The days of blackface minstrel troupes may seem like ancient history to most Americans, but Spike Lee wants to refresh our memory. Spike Lee is onto something when he looks to the days of blackface minstrel troupes to help us understand race in today's America. With Bamboozled, Hollywood's most reliable provocateur is saying we haven't come as far as we think. In Bamboozled, Damon Wayans plays well-mannered Harvard alumni Pierre Delacroix, a black TV writer whose ratings-hungry boss (Michael Rapaport) delivers an ultimatum: give me a hit show or clean out your desk. His response is the show "Mantan," a revival one of the most popular and most degrading forms of entertainment in nineteenth-century America: blackface minstrelsy.
             Delacroix developed the program as a rage-driven stunt but it turns into an unexpected hit, apparently able to indulge a racist format largely because the actors using burnt cork to blacken their faces happen to be African Americans. In the movie, Pierre Delacroix is late for a meeting he wasn't told about. He reprimands his assistant Sloan Hopkins, who hadn't received any info about the meeting to begin with. This scene makes clear that if one wants to succeed in that company, one can't count on simple procedures like memos, but has to run after the info -- that is if one happens to be black. Delacroix is the only person of color in the creative team of the TV station. However his Caucasian boss Dunwitty considers himself black because he has a black wife and was raised with black people. He illustrates this by constantly using the term "nigger" and even goes as far as to tell Delacroix, "brother man, I'm blacker than you".
             I thought it was very interesting to see Michael Rappaport in this role after seeing him play a skinhead in "Higher Learning". There he had no authority, he was just a college punk taking his frustrations out on minorities. Now he is the boss, a
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