Sea Cliff is the epitome of small-town living. A unique enclave amidst the landscape of Levittowns and highways on Long Island, it was originally founded as a German Methodist summer campground. Marketed as a brisk getaway from the hustle and bustle of turn-of-the century New York City, it was a literal shining city on a hill overlooking the Long Island Sound. I can’t stress enough how that era has shaped my hometown. Upkeep of Victorian-era buildings, maintaining a family-friendly reputation, rallying against housing developments, and stern independence from other municipalities. It’s the Jeffersonian dream: a self sufficient, proud, independent village that prides itself on said independence. Life is all about “Keeping Sea Cliff Weird.”

Yet, Sea Cliff’s admirable tenacity runs only skin-deep. The village only gets more expensive the more yuppie, Brooklynite families move in. Its roads are more packed as its nineteenth-century planning stretches to accommodate Long Island’s car culture. It becomes ever less diverse and less weird. Economic disparity joins the list alongside a long-standing lack of racial diversity. It’s an impasse between old and new. It can be seen in the transition of businesses in the last five years: the old hardware store turned into a beauty parlour, three new slick coffee shops in place of a single café, and the increasing presence of RXR real estate “luxury” developments surrounding the village. Sea Cliff’s position is similar to many across the country, finding itself perpetually shifting amidst the political shocks of an insecure nation. What’s passed down from this national political zeitgeist that champions vigilantes and the destruction of bureaucracy — a philosophy that fueled the January 6 riots — is the encouragement to localized action. If local politics reflects that of the nation, Sea Cliff is no different in its struggle for equilibrium. If there’s one flaw in the ideology of the small town, it is its resistance to change, and no better example could be found than that of local business owner Robert Ehrlich and his recent coup d’état.

On the morning of Monday, March 10, Ehrlich and three colleagues walked into Village Hall and pronounced themselves the new governing body of Sea Cliff, declaring that every current village employee was fired. These proclamations arrive nearly a week before the Village’s mayoral elections, which Ehrlich has already proclaimed “fully rigged and meaningless.” After an hourlong standoff with municipal staff and a half dozen police officers, Ehrlich and company were escorted out of village hall by county police.

As a follow-up to an official village statement, Ehrlich replied in a now-deleted Facebook post, “We have a new entity,” declaring an end to “this racist antisemitic group that wishes to control every aspect of our lives and our businesses. With zero experience and success in their lives except to maintain phony made up power. (sic)” In an interview with the Long Island Herald, Ehrlich stated he had accrued 1,800 signatures to dissolve the Village government (supposedly in accordance with the NYS Citizens Empowerment Act) and had been invited to the White House. Additionally, Ehrlich stated, “I’m interpreting the law any way I want, the way Trump would interpret laws as he sees fit… It’s called trickledown politics, which is what we’re doing.”

Robert Ehrlich may be Sea Cliff’s embodiment of Trump. A “rags-to-riches” story of his establishment of Pirate Brands (of Pirate’s Booty fame), based in Sea Cliff, made him an amiable example of smalltown success. However, after the expansion of Pirate Brands, Ehrlich sued his co-founder, Mike Repole, for 195 million USD, claiming that Repole attacked his “self-confidence and entrepreneurial spirit,” despite making an estimated 70 million USD from Pirate Brands alongside him.

It was just “Rob being Rob,” Repole said. “You would think that someone who made over 70 million USD would be very happy.”

Since 2015, while his village properties remained dormant and his business thriving, Ehrlich became increasingly active in politics, protesting the Village’s alleged lack of transparency and corruption. Recently, however, he was only able to cite inadequate outdoor seating and “limits on creativity” as the standing government’s current flaws. As noted by colleagues like Repole, Ehrlich may have a troubled relationship with facts; in a deleted post by Ehrlich, the businessman claimed he had met with New York Governor Kathy Hochul and had been given the “go-ahead” for his coup d’état plan. According to the Governor’s office, this meeting never happened. Ehrlich, without large sums of money and international recognition, might otherwise be labelled a small-town eccentric.

In pursuit of protecting a Village (or a country) from change, the reaction of the privileged is despotic. In the vein of those like Ehrlich and Trump, their ends justify their means — if they perceive something as “wrong,” “they don’t go and ask for permission, they just do it.” In small towns like Sea Cliff, across the US, individuals are emboldened to actively defy the rule of law for their own benefit. It’s an ideology that emboldens behaviour like that of March 10 or January 6, all resulting from the trickle-down of Donald Trump and entitled personalities like Ehrlich.

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I am particularly interested in Green Book and its controversy over the depiction of Black characters. My question is: what’s the problem with writing about marginalized people as a non-marginalized person? More specifically to this article, what’s the issue with white people writing about Black stories?

