Nicole Wong

Racial Masks and Stereotypes in Imitation of Life and

By Nicole Wong

Visible signs of diference mark the racialized body only in com- bination with nonvisible social preconceptions and expectations. A racial stereotype is the link, the image, which ties the visible with the nonvisible imagined meanings and values specifc to the culture in which they are produced and shared. Te process of racial stereotyping therefore requires three components: the marked body, the collective society of meaning and image-makers, and the racial mask through which the latter views and defnes the former. My concern in this article is how American1 popular culture and mass media entertainment has become the foremost platform for racial meaning production, perpetuating false racial stereotypes, yet at the same time attempting to expose its own role as image-maker.

As forms of popular mass media entertainment, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) and ’s Bamboozled (2000) depict such an exposition of the racial stereotyping process, but with signifcant diferences that come with forty years’ distance. Tese two flms function as tragic allegories of the racial stereotype production process as popular entertainment, wherein central characters mask their marked bodies, their self-identity and essential personhood. Racial stereotypes literally are enacted on stage to entertain an audience, a downsized representation of

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both American media makers and receivers. Trough the optic of Sander Gilman’s conceptions of the Other and the Self, I will explore the motives behind, and subsequent futility of, attempts to mask racial self-identities with media-defined projected identities that ultimately turn performers into the slaves of spectators. I will also position the ideologies of both films as refections of the racial performer/audience relationship of their respective time periods.

Imitation of Life, a flm adaptation of the Fannie Hurst novel of the same name, follows the story of Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a struggling single black mother who moves in with Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a white widow struggling to become an actress. Te two become close friends as Lora becomes increasingly successful and Annie agreeably acts as her domestic servant. Meanwhile, Annie’s light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), begins passing as white, eventually leaving home to perform as a hypersexual white nightclub dancer. Afer fnding Sarah Jane dancing in a sleazy club and agreeing to let her continue living as a white woman, Annie dies of grief, prompting Sarah Jane to re-embrace her black identity.

Forty years later, Bamboozled moves away from everyday and ordinary experiences of the maternal melodrama as popular attraction towards the broadcast television show format. Te flm tells the story of Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), an uptight, educated, black television producer. In an attempt to get fred, Delacroix proposes a where black actors perform in to his patronizing white boss Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport). To his surprise Dunwitty loves the idea and the show becomes a huge hit. Manray (Savion Glover), a former street performer, changes his name and becomes the star of the show Mantan: A Twentieth Century Minstrel Show. Afer refusing

62 Nicole Wong to continue performing in blackface, he is fred, and eventually kidnapped and killed by the Mau Maus, a caricatured Black Nationalist group.

Racial masks and stereotypes function in these two flms in terms of the performer/audience relationship, analogous to Gilman’s Other/Self dichotomy.2 Gilman describes stereotypes as the categories of perceived diferences that separate the Self from the uncontrollable non-Self, the Other, of the outside world. Te contact between this Self, the idealized pillar of control and solid permanence, and the outside Other, the threateningly unfamiliar and obscure, results in a paradigm destabilization within the Self. The subsequent anxiety and desire for re- stabilization results in an objectifcation of this Other. Trough a series of analogies and associations with previous experiences or imagined fantasies, and a projection of specifc characteristics onto the Other, it will satisfy the pre-emptively formed template to which certain markers of diference, such as race, have assigned it. Tese templates are mutually exclusive stereotypes, dividing the racial Self from the visible or imaginary diferent racial Other, creating a binary logic. It is the Self ’s disposition towards categorizing the exterior unknown, as well as media-produced racial Other fantasies, that enable the process of stereotype and mask construction and false identity projection, a process that is the basis of both Imitation of Life and Bamboozled. Sarah Jane, Manray, and Delacroix are the racial Others, the performers, who wear a mask to appease the Selves represented by the white males for whom Sarah Jane pretends to be white, or the studio audience that determines the popularity of Delacroix’s minstrel show.

Sirk and Lee structure their films around the perspective of the Other, the central characters who propel the narrative.

