PLAN

Discuss in detail how the destructive nature racialised stereotypes are

presented in Dinosaurs In The Hood and how far it is a characteristic of Black
Movie as a whole.

POINT 1
RACIALISED STEREOTYPES ARE SEEN TO POISON AND PERMEATE THE MINDS
Of ETHNIC MAJORITIES
POINT 2
RACIALISED STEREOTYPES ARE SEEN TO ENTRAP AND ISOLATE BLACK PEOPE
WITHIN SOCIETY, LEAVING THEM HOPELESS
“who has time for joy?” that feels like the heart of the book, the moment
when the fourth wall falls away and the writer speaks directly to us: “reader,
what does it / feel like to be safe? white?
/ / how does it feel /
to dance when you’re not / /
dancing away the ghost?” Whether the reader is white or Black changes the
valence of the poem— she is either being offered one of today’s most
provocative questions (what does whiteness feel like?) or she is being offered
a moment of empathetic pathos, a question relentlessly shared by the Black
community: what does it feel like to feel safe?
“I have no more /
room for grief / /
for it is everywhere now” and “prediction: the cop will walk free
/ the boy will still be dead.”
“Politics of Elegy” (“raise your hands if you think I’m a messenger. now this
time / if you think I’m a tomb raider”). Smith refuses simply to mourn the
dead, however, a few pages later, he instead takes a page from Li’l Wayne
and posits alienation as a kind of extraterrestrialism in the prose poem
“Dear White America,” which announces,
I’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people
ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means
something & until then I bid you well, I bid you war, I bid you our lives to
gamble with no more. I’ve left Earth & I am touching everything you beg your
telescopes to show you.

This world’s rules are too white to sustain us, Smith tells us, and yet, art
continues to be made, poems are written, joy occurs, despite everything. In
“Notes for a Film on Black Joy,” a powerful second-person prose poem, Smith
catalogues in the gorgeously intimate vernacular of interior thought-
language such tender, private moments as watching his mother dancing “so
ungospel you wonder if this is what they mean by sin,” praising the
abundance of his grandmother’s meat freezer, and the summer he comes
into his own as a gay black man—“boys look at you & go blind—most with
rage, some with hunger.” It’s here Smith makes his case for raising the
unkillable, beautiful parts of Black life to the mythic status of Boyz in the
Hood.

The ultimate poem, “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” skewers every trope of Black
cinema while offering a fantasy that lets the heroes and heroines of everyday
Black life step into the heroic roles of movies: “I want grandmas on the front
porch taking out / raptors with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses. . . .
I want Cecily Tyson to make a speech.”