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November 1993

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Subject:
From:
Edward Guerrero <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 4 Nov 1993 10:41:10 -0500
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SCREEN-L: Here's a cyber-op-ed I recently circulated on the AFROAM-L
concerning the most recent eurption of neo-minstrel antics.
 
 
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 93 00:24 EDT
From:[log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Ted, Whoopie & Sambo (fwd)
 
 
 
 
             TED, WHOOPIE & SAMBO
 
By now we all know of Ted Danson's Friars' Club performance in
blackface and full minstrel regalia, including a number of
questionable racial jokes, before an audience of dignataries
including Mayor Dinkins and TV talk show host Montel Williams.
In all, Danson's throwback, minstrel show was insulting and
controversial enough to cause Montel Williams to walk out in
protest, and to draw the attention of the mass media. In
response to all of the ruckus, Whoopie Goldberg has spoken out
in defense of the show and acknowledged collaborating on the
material for this mishap performance.
 
Overall, I'm sorry that Whoopie has taken such a problematic stance in
this messy affair. Or maybe I'm just sorry that she couldn't have forseen
where such a putrid replay of minstrel imagery, used for ever to devalue
black people, inevitably had to lead. It's too bad she didn't have the
prescience to ice the whole thing from the jump. But there is something
more subtle going on here. For implicit in her defense of Danson, is the
flawed assumption that because she is black and a media star, she can
somehow validate and update these retro-Kingfish images, rendering them
racially "safe" for consumption by a mass "crossover" audience. Sad to
say... but Whoopie is not the first to deploy such a strategy, it being at
least as old as Stepin Fetchit and as contemporary as Eddie Murphy's
resurrection of "Buckwheat." Yet even Murphy was stung enough by protest
to offer an uncomfortable explanation of his neo-Buckwheat character in
his RAW concert film. Responding to the same kind of hurt, Stepin Fetchit,
for all of his misused talent, spent his last years in mumbling
justification and apology for his Sambo screen persona.
 
If indeed BLACKNESS is the unique experience that Goldberg calls upon to
exonerate Danson for his minstrel antics, then I can't really be that
disappointed with him. Let's just chalk up his part in this to ignorance,
or white denial, or bad judgement, or maybe the impulsive return of the
repressed images that have fed so much of this society's racial nightmare.
But let me pull sister's coat about the way black humanity usually gets
represented (or should I say MISrepresented) in the media and show
business. Minstrels, Sambo and Mammy have been the most popular black
figures in the American social imagination for well over a century, until
they were driven underground by the political pressure of the Civil Rights
Movement and the black identity impulse that followed. I say "underground"
because these insulting caricatures are resilient demons that have a way
of transforming themselves and popping up in the thinnest disguises, like
white men in blackface in flicks like SILVER STREAK and SOUL MAN, or
whites coded as transgressive blacks in THE BLUES BROTHERS, or just plain ol
Jimmy "JJ" Walker or Damon Waynans' "wino" character on the tube at prime
time. And of course Mammy lives, (if benignly reincarnated) in CLARA'S HEART.
 
On "Entertainment Tonight" Goldberg described Danson's material as
genuinely funny. But I have to respond by asserting that black people
will never find Zip Coon, Buckwheat, Kingfish or Sambo, in any of their
contemporary incarnations that funny, any more than Asian Americans find
Charlie Chan or Native Americans find Tonto, "funny." Unfortunately, the
blackface minstrel coon and a whole throng of dangerous ghosts still
haunt our popular entertainment, mocking us from the TV and movie
screens, stunting the perception of black humanity with a thousand subtle
cuts and gags.
 
Montel Williams was right to walk out on such a degrading performance,
and I'm sure others in the audience, were they not held by obligation,
would have done the same. Brother Montel understands what any struggling
collectivity must in a plural society. Put simply, one's dignity is
negotiated on a daily basis and one has only as much humanity as one can
creatively produce, or defend against a symbolic order that until very
recently indeed, was dedicated to the subordination of African Americans,
in social life and the popular media. So I would caution Whoopie and
Ted... give Sambo a rest and don't lend him any more psychic energy than
he already has. Sambo is a dangerous, disreputable character, a slippery
impersonator wearing many masks and guises. And unfortunately, he and his
posse are still on the loose throughout the land.
 
 
Ed Guerrero
Critic At Large

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