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Yet the viewer is also made aware of the Self ’s perspective, that of the white males and studio audience, allowing us as viewers to witness and analyze the relationship between the two, exposing the stereotyping process. Tis is accomplished defly by the use of mirrors, not as refective, but as refractive surfaces, symbolically showing us not what the Other character looks like or who he or she really is, but rather the image of that character that the Other wishes to present, and the Selves in the flm are to see. In other words, the mirror refects the mask, not the person. To illustrate, in Imitation of Life Sarah Jane, who has been passing for white, meets with her white boyfriend Frankie on a deserted street corner. As she suggests running away together and he seems to agree, the camera pans to the lef, so the viewer only sees Sarah Jane as an image refected in the glass window behind Frankie. In this initial frame, the viewer is led to believe that Frankie is convinced by Sarah Jane’s mask; he sees her as we see her now— happy, honest, white. Te mirror is bending the image of Sarah Jane, an intervening shroud distorting who she really is. In this case, Frankie is the white, male, normative Self who feels secure in thinking Sarah Jane is also white. Discovering that her mother is black, Frankie is destabilized and projects a false image/stereo- type of “blackness” onto Sarah Jane. As Frankie angrily asks, “Is your mother a nigger?” the camera quickly pans back to the right and we, the viewer, see Sarah Jane directly, as her white mask falls away. However, the scene continues, Sarah Jane refuses to stop the masquerade. As she repeatedly denies being black, the camera again pans to the lef, and we again see Sarah Jane’s image in the glass window, getting smaller and smaller as her mask disintegrates into a brutal beating.

In Bamboozled, the most illuminating use of mirrors occurs when Manray and Womack3 apply blackface makeup for the

64 Nicole Wong frst time. As the two performers sponge on the burnt cork paste, shots alternate between close-ups of their faces in the process of being covered in a literal black mask. We see them as the indivi- duals that they are: shots of their blackened faces in full minstrel costume refected are in the mirror, the artifcial image about to be presented to the diegetic studio audience. Te symbolic nature of the mirror is further reinforced when Manray refuses to put the makeup on, and he is subsequently fred. In this melancholy scene, as Manray enters his dressing room and fumbles with the makeup and the show’s script, we see him directly, without make- up, as he sees himself. The camera moves, avoiding the mirror, and when we finally see Manray’s reflection in the mirror, it is accompanied by the sound of a woman in the studio audience screaming, “Be a nigger!” Hence, we comprehend the connection between what is seen in that mirror and what the audience expects to see from Manray—a bufoonish minstrel performer.

In addition to mirrors, we see in Bamboozled the use of rep- resentational mediums such as television and the internet to fguratively and literally depict the culmination of the stereotype process: the death of the authentic individual to let the stereotype live.4 Afer Manray is fred from the Mantan show for refusing to continue to degrade himself, for defending his self-identity,5 he is kidnapped by the Mau Maus who plan to flm his murder, which is broadcast live online and on television as a sadistic form of entertainment. Tis fnal ‘dance of death’ is repeatedly framed through video cameras, monitors, televisions, and computer screens, as the diegetic viewing audience believes they are watching not the murder of Manray, a complex human individual, but of Mantan, a simplified stereotype of a ‘minstrel coon’. Paradoxically, the Mau Maus succeed in killing the individual who fought against the racial mask, thus strengthening the degrading racial stereotypes they claim to despise.

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Te Mau Maus are a walking contradiction in that they claim to be in favour of black rights, when actually they are more like living stereotypes created and controlled by the image-making media. As a caricature of the Black Nationalist, the Mau Maus act as agents of society’s collective Self, the society that watches and enjoys the Mantan minstrel show, sent out to eliminate Manray, the threat to their stabilized racial ecosystem. Similar to Sarah Jane’s boyfriend, this collective Self is what Gilman calls patho- logical, lacking the “ability to distinguish the ‘individual’ from the stereotyped class into which the object might automatically be placed”(Gilman 18), unable to see Sarah Jane or Manray beyond the racial mask.

Having discussed the endpoint of the stereotype process, my attention now turns to the beginning of the process: why do these racially marked characters choose to don a racial mask? Sarah Jane, Manray, and Delacroix have diferent personal reasons, but each refects the notion that race is not the sole axis of diferenti- ation that marks them as Other.6 Tey wish to transcend gender and class distinctions, as well.

From birth, Sarah Jane is immediately forced to wear the mask that her mother Annie wears, of a servile, uneducated, black woman with few economic opportunities. Sarah Jane desires to transcend the economic and gender prescriptions of 1950s American society that are reifed in Annie, and for her this means refusing to date “busboys, cooks, chaufeurs,” and instead attract- ing wealthy white men. She casts of the black mask in favour of a more highly regarded identity, “masquerading similarity with the dominant culture by passing for white” (Flitterman-Lewis 327). She observes Lora’s successful acting career, associating her femininity and sexuality, which Annie lacks, with the white

66 Nicole Wong woman’s identity. Sarah Jane dances in her room and aggressively kicks her stufed lamb, a symbol of childlike purity and innocence, prior to dancing seductively in a nightclub for an audience of white men who identify her as a white woman. In this scene, immediately followed by Annie scolding her performance and Sarah Jane’s fring from the club, Sarah Jane confates the concepts of female sexuality and the white racial mask.

