Jungle Fever and Reality

Okorie Haughton
Eng103
5-19-11




Social Life Between
Movies and Reality





In 1991 an American drama film Jungle Fever was made. This featured film Directed by Spike Lee takes place in Harlem and other parts in Manhattan as well as digging deep into the interracial dating era within the late-1960‘s to the 1980’s. Harlem was filled with abandoned housing and vacant lots ready for homeless people to trash it and try to take it over as there own. The story of Jungle Fever shows Harlem to be a nice place to live but having plenty drug addicts laying around every vacant lot. It was a century which people struggled to reform politics, yet never made much change. In this research I will show how the film itself portrays Harlem as shown in the 1970's to the late 1980's

Flipper Purify played by Wesley Snipes is an African American working in middle class society at an architectural firm in New York City. Angela “Angie” Tucci an Italian American hired as his temporary secretary at the place developed mixed feelings with Flipper working together catching feelings thats more then jus work. Working at the firm late one night they converse and end up having sex which u would hardly ever see in the 1970’s to the late 1980’s. Basically racism was still being demonstrated in the New York streets especially if dating is a factor. Having a racial setting into the story line showing that interracial dating can an should be expressed however the couple feels but Flipper used it for his own uses.

In reality interracial dating is not accepted in society nor the time period that is shown within the movies time frame. The movie displays similar reality within the mind frame that all races should only mate with their own race. Result to the dating of Flipper and Angie both sides of the family shows dislike with the whole dating between them. Angie’s father violently beats her for dating a black man and throws her out of the house, as Flipper suggests to get an apartment with Angie later suffering social problems with the police thinking he was trying to rape her. Eventually the relationship between the couple got worst which subsequently they broke up and return to their normal lives. Statistics say 25,000 black men married white women in the 1960’s, the numbers jumped by the 80’s making 122,000. Becoming involved in an interracial relationship was a way black men got to test a new sense of freedom.

As we enter the 1970’s known as the worst period in Harlem's history, many people were able to escape from poverty leaving the neighborhoods in search of safer streets. The federal government’s program spent large amounts of money to improve what certain families lacked in such as sanitation, health care, and education in over ten years. In a community with the highest crime rates in New York city, vacant lots contribute to the amount of danger within much of the area. Statistics say that drug addiction and housing quality were similarly gruesome. Losing twenty-seven percent of the neighborhood, no longer having a functioning economy in East Harlem. The city neared bankruptcy during the administration of Mayor Abraham Beame, which avoided the suffering with the aid of a large federal loan.

During this time period cocaine smuggling, causing lower prices, and higher quality. Within low-income minority communities were the first to receive the drug as it grew which was commonly called an epidemic. After the extreme decline of New York in the mid 1970’s, the crack cocaine trade also devastated portions of the city’s population. The wealth generated by such activities is used to buy popular and political support in the local communities. Social scientists provided equivalent perspectives on the rapidly changing crack culture. The city was running a huge budget deficit, due to decades of ambitious spending on public works and social services, combined with an erosion of the city's manufacturing base. The crack cocaine industry increased during the 1978 – 1989. It was not until the 1980s that extensive studies on cocaine users have begun.

The rebellious sixties captured the essence of the act of feminists demanding their rights. Socially women had no respect in the world which made it hard for them to gain the rights they deserved. Feminist theory focused on the issues seeking gender equality. The movement itself grew within the aspects of poverty and voting, promoting the work rights including careers for both genders rather then just one gender. Women have historically been victims of both direct and subtle forms by men. Feminist beliefs are widely as to the most effective way to end this mental block of success.

The role of women in society was deeply changed with growing feminism across the world. In the presence and the rise of women ahead of states outside of government officials, a number of countries across the world during the 1970’s women hold such positions being their first. Drawing inspiration from the civil rights movement, it was made mainly of members of the middle class, taking part of the spirit of rebellion. Hoping to defeat the actions by proposing an amendment to outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender and race as well. Later in the late 1970‘s it failed to broaden its attraction to the middle class divisions between moderate and radical feminists.


The financial crisis, high crime rates, and damage from the blackouts led to a widespread belief that New York City was in irreversible decline. Many white middle class families moved to the city's suburbs and to other economically healthier locales. By the end of the 1970s, nearly a million people had left, a population loss not recovered for another twenty years. The fall of 1973 the crisis has spread to many areas of the U.S. monopoly capitalist economy, which has been racked with severe inflation of the dollar. Energy crisis in the winter of 1973 - 1974 was a severe over-production crisis in the industry.

By 1980, the City of New York owned 60 percent of all residential property in Harlem, and began auctioning these properties to the public in 1985. Only a small fraction would be sold at this time, and later scandals would temporarily halt the sales altogether. City's sale of confiscated houses was intended to improve the community by placing property in the hands of people who would live in them and maintain them. In many cases, the city would even pay to completely renovate a property before selling it (by lottery) below market value. About a third of the properties sold by the city were tenements which still had tenants, who were left in particularly miserable conditions. These properties, and new restrictions on Harlem mortgages, bedeviled the area's residential real estate market for years.

Spike Lee's film Jungle Fever displays a still photograph of Yusuf K. Hawkins, a young black teenager killed by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn many summers ago. The boy was not shot because he crossed the line into a white neighborhood, he was shot because he was mistaken for dating a local girl who was rejected from society for dating blacks and Hispanics. Exploring the connection between race, sex and place that costs a 16-year-old his life. After touching this issue, the effects in his earlier work developed this film which driven to the concerns of the time period of interracial dating.