Drawing America’s Brutal Imagination

Justin A. Davis writes on Ralph Bakshi’s controversial film “Coonskin” for its 50th anniversary, in a preview of the LARB Quarterly no. 47, “Security.”

By Justin A. DavisDecember 16, 2025

• Film

• Cultural Studies

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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WE ARE HAUNTED, as cultural historian Saidiya Hartman writes, by “the afterlife of slavery.” In her 2006 book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Hartman coined the phrase to describe how the historical devaluing of Black lives manifests in “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” But slavery also haunts our national imagination: our desires and fears, our dreams and nightmares, our style and sensibility. As much as Americans seem to talk about slavery, we never acknowledge how much space it truly occupies. In a 2003 interview, Hartman spoke to this ever-present tension: “On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought.”

Fifty years ago, one of the most bizarre, contentious depictions of slavery’s afterlife hit movie theaters. Its basic premise feels like a firestarter, even now: three anthropomorphized characters from Black Southern folktales rise through the ranks of Harlem’s criminal underworld. Helmed by a white Jewish writer-director, live-action sequences were combined with animation that’s purposefully dripping with racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes. Among the movie’s stars were big-name Black entertainers like Barry White and Scatman Crothers, but shock from liberal audiences haunted its release: was it biting satire or racist fantasy?

Revisiting that question feels especially urgent now, when Black outlaw and trickster narratives have firmly grown into the foundation of American pop culture—with and without Black folks’ involvement. We’re in a crisis of Black aesthetics with no easy way out. Maybe Coonskin just digs the hole deeper. But understanding just how deep it goes might fully illuminate the stakes of the moment.

Across ideological lines, our contradictory relationship to the racial gaze limits our political horizons. Some of us fantasize about a post-racial country where the racial gaze is a historical relic. Others cling to the trendy market of “anti-racism,” where our allegiance to particular brands, styles, or aesthetics is seen as a political commitment. During the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, streaming services censored or removed numerous TV scenes in which predominantly white casts used blackface. These moves, framed as reparation or atonement by the networks, are also acts of erasure. They obscure the reality that the modern West’s sense of humor is, to some extent, undergirded by minstrelsy. (Several of these offending shows, like The Mighty Boosh and Angry Boys, were British or Australian.)

Our popular understandings of “post-racism” and “anti-racism” suggest that we can separate our ideas of what’s aesthetically pleasing from the racial violence that has driven our history and our tastes. Coonskin suggests that the two are inextricably linked, and that escaping them demands a bigger sacrifice than what most of us are willing to offer.

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Physical copies of Coonskin are hard to find, and uploads have only appeared on the Internet Archive in the last few years. Since I first tracked it down for myself almost a decade ago, I’ve struggled to pin down the right words for it. Each time I describe it feels like a brand-new attempt to grasp it, to retrieve just the right angle to encapsulate its immense ambition and risk.

We might start, then, with its writer-director, Ralph Bakshi. Born in British-occupied Palestine a decade before the Nakba, he emigrated to New York City as a baby. He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a neighborhood known as a center for working-class Jewish immigrants and grassroots political organizing. As a nine-year-old, he moved briefly to the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, DC, a historically Black enclave that was on the verge of displacement. After trying to transfer to an all-Black school where his friends attended, fears around school integration forced him out, and his family returned to Brownsville. By the 1950s, Black migrants were flooding into Brownsville while younger white residents left due to economic shifts.

So much of Bakshi’s style is carried in his raw, intimate depictions of the multiracial working class. Many of his films are almost classical portraits of a have-not’s New York: tenements, dive bars, synagogues, and brothels; street gangs, mobsters, the underemployed and unhoused. “Ghettos for other people are prisons, places to be embarrassed of, places to escape from—but that wasn’t it for me,” he later reflected. “There were so many beautiful things in Brownsville. It was how you looked at it—the freedom of the streets.”

