#8) Race, Ethnicity and Culture

In “The Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon observed how a culture’s reflections of the past change throughout generations when their oral traditions develop out of colonized territories:

“…the oral traditions—stories, epics, and songs of the people—which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons.”(1442)

In his 2000 film, Bamboozled, Spike Lee satirizes the black culture in new millennial America by modifying how black face minstrel shows are used in entertainment; the blacks now don black face. This narrative brings old references up to date, and forces every American, regardless of ethnicity, to consider how we depict the “heroes” and “weapons” within our own culture, and how that relates to our view of race.

The ethnicity commonly called “black” is known for its “heroes” in entertainment, like music, dance, and athletics. Blacks are depicted as containing a soulful spirit, rich and lively behavior and expressive mannerisms. Thus we could deduce that the black culture has a strong voice both literally and figuratively. Here lies the irony: the voice of blacks throughout history, according to Lee’s film, has always come from the mouths of white privileged individuals, who form the way we think and experience black culture as a whole. Through black face, slapstick, and an eerie embrace of the offensive term “nigger,” Spike Lee conveys how racism is a ubiquitous, uncontrollable double-edged sword founded on power, perception, and personal politics. I will hone in on the complex and arbitrary nature of racism by highlighting the film’s depiction of the white man in power, the controversial communitas brought about by black face, and the disturbing, yet compulsory weapon of “racism” within comedy.

            The definition of racism, according to Stam and Spence, is “the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser’s benefit and at his victim’s expense, in order to justify the former’s own privilege or aggression” (879). This is how I am referring to racism throughout this post: an ideology that keen differences can establish one person as ‘better’ than another, and cause them to ‘justifiably’ act accordingly. Thomas Dunwitty, the producer of CSN television network, is satirized as the powerful white man. Yet the irony is that in his demeanor, he is “blacker” than his writer, Pierre de la Croix. Dunwitty strongly desires to create a more truthful black television show, unlike The Cosby Show, which is essentially “white people with black faces.” To him, white shows are too clean, antiseptic, and boring. So he wants Pierre to counter this and write the way black people really are. He believes that will help his ratings because “black people set the trends, the styles.” Here, he seems to be praising the blacks by using their accent and jargon, mannerisms, and covering his office with pictures of “black brothers”: famous musicians and athletes. He desires truth in the televised representation of blacks, yet he himself is a false representation of his own race; he is a white man, attempting to give blacks an honest voice through his own voice (literally). The level of offense (and/or racism) here is quite layered: he could offend both blacks AND whites by how he represents black AND white culture through his discussion and behavior. This exemplifies how racism is multilayered and comments on both the offender and the offended, the colonizer and the colonized, and complicates a clear division between a people’s “heroes” and “weapons.” Yet is racism really a "weapon" that can control who and HOW it hurts?

            While Dunwitty believes he is being heroic by praising and admiring blacks for being “cool,” Pierre and Sloan (his assistant) translate Dunwitty’s words to mean that he wants a show where blacks are funny, lazy, ignorant, and unwitting buffoons. Therefore to get himself fired, Pierre creates a very offensive show called Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show to become the NEW “stories, epics, and songs of the people” by satirizing the representation of blacks from the early twentieth century. Then the audience’s inevitable disapproval of the black actors in black face would show how brainshwashed Dunwitty was by his own white supremacy. Furthermore, it would show how far America has come in establishing ethics of equality and acceptance. However, to Pierre’s surprise…the show is a hit.

So what does this success mean? Is it a good or bad thing? In the show, blacks are seemingly accepting and embracing the criticism of their own kind, so they could seemingly be gaining the “power” back by owning the joke, rather than allowing themselves to be ridiculed. Yet is the playing field even now? At the show’s peak in popularity, the entire audience wears black face, red lips, white gloves, black t-shirts with the show logo, and calls themselves a nigger. Everyone looks exactly the same. They seem to be accepting and enjoying the ridicule and subconsciously stumbling upon a sense of unity; all races are laughing at the same things, and dressing up to represent the thing they are laughing at. So does that mean racist is gone, since everyone is “equal”?

To help me better understand what Manray and Womack went through each night, struggling to paint their faces, I pictured myself being asked to paint my face ghost white, and to act “whiter.” By reflecting on this parallel, I realized that the art of black face demonstrates how race, ethnicity, and culture are inherently ALL structures of PERFORMANCE. Every day, we perform our race and culture, and our race and culture perform us. Black face makes someone invisible because they are no longer themselves; then are a performance of a skin color, which can be bought and sold, just like the masks and souvenirs.

“Niggas is a beautiful thang!” Honeycutt cries with black face on, seemingly embracing the race, while black protestors proclaim: “Painted face, disgrace to the race!” So which one is it? A disgrace or an embrace? It is all based on how you perceive the performance of race, and how much power you perceive to have over your own identity. Pierre’s line, “I don’t want to have anything to do with black for at least a week” demonstrates how identity is a performative quality. Black, to him, is something that you can turn off and on. Something you can control.

The end of Fanon’s paragraph on oral traditions reads, “The formula ‘This all happened long ago’ is substituted with that of ‘What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow.” (1442) This reflects the radio interview, where Pierre, attempting to defend his show, points out that issues such as racism are not about dates or time periods. Slave mentality and prejudice can show up at any time. So to move a people to change, they have to see and experience racism up front to know how ridiculous and harmful it is. So Pierre could arguably be saying that comedy, which is built upon people finding humor in the differences between them and the characters (the characters act dumb, for example, and the audience is smarter) is always inherently “racist,” even if it has nothing to do with race. After all, he says, “The best defense is offense.” So if racism is the offense, then humor, to Pierre, is the necessary and obligatory defense.

This complex nature and interesting relationship between racism and comedic representation correlates with a quote by Stam and Spence: 

“A comprehensive methodology must pay attention to the mediations which intervene between ‘reality’ and representation. Its emphasis should be on narrative structure, genre conventions, and cinematic style rather than on perfect correctness of representation or fidelity to an original ‘real’ model or prototype.” 

Bamboozled, likewise, is not a real story; it is a pastiche and satire, representing blacks in millennial America. Thus Spike Lee supports this complex methodology that the interventions between the real and the representation should be emphasized in the discourse on racism. We should examine the performativity and perception of power among diverse races, cultures, and ethnicities, and how they translate into fluctuating oral traditions with ever-changing "heroes" and "weapons".