ABSTRACT
Spike Lee's Bamboozled, a film that unsettled both black and white audiences when it was released in 2000, is about black actors learning to perform white representations of blackness, to in effect put on a black face for a white audience. In using the minstrel show as a central metaphor or trope in the movie, Lee was making an important point about “blackness” as a production of “whiteness.” The minstrel show, performed by whites in “black face” more than a century ago and through the late 1920s in films such as The Jazz Singer with A1 Jolsen in black face, demonstrated the dominant culture of whiteness recognized all along that blackness was a representation, and one they had produced at that. So, whites could perform blackness, and arguably better than blacks. When whites put on black face, they became their own Other, and an Other who could be expected to stay in character. The minstrel show reinforced and policed rigid racial stereotypes that were oppressive. At the same time, however, it seemed to parody these stereotypes, revealing them as no more than an illusion, a performance, and an exteriorization of part of the white self.
