Blackface is helaas nog steeds geen geschiedenis (met video)

Bamboozled is not an easy film to pin down. Its satire targets everyone from media corporations and wigga executives to self-hating black creatives and even the black performers willing to sell themselves out for a quick buck. However, its most powerful moment arrives in its closing sequence: a grueling, three-minute montage comprising genuine footage of American entertainment’s most offensive historical images. This includes blacked-up Hollywood stars like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney; black stars in demeaning “coon” and “mammy” roles; racist cartoons; and disturbing scenes from films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind (1939). I can confirm that this tumbling index of degradation and dehumanization, cloaked in the guise of harmless fun for all the family, gets no easier to stomach on the 10th, 15th, or 20th viewing. Its power is only intensified in today’s climate, where white America has to be reminded daily that black humanity is a thing that matters, and the names of people like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, John Crawford, Eric Harris, Samuel DuBose, the Charleston nine, Kalief Browder, and Tamir Rice are routinely compressed into macabre, symbolic hashtags. A climate in which the idea of a blackface fundraising performance for the Baltimore cops charged in the April 2015 slaying of unarmed black man Freddie Gray can be seriously considered. (The performance was, mercifully, cancelled.)

Ashley Clark in Blackface Refuses to Die (Vice)