'Blacking Up' documentary questions white enthusiasts of black hip-hop culture

Clift, who grew up in the District and went to Woodrow Wilson High School, recalls for viewers that a classmate called him a wigger in a 1990 high school yearbook inscription because he loved hip-hop music.

That apparently set off his journey to answer our culture's most difficult questions of racial and cultural ownership and authenticity -- a path that begins with the stolen blackness seen in the success of Stephen Foster, Al Jolson, Benny Goodman, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones -- all the way up to Vanilla Ice (popular music's ur-wigger, who is interviewed here) and Eminem.

In an artfully ruminative way, Clift weaves together interviews with scholars, journalists, comedians and practitioners of hip-hop, including more than a few self-identified wiggers. Deeper still, the documentary explores concepts of masculinity in culture and the wry observation of black comedian Paul Mooney that, after all the white flight to the suburbs, those same parents "now got little [epithet] in their house. I love it."

"Blacking Up" is careful to let people speak for themselves, as Clift efficiently segues from scene to scene: a Long Island meeting of the ossifying Al Jolson Society; a trip on a black-owned New York bus tour of hip-hop landmarks, during which white tourists are urged to wear complimentary bling.

At the same time, the film is drenched in its subjects' resentment. As a group of white and black college students hurl rhyming racial and ethnic insults at one another during an on-campus hip-hop battle, Clift stops and asks: "Is this a new face of racial understanding in America?"

The film itself offers only a shrug of objective indecision, as the blacks in "Blacking Up" calmly draw for us a straight line from old-fashioned minstrelsy to today's pop charts and fashions.

And the white poseurs seem more dense the more they talk. "I love 'Star Wars,' but I've never been to space," white rapper Aesop Rock says, by way of analogy, when asked if he's merely a cultural thief. And several hipster comedians in Manhattan, whose routines involve jokey raps about crack and malt liquor and other worn-out cliches, may as well have let Clift apply shoe polish to their clueless faces for their interviews. The women of Empire Isis, a hip-hop duo, toss their blond dreadlocks and insist that race doesn't matter anymore. They don't see it. They also don't see how insipid this intelligent documentary makes them look and sound.

Blacking Up: Hip-Hop's Remix of Race and Identity

(one hour) airs Saturday at 11 p.m.

on WETA.