Carby Probes Black Images

Black Americans have long sought to integrate their culture into the national image, a struggle reflected in literature and Hollywood movies, Yale Professor Hazel Carby said yesterday in the second of three W. E. B. DuBois Lectures sponsored by the Department of Afro-American Studies.

In an hour-long lecture to an audience of about 50, Carby said that "Black cultural forms...embody the ideals of the American nation-state."

Carby said Hollywood plays out the genealogy of Black ethnicity on big-screen movies such as "Lethal Weapon."

A document of a white-Black partnership star ring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, "Lethal Weapon" stands for the "desegregation of the American community," Carby said.

These crime-stopping vigilantes bring justice to modern America by joining Blacks and whites in a common goal, Carby said. "Together they can annihilate what ails this nation," she said.

Carby also spoke at length about ways in which the struggle to incorporate Black culture into American life is reflected in literature.

According to Carby, DuBois' book The Souls of Black folk aims to "codify black existence in American culture" by reproducing the form and content of spirituals, folk songs dating from the time of slavery.

"Spirituals exist as the greatest gift to Negro culture," she said. "They harbor faith in historical justice."