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