This essay focusses on a particular cultural codification of the historical black-American question that characterizes a variety of recent Hollywood films. Its starting point is one of Stuart Hall’s most famous essays: What is this Black in Black Popular Culture (1992). The principal assumption is that the election of Obama has induced the production of Hollywood films about the historical black-American question which conveys not only a further commodification of Blackness as a «style-life», but also its incorporation into the traditional narration of «the American dream». The essay argues that the African-American question is here codified as a cause bound to be acknowledged within a nation that, accordingly to the coloniality of its self-representation system, conceives of itself as a sort of promised «land of human rights». The essay maintains, instead, that the only black feature in the American dream – as the continuous series of black killings due to institutional violence clearly shows – is still a persistent racial nightmare. This dark side of the American «neoliberal-penal state» can be conceived of as a brutal interruption of this cultural codification.