Something that happens in other art forms where blacks have practiced that is often obscured by the blindness of black respectability politics. No, there is something else at work within the Jay-Z ‘The Story of O.J.’ music video. It would be the highest point of facile and reactionary black respectability politics to simply call the music video an homage to the racism of the past. The final shot of the music video has the Jay-Z caricature flying on a rocket ship out of the earth’s orbit and offscreen into space. The video ends with the Dumbo caricature flying high over the blacks in the streets below as he rains money down upon them. Newton’s iconic pose in the “Peacock” wicker chair the Jay-Z caricature as Disney’s ‘Dumbo’ flying over a cotton plantation slaves in chains coming out of a slave ship and black slaves on the auction block.
Of the many images of subversion, resistance and reciprocity in the music video we see the images of a conveyor belt full of white hooded KKK members where one pulls his hood off to reveal himself as black the image of a black power fist that becomes part of a larger image of a black figure in the same pose as those black athletes who raised the black power fist during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City a reference to a Picasso cubist painting with the caricature of Jay-Z as the subject a reference to Huey P. This is blackface minstrelsy with the purposeful mission of black economic liberation. And yet there are several surprising images of subversion, resistance and reciprocity that challenge a reading of the video as a mere re-appropriation of a racist past, but instead count towards what I see as Jay-Z’s repurposing of the signifiers of black caricature and inferiority to put forth a powerful, even didactic, message of the collective power that black folk could wield by wearing the mask of caricature and inferiority to keep White folks deluded while we uplift ourselves economically right under their noses. Yet within Jay-Z’s music video ‘The Story of O.J.’ all of the racist signifiers of black caricature and inferiority that were represented within the racist cartoons of the Pre-Civil Rights era are seen without filter or apology: Big wide lips, pig-like noses, the eating of Watermelon, Bug eyes, the black female ‘Hottentot’ stripper, the overweight Mammy, drum beating black jungle cannibals, black cotton pickers and even a jive talkin’ buck named ‘Jaybo’ as an animated caricature of Jay-Z the rapper himself. Most of these cartoons have been buried in the film archives and hidden away from public view as a gesture of racial sensitivity even as black actors are cut out of films in production today and black filmmakers still have to struggle to get even modestly budgeted films made and shown today.
After the Civil Rights Movement, such racist cartoons were an embarrassment to the so-called liberal and White controlled movie studios. These cartoons that we now see as clearly racist were a preeminent part of the film program that accompanied feature films in movie theatres across the country prior to the American Civil Rights movement. Many of these ‘Censored Eleven’ cartoons are available on YouTube under their original titles like: “Coal black and de Sebben Drawfs,” “All This and Rabbit Stew,” and “Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears”. The most notorious of these cartoons is called ‘The Censored Eleven’ which is a complication of racist cartoons made under the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies production label by Warner Bros. seems like a comic rendering of Donald Bogle’s famous book, “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks,” but the music video actually re-appropriates and repurposes the racist caricatures of black folk that one would find hidden in the animated film archives of all the major White controlled Hollywood studios. offers itself as a biting form of ironic edutainment where beneath the surface of animated caricatures of blacks rendered in nostalgic black and white images that recall the once popular short subject cartoons of black people that once played before the feature-length movies pre-WWI and up until the popular success of the television medium.
While I must apologize for being late to the discussion about Jay-Z’s music video, The Story of O.J., in part because I am not an actual Jay-Z fan but after now having seen the work I feel it imperative that I add my two cents about it for whatever it’s worth.