ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the caricatures of the blackface minstrel show and the racist imperatives that lay behind them came to define the birth of cinema. In turn, the chapter looks at how Michael Jackson's 1991 short film ‘Black or White’ – a cinematic spectacle in itself – responded to that as well as to the racial turmoil of its own day. In this context, and the widespread hostility with which ‘Black or White’ was met, the chapter goes on to discuss Jackson's ‘racial inversion’, by way of his physical change, and how that spoke up against the blackface mask and its long enduring legacy.
