Black Cinema History is a Blueprint for the Resistance
Yes really! 5 Rules for Effective Resistance Art
Yes. Another Newsletter.
Justin Simien here. I made Dear White People, Bad Hair, and Disney Haunted Mansion1 BEFORE THEY WERE MAINSTREAM. Also had that podcast? Or maybe you’re related to me. Either way, welcome to my Substack newsletter. A thing which, as a filmmaker, I apparently have to do now, as well.2
The Film & TV industry is totally fine of course,3 but as social and mass media platforms, one by one, surrender to the Orange Oligarchy - I figured why not a Substack? Even when capitalism inevitably destroys it in the end, at least I’ll have a solid mailing list.4
Below I plug my latest series HOLLYWOOD BLACK and use it to make a case for amplifying Black History to effectively resist Fascism, which… felt relevant!
The A.I. model in use at the time, to replicate a culture for profit while bleeding its creators dry, was called Minstrelsy. It was slop and it was ubiquitous.
Black Cinema as Resistance
If you’re serious about resisting the White Nationalist Coup in progress I have a serious suggestion. Study and amplify Black history. Not just for the virtue it signals but for the strategy.
My latest series, HOLLYWOOD BLACK, is based on the must-read by national treasure, Donald Bogle,5 and presents a radically different history of the movies, simply by including Black artists that shaped the art form. Turns out, using mass media to resist Fascism became a highly evolved art form in the hands of some Black Americans before the movies were even born.
I’ve tasted viral success on Tik Tok. Once. It was elusive and fleeting. But one video got up to 500k views.6 I KNOW. Crazy because it was historical and involved little to no dancing. Instead it connected the anxiety over A.I. in Hollywood to a figure from before Hollywood was even born. That figure is Bert Williams, America’s first Black superstar.
As a Black immigrant living in the United States nine years after the abolition of slavery, the Fascism Bert faced is still in the room with us today. As a performer he also faced impossible odds against the latest in machine learning. The latest A.I. model in use at that time, to replicate a culture for profit while bleeding its creators dry, was called Minstrelsy. It was slop and it was ubiquitous. What Bert Williams did in these circumstances exemplifies how artists and culture makers today can use our platforms to resist, no matter who owns them.
“We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism... Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” - Langston Hughes
How The Past Haunts The Present
Here’s why this is relevant to what I do and the lanes I occupy in culture. I am a Black, gay filmmaker. My work is political and vulnerable by default. Especially because I overtly use my identities as a lens to explore ways in which a forgotten past can haunt the present.
In Dear White People (the film and series), a group of Black activists struggle against oppression, within the microcosm of an Ivy League, and find they can only be as effective as they are able to face their individual pasts. In Bad Hair, a Black woman given few options to climb her career latter, unwittingly makes a Faustian bargain via a sew-in made from hair with suppressed supernatural origins. Even in the crypts of Disney Haunted Mansion, there can be found a story of marginalized people who confront a restless patriarchal spirit obsessed with owning them.7
In other words my work has a world view and an argument for how to live. All mass media does because all mass media is propaganda. I will march and organize and call and wait / pray for the courts. But I will also do what I’m great at. It’s one of the many lanes I can occupy and be effective. And if you’re one of the many artists out there with less work on your hands than last year, may I suggest propaganda?
It happens to be one of the most effective ways of molding a society.8 Propaganda gets a bad rap because the oppressive class gets first dibs on new technologies poised to effectively control populations. Whoever controls the means of production always gets the head start. And yet, historically speaking, fascism is being clawed back—generation by generation. From where I can see, while the resistance gets to it later, and always in coalition with well resourced grass roots operations, our propaganda is more effective. When it’s made with humanistic intent and rooted in our shared experiences propaganda has the potential to ring the truest.
MAGA have their dog whistles to be sure, but Black people have made Signifying an art form. One we’ve refined over generations out of necessity.
