sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

I don't exactly remember where I first heard about Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled, which is about a Black TV executive whose attempt to get fired by pitching a blackface minstrel show ends up blowing up in his face when the show ends up a huge hit. It was either someone mentioning it back on the Something Awful Forums or the result of Wikipedia surfing while bored at work. It could have very well been at least a decade ago.

And I finally watched it and despite the unflinching onslaught of denigrating cultural products of anti-Black stereotypes the film rubs our collective noses in, it fucking revitalized my sense of Blackness. It's going to be a tough watch because of that, but it's a film before its time.

Now it isn't because I thought the film was going to be bad or crass that I took so long to watch it. There was a funny line one of the interviewees gave in the VH1 slurry that was I Love the 70s about the Roots TV miniseries: "I was angry at white people for a week after that." This is the reality of engaging with media on race when you're Black. When you know a show is going to get heavy, you have to balance if you can even afford to be angry at white people for a week¹. Especially if you're a Black person in a majority white environment like our protagonist Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is.

The second that we hear Delacroix speak, we sense something² is very wrong with this "Negro". I use that term because in a performance that so expertly captures the behavior of Black people who have gotten deep into their performance of anti-Blackness for the sake of white people as Delacroix, that's what Delacroix refers to himself and other Black people as. Constantly. As FD Signifier points out in his recent essay on the film³, this isn't just code-switching.

Delacroix has so embodied the bad faith of making himself safe and appealing to white people as a Black man, that the mask has supplanted his true face. His manner of speaking is a voice that has been twisted to remove all traces of Blackness to the point that it more resembles an old-timey white vaudeville villain like Snidely Whiplash. But it also feels very understandable why he's done this as we begin to see him interact with the rest of his office.

His white boss, Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport), is an overbearing frat boy caricature of Quentin Tarantino who has surrounded himself with the trappings of Blackness and feels this makes him "Blacker" than Delacroix, which he crudely tells Delacroix to his face. Dunwitty finds Delacroix's pitches centering more directly to Black issues in a grounded (though middle and upper class) way to be boring and old. It was good when the Cosby show broke that, but now people need something "raw"er Dunwitty feels.

Dunwitty obviously doesn't think very highly of Delacroix at all, and several lines infer that he constantly bullies and marginalizes Delacroix beyond what we see in the opening part of the movie, where he doesn't inform Delacroix about an important staff meeting causing Delacroix to be late and get berated. And as someone who just fell out of being in a majority white corporate environment in flames, ooh boy did they nail the unrelenting and oppressive whiteness of the office. Like it's extreme, for sure, but only because real life Dunwitties have an ounce more of tact⁴.

Delacroix's only fellow Black person in the office is his assistant, Sloan Hopkins (Jada Pinkett Smith), who is also very much playing the same game as Delacroix, just with less bad faith, and the struggle of being a woman on top of that. As well as being under Delacroix so the recipient of the shit rolling downhill from Dunwitty. Despite this, Delacroix and Hopkins seem to have some rapport with each other, and the two begin to discuss their mutual hatred of Dunwitty and his continual rejection of more grounded Black pitches.

Delacroix would love to just quit, but he's bound by his contract unless he gets fired⁵. He and Hopkins decide to pitch a straight-out modern blackface minstrel show to Dunwitty, hoping that he would be so offended to fire them, freeing them. They conscript two street buskers, the exceptionally skilled tap-dancer Manray (Savion Glover) and his hype man Womack (Tommy Davidson) to be the stars of "Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show". Manray as "Mantan", and Womack as "Sleep 'n Eat", who both have their misgivings but are eager to get off the street and accept.

And to everyone's chagrin, the show takes off, starting with a rave assessment by Dunwitty at the pitch meeting, becoming a hit. The roster of stereotypes gets further filled out once they have a budget and no shortage of Black people needing to get paid. People are so taken, the audience starts showing up in blackface and shouting how they too are "niggers". How everyone reacts makes up the rest of the plot with everyone except Delacroix and Dunwitty eventually beginning to sour on the idea and reacting as they see fit.

