Word: blackness
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...2012” opened last weekend and saw its profits go into the black instantly with a worldwide gross of $225 million. The movie probably fell far short of anyone’s expectation of a quality film—but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it, like its predecessors, allows audiences to escape into their own minds and ponder some of the biggest questions ever asked. And for that reason, it will surely continue to fill entire theatres with the same suckers who succumb to these movies every single year...
When Günter Wallraff sprayed his face with dark paint and put on a black curly wig and dark contact lenses, he discovered how it felt to be black in Germany today. Sometimes he was subjected to thinly disguised or casual racism. Other times people were openly hostile to him. On one occasion, he even felt threatened...
Wallraff, who filmed his experiences as a black man as part of a new documentary, Black on White, has made a career of this sort of daring, investigative reporting. In his 40 years as a journalist, he has worked undercover at a tabloid newspaper, industrial plants and fast-food chains to expose the conditions the employees faced. In the 1980s, he posed for two years as a Turkish "guest worker" and wrote a best-selling book revealing shocking examples of discrimination and exploitation. But Wallraff's latest project may be his most controversial yet. His attempt to address racism...
...using white privileges. He is mimicking suppressed minorities and earning money, attention and even respect," Noah Sow, a black journalist, academic and musician, said in an interview with the news website Tagesschau.de. Tahir Della, a spokesman for the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD), said Wallraff's methods hark back to the minstrel shows of the 1920s in the U.S. "[Those shows] came about because blacks weren't allowed to perform in clubs and theaters, so whites dressed up to caricature them," Della told the news website TheLocal.de. "Mr. Wallraff is using the same form, playing a role...
There is a less controversial precedent for such a project. Fifty years ago, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, darkened his skin with pigment-changing pills and traveled through the Deep South as a black man, chronicling his experiences in the classic American novel Black Like Me. The American author and journalist Grace Halsell embarked on a similar journey in the late 1960s and wrote the novel Soul Sister, which was also highly acclaimed. Wallraff, who came across both books after he started shooting Black on White, says he has wanted to make this kind of film for years...