After stumbling on the work of underground cartoonist R. Crumb in a bookstore, Bakshi adapted Crumb’s comics into his feature-length debut, 1972’s Fritz the Cat, a tongue-in-cheek portrait of 1960s counterculture, the white-led student movement, and Black-led urban uprisings. The shock it engendered among studio executives, reviewers, and the general audience, made it a cult classic. Just over three years after the Motion Picture Association of America introduced its rating system, Fritz became the first animated film to be rated X, a designation previously reserved for films like Midnight Cowboy (1969) and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Bakshi followed it with a passion project, 1973’s Heavy Traffic, which follows the violently dysfunctional family and community of a pinball-playing, Italian Jewish cartoonist. Heavy Traffic experiments with some of Coonskin’s defining conventions, especially its mixture of live-action and animation. As that film progressed, Bakshi struck up a friendship with Albert S. Ruddy, a film producer who’d just scored a hit with The Godfather (1972). Bakshi pitched Ruddy his next idea, and the two quickly got Paramount on board. It was first called Harlem Nights and then Coonskin No More… before Paramount executives suggested shortening it to Coonskin for easier marketing.

On September 9, 1974, Coonskin premiered quietly during a film festival at the University of Iowa. White Middle America was Bakshi’s test audience, on a campus that had incubated fierce anti-war protests just a few years prior. One newspaper columnist speculated on whether the film’s provocative style might make it a box office hit, remarking that the crowd “roared in Iowa City, if that’s any barometer.” Two months later, Bakshi brought it back to New York as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s independent film series, Cineprobe. That screening has become apocryphal in the years since; former film professor Mark Langer once wrote that “no two accounts of what happened […] agree with each other.” But it’s clear that members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sat angrily in the audience. According to Bakshi, a young Al Sharpton was among them. When a Q and A session with Bakshi began, CORE “marched down the aisle to the edge of the stage,” confronting him over the movie’s depictions of pimps, prostitutes, and hustlers.

The NAACP’s Hollywood branch felt the movie was “very positive,” according to an executive board member. But CORE chapters continued to protest in the lead-up to its release, appealing directly to Paramount to cancel the movie or, at least, change its title. One screening near Times Square was interrupted by a smoke bomb, and a camera crew working for Martin Scorsese happened to catch it while filming Taxi Driver (1976). “[Scorsese] sent me this roll of film showing people running out of the theater,” Bakshi later recalled. “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

There were contradictions within these protests. Some protesters explicitly stated that they hadn’t even seen the film. Meanwhile, Paramount continued to promote Mandingo (1975), a period piece that graphically depicts the sex trafficking, mutilation, and torture of Southern slaves. But CORE’s pressure worked, and Paramount ultimately agreed to release Bakshi from his contract. The film was picked up by Bryanston Distributing Company, known for gory and sexually explicit titles such as Deep Throat (1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Rather than emphasizing the political satire, Bryanston’s marketing campaign presented Coonskin as a blaxploitation film, finally releasing it on August 20, 1975, to a limited set of theaters.

Does Bakshi’s proximity to Blackness—even his solidarity—entitle him to deploy these images and this dialogue? To me, this question feels less urgent than Coonskin’s polarizing response might suggest—because we’ve already answered it. Black working-class aesthetics (both those made by the white supremacist imagination and by Black communities) are an integral part of pop culture precisely because they’re treated as everyone’s property. They’re used as indiscriminately as Black bodies themselves to hold up the foundations of what we call the “mainstream.” In many ways, our contradictory treatment of Black outlaw narratives is one of the driving forces of American style: as eternal symbols of counterculture, and as empty vessels for respectability, state violence, and corporate greed.

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Coonskin’s starring trio is the product of a century-long history that began with Joel Chandler Harris. A Georgia-born white journalist with his own controversial legacy, Harris published a series of books, starting in 1880, inspired by Black Southern lore. Many of these tales featured animals, prefixed with “Br’er” (slang for “brother”). Harris created a narrator named Uncle Remus to be his mouthpiece; according to historian Michael Price, the Remus character was “a composite of several slaves that [Harris] had known in his youth.” The image that Remus presents is an archetype: an old, proud Black freedman who, in Harris’s words, had “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery.”

Some scholars suggest that the Uncle Remus stories subvert the traditional power dynamics of the plantation; others argue that they perpetuate a paternalistic view of rural Black communities. Harris himself hoped that by “preserv[ing] the legends themselves in their original simplicity,” he might offer readers insight into the “poetic imagination” and “quaint and homely humor” that he saw in Black people. “It is bitterly ironic,” historian Wayne Mixon wrote, “that a man who, by his own account, wanted to obliterate racial prejudice created a character who came to be seen as a buttress of racism.”

