What's changed -- if anything? Well, for one thing, back in 1989 when Spike Lee made "Do the Right Thing," his character Mookie was intended as a satirical criticism of young black men who cared about nothing more than "gettin' paid." Is that social critique lost on audiences now, only 16 years later? (See some of Spike Lee's recent comments about such movies here.)
But back to the original Stepin Fetchit: Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry was a comic actor who became rich and famous in Hollywood -- and around the world -- under the name of a character he created in "chitlin' circuit" vaudeville and minstrel shows, which he styled as "The Laziest Man in the World." John Strausbaugh reviewed both Mel Watkins' "Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry" and Champ Clark's "Shuffling to Ignominy: The Tragedy of Stepin Fetchit" in the New York Times, observing that the Times' antediluvian movie critic, Bosley Crowther, once wrote that Fetchit's performance was "as stylized as James Joyce."
"Widely praised as a comic genius during his heyday, Stepin Fetchit is known now only as a race traitor," writes Strausbaugh, himself the author of a volume about the history of blackface. "Perry/Stepin Fetchit presents an almost perfect case study in the conflicts and dualities that still confront black actors in Hollywood."
It was his enormous success, Mr. Watkins argues, that made Perry the focus of so much condemnation, while hundreds of other black performers, then and now, had gotten away with shucking and jiving their way through more demeaning stereotypes....
Mr. Clark persuasively contends that Perry's Stepin Fetchit was a sly trickster, following a centuries-old subversive tradition whereby blacks played the fool to fool whites. He notes how often Stepin Fetchit, by pretending to be too lazy and addled to understand the simplest directions, avoids doing the white characters' work, all the while muttering subtle sarcasms in a drawl that was indecipherable to whites but clear and hilarious to black audiences.
But film critic Armond White, who reviewed Watkins' book for Slate.com ("Back in Blackface -- The rehabilitation of Stepin Fetchit") rejects any attempt to revise Fetchit's reputation -- and is equally hard on some of today's top black performers. White writes:[Fetchit] has been virtually forgotten. Some biographers might see this as rough justice, but not Mel Watkins, who takes his cue from the contemporary range of black pop performers—from Samuel L. Jackson's raging violence to Snoop Dogg's indolent pandering to Chris Rock's black-on-black ridicule. In this new spirit of relaxed embarrassment, Watkins attempts to rehabilitate Stepin Fetchit's reputation.
Watkins starts by dedicating the book to "all of the early twentieth-century black comedians who, under the most repressive conditions, satirized and labored to humanize the nation's distorted image of African Americans." That's Watkins' sly means of shifting your interest past Fetchit and onto the larger conundrum of African-American humor. It's a strategy tailored to hip-hop materialism and the vogue for academic validation of black pop. Moving readers within the politically correct confusion about pride, self-defense, self-deprecation, and self-denigration, Watkins uses tactics almost as slippery as Jackson's, Dogg's, and Rock's....
Stepin Fetchit established the model of the unscrupulous black performer, pursuing money, work, and fame by any means necessary.... Given the contemporary success of black performers and innumerable hip-hop artists who flirt with shameless, disreputable images, Stepin Fetchit's legacy—from popular figure to pariah—takes on new importance. Should African-American performers be accountable to political correctness? To what degree should they worry that their antics shape the self-image of young African-Americans? Should they follow any standard other than their own conscience? Should they have a conscience?
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