Blackness, as the entertainment and sports industries well know, is
a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white
consumers, black culture invites whites to view themselves in a
mirror of racial difference, while at the same time offering the
illusory reassurance that they remain "wholly" white. Charting a
rich landscape that includes classic American literature, Hollywood
films, pop music, and investigative journalism, Eric Lott reveals
the hidden dynamics of this self-and-other mirroring of racial
symbolic capital. Black Mirror is a timely reflection on the ways
provocative representations of racial difference serve to sustain
white cultural dominance. As Lott demonstrates, the fraught
symbolism of racial difference props up white hegemony, but it also
tantalizingly threatens to expose the contradictions and
hypocrisies upon which the edifice of white power has been built.
Mark Twain's still-controversial depiction of black characters and
dialect, John Howard Griffin's experimental cross-racial reporting,
Joni Mitchell's perverse penchant for cross-dressing as a black
pimp, Bob Dylan's knowing thefts of black folk music: these
instances and more show how racial fantasy, structured through the
mirroring of identification and appropriation so visible in
blackface performance, still thrives in American culture, despite
intervening decades of civil rights activism, multiculturalism, and
the alleged post-racialism of the twenty-first century. In Black
Mirror, white and black Americans view themselves through a glass
darkly, but also face to face.
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