During World War II, Walt Disney took a keen interest in adapting these stories for a wide audience. Disney felt that Harris’s distinct narrative structure “required a new screen story-telling device”: live-action scenes depicting the plantation, and animated versions of the folktales themselves. They became 1946’s Song of the South, which has been almost entirely erased from the Disney canon, though it never went away: since 1989, “Splash Mountain” rides depicting Song of the South characters and settings have appeared in three of the company’s amusement parks. The Disney corporation has consistently avoided releasing the film on home video and streaming services in the United States. But when the first Splash Mountain debuted at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Disney higher-ups dodged criticism by “us[ing] only the animated animal characters.” By leaving out both Uncle Remus and the world he inhabited, the ride’s imagery could be effectively divorced from its context, especially as younger generations were no longer aware of its source material.

Coonskin and Song of the South directly adapt one of Harris’s stories in particular: that of the “Tar-Baby,” in which Br’er Fox tricks Br’er Rabbit into trapping himself in an effigy made of tar. The rabbit, in turn, convinces the fox to toss him into a briar patch, allowing the rabbit to escape. Bakshi’s adaptation took aim not only at Disney’s telling of the tale but also at the historical relationship between anti-Black violence and the movie industry. Some of American film’s most important technical and narrative conventions came from Ku Klux Klan propaganda. The rise of commercial animation in the 1920s and ’30s introduced popular characters who drew heavily from blackface minstrelsy—down to their trickster personalities, wide-eyed expressiveness, and white gloves.

In Fritz the Cat, Bakshi adapted R. Crumb’s anthropomorphic characters, for the most part, adding color and emphasizing their political contours: Black people are represented as crows, for example, while the police are literal pigs. After that, he relished the chance to present people in a wide range of styles. Some are drawn quite realistically, while others have the exaggerated body parts of a caricature—sagging wrinkles, bulbous lips, nipples poking through blouses.

Coonskin pushes this approach by zeroing in on the social caricatures that we associate with race, class, and gender. Many of its Black characters are explicitly portrayed as minstrels, with bright-colored lips and faces so dark that their noses appear to be missing. In addition to his fast-blinking eyes and cherry-red mouth, Brother Rabbit is the color of tar. In contrast, effeminate gay men are ghostly pale and lanky; a number of them cross-dress, including several of the Godfather’s sons. According to Bakshi, who is straight, these depictions were based on his experiences in gay and lesbian bars. But they were also meant to poke fun at the Mafia’s traditional masculinity: “Basically, it’s a slap in the face to being a macho gangster if your son’s queer,” Bakshi told Cartoon Research in 2023. The Mafia takes on a grotesque role that sometimes dips into pure fantasy, reflecting Bakshi’s special disdain. Some henchmen look like mannequins, or mosquitos; the Godfather occasionally appears as a congealed mass of wrinkles, pimples, and stray hairs. When his wife is killed for turning on him, she transforms into a butterfly.

At times, Bakshi’s trademark aesthetic falls away entirely, taking on the style of his influences. As the main cast drives to Harlem, we cut to a woman who tells a story of her ex-partner, Malcolm the Cockroach. Malcolm is drawn more crudely, the lines defining him sparser; we see him abandon his family for Manhattan, saying, “If I can’t do nothing for myself here, what can I do for you?” The scene is dense, vivid like a watercolor; it’s hard to know where your focus is best placed. The art itself references two humorists from the early 20th century: New York Evening Sun columnist Don Marquis, whose Archy and Mehitabel poems feature an absurdist, irreverent cockroach; and Marquis’s illustrator George Herriman, a white-passing Creole whose Krazy Kat comics fundamentally reshaped American cartoons.

Coonskin’s story evokes the 1960s crisis of Black fatherhood that seeped through popular narratives of urban ghettos. These narratives could be patronizing and pathological—like the 1965 Moynihan Report, which famously argued that the “deterioration” of nuclear, patriarchal families lay at the root of Black inequality. Bakshi’s narrative, in contrast, points at something deeper: the quiet violence of being dispossessed, of always having to juggle personal and collective survival. Like those chapters in Moby-Dick where Herman Melville abruptly begins narrating the Pequod’s crew like a play, these brief detours are political choices, reminding the viewer that to work in a certain form means allying yourself with (or against) a certain historical trajectory.

