Hollywood has a long and ignominious history of using black actors to play minstrel-like or stereotypical parts, and of using white actors in blackface. Below is the white singer Al Jolson in the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer

In Chuck’s estimation, those years continued up through the present day – the song has a long spoken interlude where the assembled rappers go to a showing of Driving Miss Daisy, and then leave in disgust

The word “clown” also refers to blackface, when white performers would put on makeup to create a overdramatized, stereotypical African-American caricature. The blaxploitation genre of the 70s was no better. Chuck wants the media to stop portraying his people in such a disrespectful way.

Indeed he is. Both Chuck D and Flavor Flav appear on Cube’s first solo album. (1, 2)

Chuck D had this to say about seeing Cube’s verse for this song:

I didn’t know how I was going to fit all the ‘bitch’ and ‘shoot the motherfucker’ [in Cube’s verse] into my situation, but fuck it, that was Ice Cube.
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A short but brutally effective rundown of the roles offered to black actors pre-1965. For a more in-depth treatment of this issue, see Donald Bogle’s excellent book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films and Marlon Riggs' documentary Ethnic Notions

Black women in cinema tend to play either nurturing “mammy” types (see note below) or, in recent decades, promiscuous Jezebels. They are rarely portrayed as upwardly mobile professionals

Kane argues that movie roles for black women have not changed much from the traditional “mammy” stereotype, even if they look like modern-day women

Aunt Jemima:

In 1989, the Aunt Jemima advertising figure was overhauled, giving her a perm instead of a head kerchief.

Chuck and co. had taken on the mind-numbing effects of television in song before, on “She Watch Channel Zero”

Fight the Power is a Public Enemy song on this same album that advocates radical political change. Cube, as per his persona in this period, advocates, er, direct action instead.

Stepin Fetchit (the name is a variation of the phrase “step and fetch it”) was the stage name of the black film actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry. He played the “laziest man in the world” in dozens of movies in the 1920’s and 30’s