Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
Hello! Back in a March 2022 edition of “Keeping Up”, I lamented my inability to track down a copy of the LP “Elevation” by the (now sadly late) jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, despite years of searching in record stores across multiple countries. Well, you’ll never guess what I found yesterday when I went to my local record store, Iris Records in Jersey City, for one final crate dig upon learning that the shop would be imminently closing its doors…
The moment of discovery itself was a truly bittersweet—and, frankly, scarcely believable—spot of kismet that briefly had me believing in some sort of higher power. (A higher power with the specific job of uniting blokes with rare jazz records.)
Steve at Iris, if you’re reading: thank you for providing such a brilliant community service with the store over the years. I’ve found all sorts of amazing records and had so many great conversations with you, the staff and other customers. To everyone else, it’s not all doom and gloom because the shop will remain open in online form, and there will also be very occasional pop-ups at the store, which will maintain its location. And if you’re nowhere near Jersey City—special shout-out here to my subscribers in South Korea, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia and Turkey (one apiece, at the last count)—please consider supporting your local record store!
With Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction—an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure—now in cinemas and nominated for multiple Oscars, and The American Society of Magical Negroes garnering rave reviews, I figured I’d exhume an old print piece that’s never been published online before. What follows is a substantial-ish analysis-slash-overview of the modern history of Black American satirical films. It was tied to the UK release of Justin Simien’s Dear White People, and published under the title “Black Like Us” in the August 2015 issue of Sight & Sound magazine. You will be not be surprised to discover that the piece contains a discussion of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, and you will be even less surprised to discover that I am going to use this platform to yet again plug my own book on the film. As per usual, I’ve given the piece a light edit, but have stopped short of attempting to bring it up to date. Obviously, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, then Terence Nance and friends’ Random Acts of Flyness changed this particular game not long after. Anyhow, enjoy!
On the very same day that I began work on this article, news broke in America of a race-themed incident so bizarre that it seemed to transcend the realm of satire. The parents of Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), came forward to announce that their daughter was in fact white, and had been posing as Black for a number of years.
Footage quickly surfaced of an excruciating interview in which Dolezal was asked by a reporter if she was African American—“I don’t understand the question,” she stuttered, after prolonged hesitation. In the hours and days following the news, websites and social media lit up with opinion ranging from condemnation and mockery of Dolezal’s appropriation of Black culture, to grudging support, and outright bafflement. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, speaking to the concept of race as a social construct, offered an intriguing slant: “[I]n truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.”
This concept of “lying about a lie” is central to writer-director Justin Simien’s debut feature Dear White People, a droll ensemble comedy set inside a prestigious fictional Ivy League University. It tracks four Black students as they navigate a complex web of identity politics and personal issues, and culminates with a horrifyingly offensive “blackface” party apparently organized by a white fraternity. The colossal fib underpinning Simien’s film is that America has triumphantly overcome its past struggles to become a “post-racial” nation, an idea which became particularly popular following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. “People just forgot that racism existed for a second, there,” Simien told me over Skype from L.A., his voice laced with dry humor. “There was this moment in the country where you seemed like you were crying wolf if you complained about racism in any form because, like, ‘Hello! You have a Black President! Oprah’s the richest woman ever, and there’s Beyonce! What do you have to complain about?’”
Recent shocking events in America—from the lack of justice for murdered Black people like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Renisha McBride and Tamir Rice among others; to the racist massacre of nine Black people at a Charleston church—constitute only the most obvious rebuttals to the pernicious “post-racial” narrative. Simien’s focus, however, is less on such explosive examples of anti-Black racism, and more on its insidious manifestations, from daily micro-aggressions to structural inequality and institutionally embedded white privilege. In Dear White People, we see the former in the experience of mild-mannered Lionel (Tyler James Williams), who is tired of white people picking at his majestic afro but powerless to stop them without causing an awkward scene; and the latter in the case of the Black dean of students (Dennis Haysbert), who is more qualified than his white peer and rival—the intellectually mediocre president (Peter Syvertsen)—yet must settle for the lesser role.
