality.

It's easy to be cynical about the politics of the movie and its rushed release. The U.S. got into a famine-stricken Somalia under George Bush pater, sending troops in a massive U.N. humanitarian operation which undoubtedly saved lives. In the spring of 1993, however, the U.S. scaled back its relief force, secluded itself from the rest of the U.N. contingent, and began to increase its military operations against renegade clan leader Mohammed Farrah Aideed. Disregarding a political track, which involved negotiations between the U.N. and the various clan leaders, the U.S. converted its humanitarian mission into a war on Aideed. American troops botched numerous raids on Mogadishu in the summer of 1993, even as diplomatic experts warned Congress of the likely disaster that was brewing. A former U.S. ambassador lamented that America was turning "triumph into tragedy" as its raids terrorized the civilian population and strengthened support for Aideed's clan.

Does any of this make it into the movie? Of course not. American troops are presented as innocent peacekeepers and aid-givers, the unwitting dupes of an overreaching United Nations and the ungrateful Somalis themselves. One of the movie's few honest gestures was excised in post-production — a title card at the end of the film linking the debacle in Somalia to the U.S. refusal to intervene in Rwanda six months later. More than 500,000 people were killed in Rwanda in a genocide which could have been prevented with just a few thousand foreign troops — and yet the U.S. not only refused to send peacekeepers, but it worked to prevent any other country from doing so either. The full story of America's Somalia adventure, then, would take in the mistakes of the months before the October battle and the ignominy of American inaction in Rwanda. Instead, we're left with 143 minutes of white guys killing black people, for the most part.

"Black Hawk Down" was originally slated to appear this spring, but in the wake of September 11 its makers decided to rush it into theaters, hoping both for the Academy's attention and for a boost at the box office from the 'war on terror.' By the time of its December release, the Pentagon was threatening to invade Somalia once more, and the President had stressed the need to fight the 'evildoers' wherever they might be hiding. Ironically, in the years before September 11, the battle of Mogadishu had been treated by Republicans and Democrats alike as a textbook example of why America's involvements abroad should be limited. Disingenuously casting the Somalia intervention as an example of U.N. do-gooding run amok, policymakers had referred to the battle as a powerful lesson on the limits of U.S. action abroad. How fortunate for Columbia Pictures, then, that the release should coincide with the emergence of the 'evildoers,' the 'axis of evil' and the other reductionisms that we're used to hearing from the White House.

Now, instead of a fable demonstrating the merits of isolationism, we get a stirring story of the courage of ordinary American soldiers — as well as a jarring reminder that our non-white enemies, whether in Somalia, Iran or the Philippines, don't want our 'democracy' and won't stop their killing until we put an end to them. President Bush invited a number of Republican Congressmen to Camp David last month for a private screening of the movie. It's hard to guess whether they were more impressed with its fallacious rendering of history or its annihilationist aesthetic. Both will no doubt come in handy in the coming months and years, while the rest of us are left with the prospect of more stirring epics that remind us of what we're supposed to be fighting against. Pass the popcorn as we prepare for yet more race warfare at the multiplex. Anyone for Collateral Damage. Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.