BLOG #4: Black Popular Culture (Question 2)

As I watched "Bamboozled"-- a movie that I've seen quite a few times, yet is still quite eye-opening each time-- a few things stuck out to me in particular. One, Damon Wayne's character, Pierre Delacroix/Peerless Dothan, was what many in my culture refer to as a "sellout". He was indeed, a product of a middle/working class, black family, yet he wanted to be accepted into the white demographic. You see that in the fake accent, the "OVER-professionalism", the shunning of anything to do with anything "black", etc. Another scene that ties very well into Pierre Delacroix' somewhat "Uncle Tom" persona, was the scene where Michael Rapaport's character, Thomas Dunwitty, was giving Delacroix flack about his Cosby Show-type scripts and pilots he kept writing. In that scene Dunwitty remarked that he was "more black than Dela" and that he "knows black people better that Pierre knew his own". He went on to say that "Black people ARE culture. They define what's hot and what's not." In this same scene, if not then the scene immediately after, Delacroix states that "Everyone wants to be black... But nobody wants to BE black."

One last theme that correlates with the "popular black culture" focus surrounds the character collective, "The Mau Mau's". That group somehow managed to refute everything "black" (all the stereotypes, everything that was accepted into mainstream culture) with what they believed to be real or traditional African culture, but still falling into those EXACT SAME stereotypical qualities. While hating everything that the white man pushes on to their people, The Mau Mau's seemed to subconsciously accept it with the clothes they continued to wear, their dialect, the malt liquor they drank in every scene, the over-the-top Afro-centric behavior. They were one big contradiction going back and forth between what they believed to be "black" and what the media defined as "black".

Those themes connect very well with what Stuart Hall touched upon in the "What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?" He mentions how at one point Europe was the center for everything high culture and how soon after the African diaspora, the engagement between the lesser European culture and the more dominant African cultures created an American culture. He says, by my own understanding of the passage, that whether or not people acknowledge and adhere to the fact, American culture was and still is influenced by African culture. With the language, music, etc. Just as the Thomas Dunwitty character in "Bamboozled" said that what blacks do is what everyone finds "cool".