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// Racism targets our visual senses, our eyes, and distorts what we think we see, learning to view critically remains an essential task. Many artists of color have engaged in this work, teaching us to see through their re-visioning of previously popular images, stereotypes, and conventions of representations. Some of early production and various shows allowed for white actors to play roles in blackface to block out African Americans from roles and etc. These acts are now frowned upon and regarded as extremely disrespectful. Some artists even till this day make light of the previous practice to illustrate exactly how wrong this was by allowing white actors to make a mockery of African Americans in the public’s eye. // // For example, //Mark Steven Greenfield, a contemporary African American artist, creates work based on racist images from the blackface and minstrel traditions. He puts these back into circulation, however, with a critical difference, marking them with phrases and redesigns that interrupt and subvert their former meaning. A highly offensive practice of some earlier 

 In his statement for the gallery exhibition, entitled "Post Minstrel," Greenfield states, “ Blackface minstrelsy became the dumping ground for everything the dominant culture despised about itself and as such became it's shadow. Concurrently African Americans projected every negative aspect identified with them on these images, making these their shadow as well. I believe that we African Americans can never fully exorcise that which we do not first recognize. Therefore, it is my hope that recognition of this alter ego will be the key to removing it's power”. These words still hold true today and these images that White America portrays of the Black culture give more negativity to the color of skin. In response to this blacks for the most part are forced to conform into a higher level culture dominated by whites to ensure that there is acceptance of the color of their skin. Scholars and critics now agree that these racist acts have long been a way for "whiteness" to produce the illusion of its difference and supremacy through a kind of negative theater. Lacking character itself, "whiteness" appears as the negation of "blackness," as if to say "Whatever we are, we're not like them!" ([]) Contemporary debates over the politics of blackface cultural images are subjected to harsh satire in Spike Lee's controversial film //Bamboozled//, in which Damon Wayans plays a black TV executive whose attempt to protest racist acts backfires when his show becomes a hit. Initially the plan was to show black people in black faces and help people understand the negativity of this, but White America actually loved it. Its stars, played by Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson are African Americans who find themselves blacking up in order to make it in the white-dominated culture industry. [] Lee's film takes a look into a debate among African American artists and critics about collecting or performing these images. Through more current T.V series and other forms of entertainment there are far too many instances of the African Americans forced to conform to the likes of others in a clique. One of the best examples of this is "Buckwheat" from the //Little Rascals// T.V. series.

[| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6sQEgRKaME]  The character buckwheat which is a black young boy with hair never combed out and always put in the worst close. His pals from the show are all white and have better clothes and treat Buckweat almost as if they are his father and is not capable of making decisions on his own. The evil and hurtful effects of such stereotypes unfortunately appears all-too-universal among white people who think such portrayals are innocent fun. It seems as if every month brings us yet another story of white people--kids, college students, court judges--once more putting on blackface in a continuance of a racist practice that has always reinforced white supremacy. It's no laughing matter.

"What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a closer look at literary 'blackness,' the nature--even the cause--of literary 'whiteness.' What is it //for//? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as 'American'? . . . What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions. The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters." (Morrison, pp.9 11-12)Toni Morrison, //Playing in the Dark// (pp. 9,11-12)