Spike Lee Wows Forum

Spike Lee discussed his new film, Bamboozled, before a packed audience at the ARCO Forum last night. Co-sponsored by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research and the Institute of Politics, the event featured a panel of five experts to discuss the film and representations of race in media.

Bamboozled, which screened at the Harvard Film Archive Saturday afternoon, takes a satirical look at the notion of minstrelsy in the 21st century. While the film explores the impact of a fictional television program performed in blackface, Lee said that contemporary minstrelsy need not take such obvious forms.

"In the new millennium you don't have to wear blackface to be in a minstrel show," Lee said.

He pointed to Will Smith's role as a golf caddy in the recently released The Legend of Bagger Vance as an example of his point.

"If you're coming to Georgia with black people getting lynched left and right, why are you....trying to teach Matt Damon a golf swing?" Lee asked.

The ability of minstrelsy to take many forms remained the center of the discussion for the rest of the evening. Panelist Stanley Crouch, an author and cultural analyst, said that the problem of minstrelsy prevails in media representations of all marginal communities.

"The dumb blonde, that's the female version of blackface....The Italian who's always eating pasta and shooting people, that's the Italian version of blackface," Crouch said.

The problem occurs, he explained, when the comic stereotype becomes the predominant image of the entire community.

When the panel opened itself up to audience questions, many wanted to know what measures could be taken to counter existing stereotypes.

Lee said that some of that power lay with consumers, encouraging them not to support the entertainment industry when it circulates those stereotypes.

"[It can be] a matter of you not watching a TV show, or going to a movie or buying that CD" he said.

When asked about the difficulty in walking the tight line between realistic and positive representations of minorities, Lee responded that he did not allow himself to be confined to positive appearances.

"My goal was never just to do positive images," he said. "I don't worry about that stuff."

Besides Lee and Crouch, the other panelists were W.J.T. Mitchell, a professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago, photographer Carrie Mae Weems, and television producer Octavia Hudson. Alvin Poussant, pyshchiatrist and associate dean at Harvard Medical School, mediated the discussion.

The panel evoked mixed reactions from audience members.

Jennifer K. Sunami '02, for example, said she admired the panel's "statements against people's complicity" towards media misrepresentations of race.

However, others lamented that the panel failed to provide practical suggestions towards changing race representations in media.

"I was disappointed," said Mawuena M. Agbonyitor '04. "I thought they were going to discuss how we can go about changing the ways minorities are represented in the media."

Some of the questions last night hit close to home. One student in the audience asked if Lee was making a statement about the University by making Pierre de la Croix, the creator of the minstrel show in Bamboozled, a Harvard alum.

"No. No way," Lee said.