They Not Like Us
Certainly, Kendrick Lamar’s audacious show of force at the MAGA-Bowl can be understood as propaganda of this kind. I have seen people online questioning how a televised performance at the center of such capitalistic pageantry as the Super Bowl could be considered resistance, compared to grassroots organizing. I would argue these aren’t mutually exclusive.9
Since the dawn of civilization, whoever wins learns to send artists wherever there are troops. Kendricks performance was resistance, even if only to fortify “the troops” who I believe need battle cries and stories and Icons to project their best selves onto. I also heard a call to action. A call to be brave, visible, petty and audacious. The Orange Oligarchy knows how powerful the arts can be in any show of force. An easy example is the fact that the Defense Budget, the only one seemingly not being gutted by DOGE10, includes a $500 million dollar line item for military-band musicians.11
Part of the issue is that performance art is not like an essay or a march or a law suit. Things get lost in translation. This is a feature, to me. Some of Kendrick’s message is being transmitted through signifying. That Black American art form of layering meaning based in cultural experiences onto common phrases or tropes. An ancient form of cultural encryption. MAGA have their dog whistles to be sure, but Black people have made Signifying an art form. One we’ve refined over generations out of necessity.
Consider the Cakewalk, the precursor to minstrelsy. Bred on plantations out of the parasitic relationship between the enslavers and their enslaved workforce. Black bondsmen, too, blew off steam by mocking white people. In particular their stilted styles of dance. As we are want to do, we elevated these dances and made them our own. We encoded in the dance vital information for survival, such as the observation that their enslavers had blind spots such as their terrible taste in dance. Unaware that they were being mocked, plantation owners were entertained by this custom and sought to control it through contests where the “best dancer” among the enslaved would receive a slice of cake.
After Reconstruction, the Cakewalk, exploded in popularity among white Americans who made it a main feature of their minstrel shows—ostensibly showcases of Black culture where only whites in blackface were allowed to perform. Eventually, Black entertainers such as Bert Williams and George Walker redefined and exemplified the dance form, taking the craze to even greater heights—only to have it co-opted again. This back-and-forth continues to this day, as any Black creator on virtually any platform knows.
Take a moment to consider the following. The collective mocking of Black people was America’s first defining cultural experience. A ritual degradation of the people who built the country’s fortunes and infrastructure was America’s first popular culture.
RULE #1: Keep Iterating
This isn’t just an interesting story. This is a strategy. One strategy the right uses is to repeat progressive talking points back to progressives, rendering them irrelevant to any uninformed citizen listening in. It doesn’t matter to them that reverse racism can’t logically exist in a system of white supremacy. It doesn’t matter that the oppression of Christians is a fantasy in search of a fact. They have learned that if they simply repeat our language against us, it challenges the nature of reality itself, entrapping us in debates that fail to gain us allies.
Until now, liberals and certainly Democratic lawmakers have been sheepish about reclaiming language that has been weaponized against us. Fight fire with fire-works. However, when we look at the strategies of Black entertainers at the turn of the century, this is exactly what they did. Bert Williams, became America’s first Black superstar by mastering this strategy. He used the machine to tear it down from the inside out.
Few realize that even while in blackface, Bert being a minstrel was a dangerous and radical act during his time. It’s that kind of bravery that paved the way for Kendrick Lamar’s assertion before Donald Trump and millions of Americans that they “picked the right time but the wrong guy.”
RULE #2: Take a proper toll of the problem
Minstrelsy grew out of the Cake Walk to become America’s first popular culture. For the first time there was an American national pastime. Wherever you went in the country you could find a minstrel show featuring a tightly formatted performance of songs and skits that could be produced as cheap entertainment. Only this time, no Black’s were allowed to perform it. The cake was rescinded.
Take a moment to consider the following. The collective mocking of Black people was America’s first defining cultural experience. A ritual degradation of the people who built the country’s fortunes and infrastructure was America’s first popular culture. Let’s not be naive about what we are facing here. In place of outright slavery, minstrelsy was the “opium” given to the working masses in order to keep them entertained and maximize profits by keeping labor costs low. Beyond the cheap thrills, minstrelsy was also a way for European immigrants to consolidate into the more exclusive white class of the late 1800’s.12 Jews, Italians, the Irish, even Catholics had to wait in line for Constitutional rights to apply to them, but through minstrelsy, these converging ethnic groups could point to a common thing they were all not… Black.
