How Hollywood’s ‘Alien’ and ‘Predator’ movies reinforce anti-Black racism

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What makes Black people more likely than others to be killed, beaten, tortured and raped by white police officers and vigilantes? Although Black men are killed by the police more than any other group, Black women are regular targets of police violence even though this fact is often rendered invisible.

A culture and history of racist misrepresentation may have something to do with it. Why has there been considerable tolerance among the silent majority of white people for animal-like, demonic representations of Black people in media and popular culture?

The short answer is that we are dealing with a culture of domination. It is a culture that thrives on the sexualized demonization of Black people. Two examples of this are Ridley Scott’s Alien, which comports with the trope of Black women as alien breeders and Predator, written by brothers Jim and John Thomas, that riffs on images of Black men as dreadlocked, violent and superhuman.

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Black women have been portrayed in contemporary white social and political culture as super-fertile and indestructible breeders whose sexual reproduction must be controlled. This is a shift from the slave-breeding campaign that emerged across the Americas after Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1834.

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Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, with its vicious and endlessly breeding carbon black alien mother, came at the height of neoliberal experiment and in the U.S. especially, an all-out assault on Black people. In the context of anti-Black culture, the film signifies the Black woman as an unkillable and ceaselessly breeding alien who threatened the body politic. In terms set by historian Lothrop Stoddard’s white supremacist 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color, a Black woman’s sexual reproduction is imagined to signal the genetic extinction of the white republic.

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Black men and boys are imagined as dangerous, threatening, inherently criminal and superhuman — bigger, faster, stronger and less likely to feel pain. These views have roots in chattel slavery

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In the context of racially charged white anxieties about immigration and social order, the historical demonization of Black men is a trope, a stereotype, that easily maps onto cinematic typecasting. The 1987 Hollywood film that launched the Predator franchise fits this pattern.

Predator depicted a Black, dreadlocked, large and super-virile male in a way that converged white art with white political history. A white man once said he thought it was cool that I had dreadlocks like the Predator. This is not a compliment.

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