In Bamboozled, both Manray and Delacroix do not don Sarah Jane’s white mask, but they instead adopt a minstrel-like mask, using the images of the ‘dancing fool’ and ‘minstrel coon’ as scapegoats to mask their economic segregation. The initial marginalization Manray wishes to transcend is of abject poverty,7 busking on the street and squatting in abandoned buildings, he views the television show Mantan: A Twentieth Century Minstrel Show as an opportunity to earn wealth and fame. He considers himself a dancing performer, a talent he cherishes, ignoring the racial performance unavoidably attached to the minstrel format. In doing so, Manray simply replaces the Other- ness marker of class with the marker of race, donning the bufoonish minstrel mask, as well as the literal blackface mask, to satisfy and delight the over-observing Self of the television producers and audiences.

Similarly, Delacroix desires triumphant success in his professional life, measured in numbers of awards, job ofers, and popularity. To achieve this, he chooses to embrace the identity suggested to him by his colleagues Dunwitty and Myrna Goldfarb, of a “non- threatening African-American male”. He internalizes the notion that the audience of his peers will not accept an educated and talented black man among their esteemed ranks. To circumvent this perceived barrier to success, Delacroix literally performs on

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stage at award shows, adopting a racial mask to ingratiate him with the dominant mass entertainment culture.

As a producer of media entertainment, Delacroix draws parallels with flmmakers Lee and Sirk, whose flms deal with a tension between entertainment and interrogating social values. Sirk’s Imitation of Life addressed popular perceptions of the performer/ Other historically embedded in a racial binary, which is itself predicated on visible diferences in skin colour. Te flm posed a problem to censorship boards by threatening to question “how subjects…believe in and identify in relation to the designated “white and black races”(Courtney 146) by depicting a deliberately conflicting image of ‘black in the character Sarah Jane. Lee similarly foregrounds the ineptitude of categorization according to skin colour most notably in the One Sixteenth Blak character, the seemingly white member of the Mau Maus. His proclamation that “all it takes is one drop of black blood…[and] everyone thinks he’s black” points directly to the contradictory conflation of blood and colour as synchronous markers of race, and challenges the audience’s projection of identity based on both visible and nonvisible qualities. However, Lee also creates a paradox in which the Mau Maus, in addition to being an indictment of the audience’s conflation of blood and colour, also act as a quasi- minstrel comic relief and entertaining caricature, and offer a prime example of when “African Americans play a crucial role in the continued perpetuation of one-dimensional imagery of themselves”(Smith-Shomade 231).

Considering the motives behind these racial masks, my next ques- tion is why do these masks ultimately not work in the characters’ favour? Te answer lies in their fundamental failure to maintain racial authenticity and memory, causing the masks to quickly

68 Nicole Wong become prisons of degradation. For Manray, conforming to the ‘coon’ stereotype progressively strips away his personhood, what made him an authentic8 individual; he loses his best friend, his girlfriend, and his own sense of self-respect and rootedness as a talented black street performer. However, he is too immersed and pigeonholed in the audience’s mind, that a return to authenticity is made impossible.

For Sarah Jane, the situation is different because she has no authentic personhood to return to. She vacillates between two inauthentic images of blackness and of whiteness. Te former is derived from Annie, who is an inauthentic character in and of herself, for she placidly adheres to the ‘black archetype’ mask projected onto her, glad to be Lora’s servile doter, even when Lora is earning enough money to hire maids and servants. Annie is given minimal backstory, and is presented in the beginning of the flm as a black fgure seeming to suddenly pop into existence on the beach among a crowd of white people, in order to help Lora fnd her lost daughter, Susie. In addition, Annie concedes to the idea that the inherent nature of race means that Sarah Jane was “born to be hurt,” and that “the Lord must have had His reasons for making some of us white and some of us black”. Te flm further sets up this binary: Sarah Jane`s angry, self-hating outburst afer Annie discovers that she has been passing at school as white, exposing her racial Otherness to her classmates, is immediately followed by a shot of a delighted Lora telling Susie that she is “practically normal”. In addition, Sarah Jane’s beating by Frankie is juxtaposed with a shot of a decadently dressed Lora having her feet massaged by Annie. Tese two edited sequences reinforce the ideology that to be black is to sufer and to be white it to be happy; Sarah Jane can never be authentically white, thus she can never be truly happy.

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Racial authenticity is rooted in historical memory, for as Tavia Nyong’o has written, “a forgetfulness of the past…is one of the greatest privileges of whiteness” (217), and in these films is a manifestation of the audience’s hegemonic control over the history and future of racial stereotypes. Delacroix’s mask fails to have a happy ending because it is embedded in a historical amnesia that trivializes the past, as he glibly states on a radio talk show that “slavery has been over 400 hundred years ago”. Te minstrel show that he produces is a type of revisionist history, replacing the audience’s shame of slavery in America’s past with a sense of innocence and comfort in pleasurable entertainment, and an abdication of blame. Te audience enjoys watching the twentieth-century minstrel show; as if it were saying to them, ‘Don’t worry about the past. Everything is okay now’. However, Delacroix’s assistant Sloan () acts as curator, reminding Delacroix of how slave history is preserved through racial kitsch,9 and subjects him to a montage of racist flms and cartoons, before shooting him as punishment for his misdeeds against history.

