Satire and Stereotyping in the Birth of a Nation and BamboozledEssay Preview: Satire and Stereotyping in the Birth of a Nation and BamboozledReport this essaySpike Lees film Bamboozled (2000), cinematically stages American mass entertainments history of discrimination with humiliating minstrel stereotypes which was first brought to film in 1915 by D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation. Blackface minstrelsy is a disturbing legacy that began as a tradition in the early 1800s on stage, with white actors using burnt corks to darken their skin and “allowing them to portray African-American slaves, usually as lazy, child-like providers of comic relief” (4). This eventually evolved into Vaudeville-style parody shows consisting of songs, dances and comic skits. This tradition represented an accepted way of looking at African-Americans and was the first form of American mass culture that created stereotypes. At the time it also eased white tensions about black America and the images served to justify notions of white superiority and power. Early American cinema relied on racial stereotypes and spectacles and it gained much popularity because it drew heavily from the tropes of vaudeville and minstrel shows, it was an effort to make the film-going experience comfortable. Bamboozled offers itself as a “status check” of the genealogy of American Cinema that begins with Griffith and develops through most of the genre and major technological innovation in film history. Bamboozled clearly compresses the aesthetic and socioeconomic history of racist representation and essentially is a tool to analyze the presence of this history in the present. It also destabilizes the possibility of constructing an “innocent” history, by rooting the film industry in the aesthetics of racism. Minstrelsy is politically charged and its influence has clearly continued to influence film historically and contemporarily. Bamboozled and Birth of a Nation share two common elements of satire and stereotyping.
Birth of a NationThe Birth of a Nation relays a strong message of its white supremist vision through minstrelsy and propaganda which implicitly excluded African-Americans from stage and identity performance. It is considered the single most important and key film of all time in American movie history. It contains many cinematic innovations and refinements, technical effects and artistic advancements, including a color sequence at the end. It had a “formative influence on future films and has had a recognized impact on film history and the development of film as art” (7). Its story includes the events leading up to the nations split; the Civil War era; the period from the end of the Civil War to Lincolns assassination; the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era detailing the struggle over the control of Congress during Andrew Johnsons presidency , actions of the Radical Republicans to enfranchise the freed slaves, and the rise of the KKK. The film was made during a time when the audiences were familiar with the blackface and it provided an authentic re-creation of African-American culture and provided a narrative to “explain” the ambivalence of its stereotypes: “black” behavior is the direct result of “white” politics. In blackface, whiteness controls the performance of blackness. African American actors are in the film but most are not the main characters, instead they appear in mobs that do not speak and make random roars and murmurs. The few African-American actors that do have their own individual roles put on the blackface and portray either devoted Southern servants who reject freedom after the Civil War or rebellious Northern servants who roll their eyes. The minstrels mimed blacks and in the Birth of a Nation, the black actors and clearly showed that they were “denied potential of having their own self-representation and instead had a fixed African-American identity masked and crucially guided by “whiteness” (6). Literal blackface surfaces in the film in contexts that are clearly suggestive of minstrelsys racist implications. One actor, who early in the movie plays Abraham Lincoln, later rides a horse wearing a Ku Klux Klan mask and robes only to chase himself in blackface. Griffith recycles the actors which makes the film complex and difficult to completely understand. For example the audience may believe that the masked Ku Klux Klan riders were “white” behind their masks and have in reality may have tried to forget that many of the fleeing African Americans were actually “white” actors.
American whiteness as articulated by Birth of a Nation is built on stereotypes, and this is precisely why minstrelsy might have the power to resist racism. Minstrel performances relied on stereotypes to evoke their opposites. It is possible to assume that the discourse of mass entertainment from its minstrel days to current film and possibly beyond, recognizing and accepting blackface conventions and stereotypes were key, almost necessary conditions of American whiteness. “Minstrelsy took the productive ambivalence inherent to the stereotype and magnified it to increase the stereotypes inevitable undoing of itself” (4). But in Birth of a Nation, the determining concept of the stereotype that makes sense is disrupted by the inevitable context provided by narrative: in the films narrative, African-Americans are seen gently working and playing for their masters benefit prior to the Civil War. This stereotypical representation draws on myths that blackface minstrelsy seemed to ally to the politics of white supremacy; it worked to promote propaganda. Prior to the Civil War, the film explains African-Americans were docile and happy on the plantation because of slave laws imposed by the political system that was dominated by white people, even if this system was deeply divided. After the Civil War however, the other side of the stereotypes emerge; African-Americans in literal and figurative blackface are shown avoiding work to drink, riot anarchically and lust indiscriminately. The stereotype works because it is continually pronounced through repetition.
Griffith had a racist ideology and he is probably the reason for the longevity of minstrel stereotypes in American mass entertainment. Just as blackface implies the power of whiteness to construct and control blackness, so does Birth of a Nations account of Reconstruction imply this same power: Whiteness controls blackness in the narrative and in the films blackface form. Indeed, whiteness controls blackness even when blackness is out of control (hence the need for many African-American performers to apply burnt cork). The contradictory stereotype is the logic of white supremacy and the reason for the exclusion of blackness from self-representation and from performance. The power of stereotypes seem to undermine themselves and the minstrelsy
The irony of the myth and the myth-belief may be that the myth has been promulgated largely by white males, who are often a little too liberal for their own good. “But what should I be ashamed of!” they all cry on screen. It’s a little ironic – but it does have a basis in what we think of as the old media. As we’ve shown, we cannot deny that our cultural practices, our experiences and our opinions about white people are racist and sexist, particularly when we consider the recent events in Charlottesville and the rise of Donald Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” and “he’s the right guy”. We can just take the rhetoric and treat it as much or even less true than we’d like, or not, since the history of race-based hate has not been as fraught. So our current cultural culture is, as it were, part of the racist white supremacy culture.
I think we can see why cultural and historical factors such as the fact that white-male male performance models used to perform such a thing, and when they did, they’ve turned into a kind of glorified “alternative” culture, in the shape of a self-perpetuating image of whiteness and an image of white masculinity which also includes racist attitudes and stereotypes. These are very clearly “racist” parts of the white male culture – and, for our purposes, in the context of modern American music. I think we can see why some of them tend to reflect a more “racist” or “irrelevant” version of what the “real” American is like, and why it’s much easier to “prove” that you haven’t seen blackface or that you were wrong in certain ways (both are far from being necessary to make the cultural sense of white supremacy they claim to represent). I think we can find our own perspective on them and our own assumptions about what that culture looks like.
I agree with this. But it’s fair to say we have an inbuilt idea of whiteness that can be challenged and changed by our own perception. To claim that cultural racism isn’t real does imply that we have an inbuilt concept of its possible truth. There are a few things about it that I’d like to stress. I think the question that’s most important for us is why the majority of American culture has not allowed whiteness to truly exist in all its forms (which I think is really a good question even after we have seen a host of white people getting shot at by a white man). These include the way Western culture has assumed that white people are inherently the same way that European and Anglo-Americans assume that Europeans are inherently the same way that Italians and Germans are inherently the same way that English people assume that English people always have the same beliefs and customs. Thus we can assume that our culture is as much a product of our own cultural past as white culture is or that our culture is shaped by our own culture’s