Bakshi’s animation intentionally reflected audiences’ conscious and subconscious images of race, gender, and class back at them. And by flitting between animation and live action, the viewer is continually reminded that America’s cultural imaginary obscures real, full human beings—undermining their real wants, loves, and griefs. There’s something deeply discomforting about using cartoons to convey the reality-warping quality of these encounters. We see someone in the street, or at a party, and instinctually pull from a latent pool of images, hundreds of years deep. As Bakshi himself once put it, he “drew like white people thought.”

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Like the Uncle Remus books of the late 19th century, Coonskin is a frame tale with two parallel narratives. Instead of an idyllic postbellum plantation, it begins outside the walls of an Oklahoma prison, where two prisoners—the elder Pappy and younger Randy—wait for Randy’s two friends Sampson and Preacherman to come rescue them. To pass the time, Pappy tells a story of a trio that reminds him of Randy’s cohort: Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear, and Preacher Fox. Sampson and the hulking Brother Bear are voiced by Barry White, one of the most iconic voices of 1970s soul and disco; Charles Gordone, the first Black playwright to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, takes on Preacherman and Fox, a skittering, alcoholic minister turned pimp. Randy and Brother Rabbit are both played by Philip Michael Thomas, a then-unknown actor who would get his big break almost a decade later on Miami Vice (1984–90).

When Rabbit loses his family home in small-town Georgia, the trio move to Harlem together, just a few more participants in the Great Migration. Harlem is supposed to bring upward mobility, safety from white violence, and ownership, but they quickly find out that the violence of racial capitalism has simply moved with them. By altering the setting from the Uncle Remus books, Bakshi highlights the historical continuities between these spaces of racial enclosure. To call it analogy doesn’t quite cut it: the prison is a plantation, and the ghetto is a colony, the struggle within both a struggle over the basic terms of Black existence.

The trio quickly meets Reverend Simple Savior (Scatman Crothers, who also plays Pappy and several other characters), a faux revolutionary figure who oversees much of Harlem’s underground economy. Savior’s version of Black radicalism is pure aesthetic. As he hangs naked from a crucifix covered in stage lights, he shoots at large photographs of John Wayne, Elvis Presley, and Richard Nixon with pistols. Meanwhile, Savior’s henchmen collect tithes, supposedly to buy weapons for this vague war against whiteness: “Guns, tanks, planes, even an atom bomb or two.” After killing Savior with subterfuge, Rabbit announces his plans to become Harlem’s new kingpin. But to win over Savior’s followers, Rabbit has to kill off the underground’s remaining leaders: a Mafia don aptly known as the Godfather (Al Lewis), and his enforcer, a cop named Mannigan (Frank de Kova). Postwar Harlem was the heroin capital of New York, and a popular destination for cops who wanted bribes from drug pushers and gambling operators. In fact, “Harlem’s precincts generated so much cash that police referred to them as the ‘Gold Coast’”—a term first used for a small region of colonial West Africa that sustained European trade in gold and slaves. The end of the Civil Rights Movement, the failures of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty,” and the violent antiradicalism of the Nixon era loom over Rabbit’s task.

Lingering in the background throughout this journey is Miss America (Jesse Welles), a personification of the white mainstream. Between plot beats, Bakshi intersperses a series of surreal, gory vignettes that try to explain the failures of the Black liberation struggle. An accommodationist, a gun-toting insurgent, and a poem-reciting “minstrel man” each approach her; she maims the first two when they choose to let their guard down. But the last scene is the most viscerally disturbing. The minstrel man vows to stop engaging with her entirely: “I won’t die in disgrace if I stop dancing, and don’t let you blow me anymore in the wind, ’cause I refuse to come.” She calmly accuses him of rape, and a noose appears suddenly to hang him as she strums on a guitar.

Rabbit, Bear, and Fox are not revolutionaries, per se. Nevertheless, they do what the revolutionaries won’t: they show genuine care for each other, and sustain a prolonged struggle against the state—all while acknowledging their culpability in the conditions they struggle against. “Black racket money stays in Harlem” is Rabbit’s political vision. “No more Mafia, police, mayors, senators, judges, or presidents. It’s our money up here—let’s keep it.” This is a Black radical tradition that might include Stephanie St. Clair or Iceberg Slim, one based less on a new kind of society than on perpetual warfare against the old one.

White supremacy is killing them, but so is their reluctance to leave “the game”—a decision that is equal parts selfishness and self-determination. We see this in the film’s final arc when, to stay in the Godfather’s good graces, Fox suggests that Bear become a boxer for the Mafia. “What makes you so special?” the Godfather’s right-hand man says to Bear. “Think you’re gonna save your race all by yourself? All you gotta show for it is some holes in your gut.”