I feel like I could go on with the plot summary, because oh my god do I want to talk about the Mau Maus, a Black revolutionary hip-hop group led by Big Blak Africa (Yasiin Bey), Hopkin's brother, hoping that she could get them a leg up at the channel. They are an interesting balance of the "unserious Black radical" joke character that constantly crops up in Black comedy and a sympathetic portrayal of actual Black radicals. However, I'm just going to content myself with putting them up there as a Chekov, and suggest you find out why they're here by watching the movie⁶.

Now, before you run off and watch let me reiterate that the movie is unrelenting in shoving minstrel imagery in your nose as a viewer, partially due to a bit where Delacroix begins collecting minstrel memorabilia in his office as the story moves on. But mostly because the it wants to pull a trick on you to point out how prevalent this shit is in our culture.

When we see the first shooting of "Mantan", the audience actually does not laugh and watches in uncertain silence. I figure this is because Spike Lee wants you to hear loud and clear when you and the other people watching laugh at the minstrel jokes. And maybe y'all are woker than me and will remain stone-faced, but sure enough I did laugh at some of them. I also recognized how many of them were familiar because I had seen other versions of them from say, Looney Toons cartoons, often not even recognizing their provenance from minstrely. Spike Lee wants you to face the other horror that sometimes these jokes are just 100% solid comedy and make you ask if that comedy is worth it.

And the movie's message is clear. While we can understand the pressures that led and lead Black people to take on the role of being a "coon", the cost in dignity and effects on how Black people are viewed is not worth it. Further, it makes clear that we cannot trust that "good" white people will call this out, but will instead come up with a whole toolkit of denial and bullshit to defuse the anger. The same toolkit you can catch people using still today, and outlined by a white executive who comes in to provide that toolkit to Delacroix and Hopkins, who come to realize with horror that it works.

But most of all, this type of coonery doesn't just hurt the wider Black culture, but it very directly takes a toll on those who accept that role, eating them out from the inside with every step they take further into it. That the coon is at heart a terrified Black person afraid what will happen when white people stop laughing. Because they likely know that if they leave, the money stops, and there'll be another coon ready to take their place.

So how did this actually make me feel better about my Blackness? Because I can at least look back on my life, where as a biracial person I was practically bred for coonery, and inundated with all sorts of "tragic mulatto" bullshit that kept me from realizing that. But I did eventually realize what many Black people in my life tried to teach me earlier, and made the necessary decision to break out of that shit the best I could⁷. More that while I sadly have slept on Spike Lee due to that shit, that his films are much more relevant to my own personal travels as a Black person than I ever thought.

And that's why it's a great movie that the US in the year 2000 was completely not ready for leading to its flopping. We'd have to wait until Boots Riley dropped Sorry to Bother You for a film that is so unflinching with its hokum.

1. Not to ignore that I bet most of us have that anger on simmer 24/7 due to the sheer level of white nonsense we're all drowning in. I'm talking about when that simmer becomes a rolling boil.

2. Well, Black people at least.

3. Part of the reason I felt inspired to watch Bamboozled is because I was about to sit down to watch his essay, when I felt like "fuck I better just watch the original film first." I'm glad I did, and that's not meant to be any slight against his essay. Watch both.

4. It's super interesting to try to think of how a more modern version of Dunwitty would differ. I suspect a bit less brash and a bit more paternalistic and faux progressive.

5. Oh dang, I just literally went through this at my last job. I ended up quitting and taking the punishment for it. I'm unemployed but healing.

6. Or go watch FD Signifier's essay, he gives a complete plot summary there. But I personally recommend you watch the movie and see the drama unfold before you.

7. Cause under capitalism we all got to shuck and jive a little to get by, do we not?