Dear White People is notable for its wry, sardonic presentation of tricky material. Its title, for example, derives from the arch radio broadcasts delivered by radical student filmmaker Sam (Tessa Thompson): they begin with piquant rejoinders like “Dear white people, the minimum number of Black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two.” Simien’s tonal strategy is well-considered. “Satire is particularly powerful because it tricks you into laughing at the thing that otherwise you wouldn’t even look at before,” he says. “You laugh and you laugh and then you realize you’ve just looked at something you weren’t willing to look at before, and you have to deal with it. That’s what I think is so powerful about satire.” The laughs, however, stop definitively during the end credits, into which Simien splices a series of chilling photographs of genuine recent blackface-themed parties at US colleges.
As a powerful rhetorical technique, this brusque intrusion of reality upon a fictional landscape recalls the end of Spike Lee’s acrid Bamboozled (2000), in which the conclusion of the diegetic narrative is followed by a five minute montage depicting Hollywood’s most offensive historical stereotypes of Black people. Bamboozled is a clear influence on Dear White People, and—although it was critically mauled and performed poorly at the box office—is arguably the central work in a slim yet distinct body of Black American cinema which deploys satirical methods (absurdity, irony, sarcasm, dark humor) to pose tough questions about race without delivering obvious answers.
Bamboozled was inspired by media satires like Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd (1957) and Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), as well as Lee’s own student short The Answer (1980), in which a Black screenwriter accepts a bumper fee to pen a remake of D.W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation. Bamboozled stars Damon Wayans as Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard-educated TV executive who is chronically frustrated by the lack of opportunities he is afforded by his vulgar wigga boss Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) to create shows for middle class African Americans. Delacroix thus proposes the most offensive idea he can conjure—a modern-day blackface minstrel show—in order to expose the racist venality of the network. He also banks on ensuring himself the sack, plus a tasty severance package, should the show make it to air: how could the American public possibly countenance such an affront to good taste? However, in a ‘Springtime For Hitler’-esque twist, ‘The New Millennium Minstrel Show’ becomes a smash hit with audiences, sending Delacroix into a pit of self loathing, and the plot into a spiral of macabre, violent melodrama.
Bamboozled is a deliberately excessive, unwieldy, and ultimately cold work, yet no major American film has so comprehensively explored the lasting, corrosive effects of the racial stereotypes forged in Hollywood’s early days and beyond. Often mistaken for a double barreled shotgun blast at white racism, Bamboozled in fact draws its visceral power from the range and breadth of its rage. Lee, operating in an unprecedentedly crotchety register, lets nobody off the hook. He chides gangsta rappers and contemporary Black audiences for their collusion in the replication of stereotypes; criticizes Black performers for allowing themselves to be “cooned”; and arguably even implicates himself. It’s hard not to see the film’s jabs at rampant commercialism (“Timmi Hillnigger” clothes marketed aggressively at Black youth), and not consider Lee’s own pivotal involvement in making Nike trainers such a hot property through a series of ubiquitous commercials in the 1980s and ‘90s. Bamboozled’s combination of fearless provocation, wit and ire was a key influence on boundary-pushing Black American humor in the coming decades, from Chappelle’s Show (which featured a character named Clayton Bigsby, a blind, Black white supremacist), Aaron McGruder’s animated series The Boondocks, and the comedy of Key & Peele and Larry Wilmore.
Bamboozled’s human core is provided by Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), the impoverished, talented and hopelessly circumscribed black entertainers drawn into Delacroix’s sticky web: they can’t get work anywhere else. In this respect, Lee’s film echoes Robert Townsend’s scalpel-sharp—but infinitely more good-natured—Hollywood Shuffle (1987), in which the director also stars as a jobbing Black actor forced to repeatedly audition for a desultory range of roles: pimps, hoodlums or slaves. Amid the smart comedy, Townsend proffers a moment of horror: a scene in which white movie execs repeatedly demand an “Eddie Murphy type”, while the camera pans across a row of bare-necked, leather-jacketed Black actors (some of the lighter skinned actors are wearing blackface make-up) giving it their best Murphy-style shit-eating cackle. The message is clear: if you don’t want to play a slave, then mimic the one guy who made it.
Through Pierre Delacroix, Bamboozled also facilitates a valuable discourse on “Blackness” that's hyper-relevant in the Dolezal age: what does it mean, and who can claim it? With his Ivy League pedigree, made-up name, and preposterously affected accent, Delacroix clearly orbits outside traditional realms of onscreen Black identity, yet Lee refrains from presenting him as a straightforward Uncle Tom caricature. One of the film’s funniest scenes depicts a Delacroix daydream in which he boxes the oafish Dunwitty about the ears as punishment for his egregious disrespect (“If the truth be told, I probably know niggers better than you,” claims Dunwitty without a trace of irony.)