Bear wins match after match in front of white audiences, who are shown in live-action; the whiteness of the boxing ring makes it seem like Bear is fighting in an endless void. The image brings together a life under the white gaze with the emptiness of living as human capital. When the animated and live-action casts each drive off together, escaping their respective conflicts, you wonder if rugged individualism was the problem all along—if the way to beat Miss America was by refusing to let her catch you alone.

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The rest of Bakshi’s career is a Forrest Gump–esque romp through the margins of film history—an animated Lord of the Rings (1978) that influenced Peter Jackson’s more famous versions; a two-season revival of the midcentury Mighty Mouse cartoons; Spicy City (1997), a cyberpunk anthology that beat South Park by a month to become the first animated TV series geared specifically toward adults. Our current understanding of “adult animation” as a genre quietly owes itself, in part, to Bakshi. But the racial gaze continually shapes what kinds of stories, characters, and settings appeal to our deep-seated sense of how we relate to each other—and thus to the cultural mainstream. When American audiences often treat aesthetics and politics as one and the same, Bakshi’s work left an unintended impact: its racial spectacle risked reinforcing the same violent gaze that he was trying to critique.

There’s a constant tension between Bakshi’s attempt to depict New York as intimately as possible and his own limited gaze as a satirist. When Bakshi deploys queer characters as foils for the lead villain, for example, what kind of representation is being offered to queer New Yorkers at-large? In Bakshi’s vision of the Harlem underground, queerness and Blackness only brush past one another. More broadly, the controversy surrounding Bakshi’s depictions reflects a lived reality of being Black: seeing yourself constantly reduced to a set of archetypes is exhausting, even if the intention is earnest.

Bakshi is incapable of feeling this particular kind of exhaustion, although he may have felt other kinds across vectors of his own identity. It’s what Claudia Rankine might refer to as an encounter “between the ‘historical self’ and the ‘self self’”—the act of looking at others looking at you, knowing that they can’t (or won’t) say what they actually see.

That contradiction is very much at play in one of Bakshi’s stylistic descendants, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino has called Coonskin “the most incendiary piece of work” from the blaxploitation movement, challenging “audiences’ sensibilities in ways that made all the other blaxploitation titles seem like the wish-fulfillment fantasies they were.” But one of Tarantino’s calling cards is fantastical, racialized violence as a form of wish fulfillment. In Inglourious Basterds (2009), Jewish American soldiers commit war crimes against Nazis as anti-fascist praxis. Django Unchained (2012) is the gory, scorched-earth campaign of a freed slave turned bounty hunter. What Tarantino takes from Bakshi is a basic conceit: that grotesque, “cartoonish” political violence—which, in the United States, is always racial violence—scratches an itch inside our culture.

The quintessential outlaw genres of the late 20th century—Westerns, blaxploitation, mob films—all rely on a distinctly racial gaze, in which non-whiteness is inherently transgressive, attuned to both receiving and doling out spectacular violence. Flipping that violence on its head lets us confront it in all its discomfort and leave with a clean conscience: by seeing it directed at the “right” people, we don’t have to feel implicated in it ourselves. It becomes more spectacular, even heroic, and the dissonance is magnified. Now that social media is a shared stage for political and cultural diffusion—and AI image generation is widely accessible—the state has hijacked this phenomenon for its own ends, owning its routine violence by making it cartoonish and spectacular. In the past year, official outlets for the White House have turned migrant deportations into Studio Ghibli–style cartoons and ASMR videos. President Donald Trump personally shared a video of a deadly airstrike on social media with the casual snark of someone playing a game of Risk. It wasn’t that long ago that the US government actively hid images of its brutality while promoting a more sanitized brand of patriotism. But “if the Abu Ghraib photos leaked today,” as Peter C. Baker wrote for The New York Times Magazine, “it’s possible to imagine that the White House would repost them approvingly.”

If the afterlife of slavery makes American art possible, then everything is up for interrogation: our collective vision is saddled with the weight of power, of history. Our aesthetic crisis remains, and the way out is as murky as Blackness itself. Bakshi’s work doesn’t promise liberation, but it offers us a match that we might toss downward—something that asks what we can make out as it cuts through the dark.