Seizing the third rail of cultural criticism with both hands, former New York Press editor John Strausbaugh offers an impassioned defense of minstrelsy in Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture (Tarcher/Penguin, $24.95). Strausbaugh's aim is not to rehabilitate racism (although he will undoubtedly be accused of such) but to examine the way the undeniably painful images of blackface sometimes provide camouflage for a messy, vulgar and cathartic exchange between races, in a way that more socially acceptable forms of performance do not.

Strausbaugh opens Black Like You with protesters leafleting an appearance by Shirley Q. Liquor, a white gay man who performs in drag as a black welfare mother. Without exactly answering the protesters' claim that Shirley Q. is "a racist, classist, misogynist attack," Strausbaugh argues that the act is "funny, extremely daring satire," aimed more often at whites and gay men than women or blacks. (For what it's worth, RuPaul apparently agrees.) His underlying point is that there is nothing inherently disrespectful, let alone hateful, about a white person dressing up as black, and that, in a culture where Spike Lee and Bill Cosby dismiss as "minstrels" black entertainers who offer less-than-positive portrayals of black life, the time is ripe to re-evaluate the minstrel show's uniformly besmirched past.

Working his way from the days when Africans were exhibited as freak-show curiosities through the heyday of minstrelsy and vaudeville and up to the Blaxploitation boom, Strausbaugh finds a history not of one-sided exploitation but mutual, if uneven, exchange: the template for America's "mongrel culture." In his bid to buck conventional wisdom, Strausbaugh sometimes steamrolls delicate distinctions; he's so intent on celebrating the cultural collisions of blackface, he sometimes forgets to be offended by its most glaringly racist applications. But in a country where many guardians of culture can't bring themselves to pronounce the "n-word," let alone discuss it, Strausbaugh's book is, as he imagines a performance by the minstrel great T.D. Rice to have been, "a blast of fresh air in a stuffy parlor."