Questions surrounding authentic Blackness are common in Lee’s work, like his own college satire, School Daze (1988), and the bombastic Drop Squad (1994), which he executive produced. Drop Squad follows a group of violent Black neo-revolutionaries who kidnap and “de-program” Black people whom they consider sellouts — one such “sellout”, a cynical ad-man played by Eriq LaSalle, is an obvious precursor to Delacroix. Much subtler, yet on a similar theme, is Michael Schultz’s perceptive comedy Livin’ Large (1991), about an aspiring Black TV anchorman who wonders whether becoming successful also means becoming "white". The oddball, outsider Black figure can also be found in Wendell B. Harris disturbing Sundance-winner Chameleon Street (1989), about a Chicago career impostor who slipped undetected into a number of roles from lawyer to gynecologist.
Bamboozled and Dear White People are definitively new millennium texts in the way they deal with the production and effects of new media (dissemination of information on the internet plays a key role in both narratives). Yet tonally they hark back to a gaggle of weird, acidly humorous films which posed thorny questions about race in the turbulent aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy.
Though not made by Black directors, Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope (1969) and Brian De Palma’s Hi Mom! (1970) are worthy of inclusion in this discussion. In the former, the token Black man on the executive board of an advertising firm is accidentally put in charge; the latter, meanwhile, digresses from its main narrative to present ‘Be Black, Baby!’, an extended “documentary” in which a group of Black actors in whiteface show an audience of nervy WASPs in blackface make-up what it’s really like to be Black, with disastrous consequences.
Hal Ashby’s starkly ironic The Landlord (1970)—written by the great Bill Gunn—presciently critiques white gentrification of urban Black areas, and Melvin van Peebles’ Watermelon Man (1970) follows a cocky, racist suburban white man who one day awakes to discover, to his horror, that he has transformed into a Black man. The film, which features a truly hilarious, MF Doom-sampled performance from Godfrey Cambridge, ambles along with a combination of smart social observation and slightly dubious humor, but ends with a bang. The man, having come to terms with his Blackness, is last seen practicing martial arts with a group of Black militant activists. Watermelon Man was the perfect prelude to Van Peebles’s next film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which was dubbed “the first truly revolutionary Black film ever made… presented to us by a Black man” by Black Panther Huey Newton. Even better, though, is Ivan Dixon’s jaw-dropping The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), in which a Black man recruited by the CIA as pen-pusher proceeds to learn—then forcefully apply—the techniques of urban guerrilla warfare on the streets of Chicago.
No discussion of Black film satire would be complete without mention of the self-reflexive parodies in which Black filmmakers comment ironically on stereotyped styles and genres with which their contemporaries and forebears have been associated. Trashy Blaxploitation tropes are gleefully skewered in Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988) and Scott Sanders’ Black Dynamite (2009); gangsta rap showboating takes a pounding in Tamra Davis’ CB4 (1993) and Rusty Cundieff’s superb Fear of a Black Hat (1993); while Paris Barclay’s hood movie send-up Don’t Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996) is almost as good as its title.
It’s a relief that Dear White People has secured an albeit limited UK release some 17 months after its Sundance bow, but few of the other films discussed above are especially easy to locate today. Perhaps in part because of their critical, anti-establishment approaches and innate awkwardness, they’ve suffered from shoddy distribution, limited home entertainment releases or, in the case of The Spook Who Sat By Door, allegedly been actively suppressed by the FBI. Yet they’re each worth the effort in tracking down. They all offer distinct, compelling takes on the Black American experience, and what's more, the treasure hunt should be sufficiently involving to keep you busy until the inevitable Rachel Dolezal biopic hits our screens.
Before I go, a quick shout-out to the intrepid compilers of the remarkable resource, the Palestine Film Index, whose cover statement reads, in part:
Palestine Film Index is a growing list of films from and about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, made by Palestinians and those in solidarity with them. The index starts with films from the revolutionary period (68 - 82) made by the militant filmmakers of the Palestine Film Unit and their allies, and extends through a multitude of voices to the present day. It is by no means a complete or exhaustive representation of the vast universe that is Palestinian cinema, but is only a small fragmentary list that we hope nonetheless can be used as an instrument of study and solidarity.
Until next time!
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!