This is important because as James Baldwin tells us “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Today, our resistance can and must rely on more than just performance art. However in Bert Williams’ time the levers of societal change obtainable by Black people were slim to nil.
RULE #3: Thrive in their blindspots
Consider how MAGA operatives were able to persuade an undereducated cohort of young men to cast their first-ever votes for the bundle of untreated personality disorders that run the country with podcasts, bad A.I. and conspiracy theories. Part of the success of Authoritarianism is due to the self induced echo chambers we’ve allowed ourselves to be walled off in.
Williams and his partner George Walker made the, no doubt, painful choice to use the derogatory facsimile of Blackness white audiences expected in order to push beyond them. Sensing that audiences wanted ever more “authentic” depictions of Blackness, Williams blacked up and started an act with Walker, dubbing themselves “Two REAL Coons.” Their act became a sensation, leading to the first Black show ever produced on Broadway, In Dahomey. Williams went on to become the first Black entertainer to headline the Ziegfeld Follies, despite being forbidden from entering the lobbies of the theaters that he regularly sold out. The cognitive dissonance of his existence took a toll on Bert, but the success he achieved was a means to an end. This was not “cooning” for fame or access. Williams’ aim was to change the possibilities available to Black performers and to counter the message of inferiority Black audiences were used to hearing about themselves.
Williams’ brilliance lay in his ability to subvert expectations. He played characters similar enough to the Jim Crow stereotype that white audiences accepted him, but once on stage, he reshaped those characters to engender empathy and admiration rather than mockery. Because his characters presented as “simple” white audiences seemed not notice how radical they were. An example is In Dahomey, where Bert and George play conmen who stumble into money and use it to escape America for a fresh start in Dahomey, the African country now known as Benin. This was in 1903. There is no doubt that Black audiences, relegated to the balcony, understood the deeper message of Black Imperialism encoded in the plot while the whites below laughed.
RULE #4: Make it an Art
In the same way that Michael Jackson’s domination of pop music in the ’80s challenged white supremacy without explicitly addressing it, Bert crafted a persona that exposed the contradictions of a society that celebrated Black culture while oppressing Black people. He had a hit song called Nobody which is one of the most brilliant satirical works of the 20th century.
In the song Bert plays a down-on-his-luck vagabond rapping (yes rapping) about all the times he’s gotten into jams no one helped him out of, comically escalating with each verse. It became his signature song with records and sheet music making him a household name. Few of his white fans realized they were celebrating a record where a Black man emphatically tells them “no” over and over again.
Bert’s strategy is at the heart of what Kendrick did at the MAGA-Bowl. It’s at the heart of Dear White People and everything I have made, including Hollywood Black. As we resist through essays and memes, stories and films, images and words, marching and organizing - we should take this strategy seriously. Our history has given us a blueprint—but we have to follow it.
Not a typo - this that baby’s government name
According to the LA Times, the Directors and Writers Guild of America left word at the major studios, asking them to maybe tell A.I. startups not to illegally train their models on decades of intellectual property in an effort to replace the very creatives upon whose work the training’s been done. Still waiting to hear back 😬
Based on the book by Donald Bogle, the preeminent scholar on Black Cinema History. Get it from an Independent Bookstore here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/hollywood-black-the-stars-the-films-the-filmmakers-turner-classic-movies/12203631?ean=9780762491414&next=t&next=t
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DEI!
I’m convinced we are being pushed to use A.I. in every facet of our lives so we can train it to better manipulate us, the electorate. 👁️👄👁️
DEI!
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/americas-indefensible-defense-budget/
DEI!
I enjoyed watching your Hollywood Black series. I definitely made a list of films to check out afterwards.
Great read! And welcome to the Substack joy.