Since the advent of film, Black people have been pivotal in the evolution of the medium and the boom of Hollywood — for the wrong reasons. Represented in tropes like the domineering brute, the servile fool, or loud mouthed comic relief, Black people have been made passive in a film industry fueled by white supremacy. Even as Black people across North America fought for equality in the mid-20th century, their narratives in film remained stagnant. As Black culture gained traction through music, art, and politics, Hollywood continued to reinforce the status quo, aimed at fulfilling the cultural curiosity of an “othered,” or foreign, Black society. Whether it be the era of Blacksploitation or slave-dramas like Roots, Black people continued to have their agency denied and be subject to white exoticisation. Even with Black creators seeing success throughout the industry, film studios only wanted to further the image of Black people that white audiences were used to.

Cut to 1999, director Spike Lee is disillusioned with Hollywood and mainstream media. Ever since 1989, when his film Do The Right Thing was snubbed at the Academy Awards and Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture instead, Lee believed the industry only wanted to see Black people in traditional racist stereotypes. Black filmmaking had seen a boom during the period, with the cultural zeitgeist of gangster rap and slavery dramas like The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. However, Lee saw Hollywood twisting old negative racial stereotypes into new forms of neo-minstrelsy.

The previous ten years had seen the release of Soul Man, a comedy about a white kid dressing up in black face to secure a college scholarship; the rise of Quentin Tarantino and his co-opting of the N-word and black struggles; and the popularization of films like Boyz n the Hood, depicting gang violence between young Black men. Even as Lee made a name for himself with Malcolm X and Jungle Fever, all the accolades and money were being tossed to projects about Black tragedy or passivity. From his malaise, Lee would create his 1999 masterpiece, Bamboozled.

The film’s premise centers on Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans): an astute Black TV executive struggling to launch a successful Black series centered on positivity. He is juxtaposed against his woefully misguided white boss, Mr. Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport), who is arguably a reference to Tarantino. Fuelled by Dunwitty’s desire for a “real” Black show, Delacroix sets out to make the most offensively racist show imaginable, to get himself fired and ruin Dunwitty’s reputation. Recruiting two homeless street performers, Delacroix pitches “Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show” to great amusement from Dunwitty. What ensues is a mix of Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Sidney Lumet’s Network, involving the minstrel show’s meteoric rise and spiral into insanity as both Delacroix and the performers grapple with their dehumanization. Lee’s characters — Delacroix, Manray/Mantan, Womack/Sleep n’ Eat, and Sloan Hopkins — portray different feelings and insecurities about Black struggle, from poverty to family, to performative blackness and self-hatred. Yet, what truly furthers the movie’s message is how Mantan gets approved, produced, and catapulted into stardom.

The fictional TV network, CSN, is entirely white with Delacroix as its only Black writer. Delacroix is Harvard-educated and very obedient to his white superiors, despite harboring a deep hatred for their ignorance. His main concern is working towards a big paycheck. He is a diversity hire, appointed by CSN to meet the need for a new, funny Black TV show – a trend Lee was very keen on in the late 90s – under the supervision of his boss Dunwitty. Dunwitty is an obvious victim of corporatized, misinformed race-consciousness; he has posters of black athletes and actors in his office, he argues with Delacroix that he’s “more Black” than him because he’s married to a Black woman, he rejects projects of Delacroix as “not Black enough,” and throws around the N-word willy-nilly.

When Delacroix runs the idea for his minstrel show in the Caucasian writers room, they are hesitant, feigning their progressivism and tolerance — but they eventually fold with Delacroix’s insistence of “satire” and his identity as a Black writer. Ultimately, blatant displays of racism cause concern in this media order. But as Lee shows, they end up being accommodated by whites under the guise of Black representation. As long as a Black person is okay with it, they won’t mind.

Bamboozled was always seen as a heavy-handed, if not angry, film. Admittedly, the premise of a full-blown minstrel show being adopted by a major network shocked many audiences and critics alike. The film tackles a handful of Black insecurities and cultural stigma in a disparate narrative that varies from raucous laughter to discomforting silence: audiences were overwhelmed.

Yet, in the context of Spike Lee and his experience with Hollywood, the massive shift towards tragic Black stories wasn’t too different from the era of Hollywood that demeaned Black people through minstrelsy. The premise of a minstrel show being put on TV could only exist with non-Black writers and execs like Dunwitty, just as it did during the early 20th century. If we relate Bamboozled to recent films like Emilia Perez, turning to Spike Lee reveals the pitfalls of misrepresentation in film and how its insidious implications plague progress overall for marginalized peoples.

In the same way the producers of Emilia Perez misconstrued the trans community, Bamboozled acts as a blunt, glaring example of misrepresentation in a seemingly enlightened media order. In a zeitgeist that focuses on trans issues, there’s a vacuum for mainstream media to tell and profit off of them. Just as Black issues were exploited with Blacksploitation and the gangster films of Spike Lee’s era, contemporary trans issues are under the same scrutiny with the release of Emilia Perez. The identity politics of both pieces highlights the importance of tolerance versus understanding. While the racial fetishism of Dunwitty could count as “tolerance,” it stems from a complete lack of understanding: an understanding that is, moreover, specific to the marginalized group, rather than being co-opted for the non marginalized as well. It’s this understanding that’s lost on the nearly all-French directing team of Emilia Perez; feigning tolerance, the movie falls flat because of their misunderstanding.

Special thanks to the Black Student Network for their screening of Bamboozled this past February.

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