Te scene in which Honeycutt (Tomas Jeferson Byrd), the host of Mantan: A Twentieth Century Minstrel Show, interacts with various studio audience members proudly wearing blackface is a grand culmination and visualization of the monolithic collective Self-exerting its control over the use and meanings of racial stereotypes that defne the Other. Trough a wilful amnesia of the ofensive and degrading history of blackface, and an inclusion of audience members of various racial backgrounds (Sicilian, Puerto Rican, etc.), the audience buries the shame of the past under a guise of racially inclusive, innocent entertainment.

Te temporal distance between Imitation of Life and Bamboozled enables a tracing of racial stereotypes and the resulting masquerades

70 Nicole Wong throughout American history and popular culture. Te subject matter changes from intimate maternal melodrama to social satire, but the essential message remains the same. Both flms are ultimately pessimistic, for even though Annie admits that the wearer of the black mask sufers, and tells her daughter to patiently wait for the world to change, Bamboozled asserts that afer forty years, a substantial change has not occurred. Sarah Jane’s belief that she can only present herself in a binary fashion, as either black or white, as her sole defnition, is remodelled into Manray’s coupling logic, the belief that he can be both a black man and a talented performer. Nonetheless, this logic still essentially fails, reminding viewers that racial stereotypes and masks are still alive and well in popular entertainment. To echo Stuart Hall, however, as both reassurance of the possibility of authentic racial identity and warning against the adoption of racial masks, the realm of popular culture and entertainment, although appealing and pervasive, is not the appropriate arena for finding, exploring, nor creating one’s racial personhood (32).

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Notes

1 According to Stuart Hall American mainstream popular culture has become the new centre of global cultural production, displacing European models of high culture as most culturally signifcant. Terefore, performers who wish to be part of the cultural landscape must ingratiate with a mass audience, not just cultural elites.

2 Gilman, “Introduction: What Are Stereotypes and Why Use Texts to Study Tem?”

3 Womack, played by Tommy Davidson, is Manray’s friend and performance partner who eventually quits the show due to the ofensive content and Manray’s increasingly selfsh behaviour.

4 See Mitchell for further insight on the lives of stereotypes.

5 Manray refuses to put on the blackface makeup, and goes on stage in front of the studio audience in his own clothes, rants about the abuses of the racial body, and performs his own “dance of free- dom” before being forced of stage and thrown out of the building.

6 See Hall, 30–33, for his explanation of “the other kinds of diference that place, position, and locate black people”.

7 According to Eric Lott, minstrel performers were mostly men “marginalized by temperament, by habit (ofen alcoholism), by ethnicity, even by sexual orientation,” 51.

8 I use the term ‘authentic’ in the same way Smith Shomade formulates the term: “In terms of popular culture, authenticity refers to the display, respect of, and/or aspirations of those from where you came,” 229–230.

9 See Nyong’o for a detailed analysis of curatorial opposition to historical amnesia through the preservation of racial kitsch.

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Works Cited

Courtney, Susan. “Picturizing Race: On Visibility, Racial Know- ledge, and Cinematic Belief.” Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. 142–192. Print.

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “Imitations of Life: Te Black Woman’s Double Determination as Troubling “Other.”” Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director. Ed. Lucy Fischer. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 32–335. Print.

Gilman, Sander. “Introduction: What Are Stereotypes and Why Use Texts to Study Tem?” Difference and Pathology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 15–35. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “What is this Black in Black Popular Culture?” Black Popular Culture. Ed. Gina Dent. New York: New Press, 1998. 21–36. Print.

Bamboozled. Dir. Spike Lee. 40 Acres and a Mule; A Spike Lee Joint; New Line Home Productions, 2000. DVD.

Lott, Eric. “Love and Tef: “Racial” Production and the Social Unconscious of Blackface.” Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 38–62. Print.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Living Colour: Race, Stereotype, and Anima- tion in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.” What Do Images Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 294–308. Print.

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Nyong’o, Tavia. “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance.” The Spike Lee Reader. Ed. Paula J. Massood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.212–227. Print.

Imitation of Life. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Universal Studios, 1959. DVD

Smith-Shomade, Beretta E. “”I Be Smackin’ My Hoes”: Paradox and Authenticity in Bamboozled.” The Spike Lee Reader. Ed. Paula J. Massood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. 228–242. Print.

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