Bamboozled (2000)

Yesterday I watched Spike Lee's film Bamboozled. Damon Wayans plays Pierre Delacroix, a black television show creator who is irritated at the pressure from his white boss to create a stereotypical "black" sitcom. In an effort to point out the underlying racism at the network, Delacroix decides to pitch a horribly offensive idea that they should create a minstrel show in the fashion of early 20th-century blackface comedy. He hoped the show would be so horribly offensive that the reactions would get him fired, but his plans backfire when audiences make "The New Millennium Minstrel Show" a huge success. On the show, instead of white actors dressing up in blackface, black actors make themselves even darker with makeup and imitate the "buffoonery" of old racist television and stage shows.

This film was extremely difficult to watch, and made me feel extremely uncomfortable the whole time. It is almost physically painful to watch Delacroix's white boss, Thomas Dunwitty, interact with his black employees, thinking he has the "right" to use the n-word. He is completely oblivious that Delacroix is mocking him when he pitches the idea for the minstrel show, and Dunwitty just releases this sick pleasure in exploiting black stereotypes. It was also really hard to have to watch the black minstrel show actors have to paint themselves in blackface each time before going on stage. I can't imagine how it would feel for those actors to have to invoke the awful history of that kind of stage performance, in a time where African Americans were subhuman in society.

Bamboozled made me think about the suppressed racism that probably exists in America today. The scene in the writer's boardroom is interesting, yet also disturbing. Delacroix tells the white writers to unleash their inner racists, and sets them off by mentioning the O.J. Simpson trial. It's hard to identify the amount or level of racism (I know, those are very abstract terms) in America today, but it seems that it could definitely be similar to how people act in Bamboozled (although it is obviously exaggerated for the point of the movie).

Overall, I think Bamboozled is a very important film to see, because the discomfort at watching the extremity of stereotypes really forces you to question the prevalence of racism. I think too many people dismiss that it is real anymore, but the idea of white audiences accepting a new minstrel show in the film leads to serious questions about what reactions would be like in the real world. Bamboozled also was a glimpse into how damaging something like blackface was to African Americans in the past, and helps put current trends (like models using blackface for "fashion's sake) into perspective.

Levi "Going Forth"?

After reading an article about race representation in advertisements ("Advertising and People of Color" by Clint C. Wilson II and Felix Gutierrez) I remembered the new ad campaign by Levi Jeans. Minorities have a history of either stereotypes perpetrated through commercials (Latin Americans in Taco Bell commercials), or being ignored altogether (using Native American names for products but leaving actual Native Americans underrepresented).

I keep seeing these "Go Forth" commercials in the time before a movie starts in the theater and their racial diversity is actually pretty striking. I'm so used to stereotypes and racial exclusivity that I usually just block out ads, but this commercial (using a Walt Whitman poem as the voice-over) caught my attention:



The first image after the "America" sign on the screen is a young black girl, so you could assume the advertisers are using her as the image directly associated with the U.S. The ad continues with a mixture of black and white Americans with actually a broad range of [arguably stereotypical] representations of urban black youths and a successful white executive to an apparently middle-class interracial group of hipster friends.

I think this is an interesting step forward for an advertisement, since it gave a relatively broad range of black and white representations. It doesn't ignore the obvious reality of urban life, but it doesn't confine the races to certain economic classes either. One issue could be the lack of inclusion of other minorities of the American population, since there aren't any obviously Hispanic or Native American actors, but there is at least some progress with one American ethnicity [Other versions of this commercial actually do include a woman that appears to be Hispanic]. Anyway, I really think that opening image is especially important, because it doesn't have a middle-class white person as the first thought after "America." It isn't exactly a radical change in race relations to have a racially inclusive advertisement, but I think the more diverse representation is actually pretty inspiring (which was probably the intent of advertisers appealing to the younger generation).