Slavery was pure evil. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had slaughtered each other in the Civil War over the issue, yet the racist views of many white Americans did not drown in the rivers of blood flowing across the fields at Gettysburg and Shiloh. The bigotry against the African Americans instead raged into an inferno of hate, fueled by the still-fresh schism in American ideology. As it became more and more apparent that slavery needed to be abolished, the holdouts needed more and more material to justify their reasoning. The sharp instruments of physical and psychological torture were not dulled by the War, only disguised. The pen can be as deadly as the knife, as became the case with the practice of black minstrelsy. In reality, it portrayed the white perspective more accurately than the black culture. The term “black minstrelsy” does not represent the practice as accurately as perhaps, “white minstrelsy” of the black race. Examining the manufactured perspective and the real perspective separately yields the true difference.
The minstrelsy was presented in an arsenal of different mediums, and conveyed its overt and subliminal messages through song, art, literature, and live acting, among others. These could each be thoroughly analyzed, but a playbill is an ideal example since it pulls from several of these channels. One such playbill is that of “Christy’s Minstrels,” for a show in October of 1848 ("Blackface Minstrelsy 1830-1852"). At first glance, one may notice the obvious: the white male performers are displayed in formal dress, with prim posture and sophisticated style. The blackface characters are either dressed less lavishly or positioned in demeaning or ridiculous poses with exaggerated facial expressions. A number of prejudiced terms are used (most or all of which were coined by white people,) including “old zip coon,” “jolly darkies,” “Dinah Crow,” and so on. There are also concealed details that further advance the white viewpoint. For example, on this and other playbills, the white performers are always listed first, before any of the racist content. Terms and phrases such as “description,” “phrenology,” “peculiar characteristics,” “specimens,” and others hint at a certain scientific correctness of the performances.
This particular specimen was produced before the Civil War. However, that event was only the pinnacle of the conflict. The prevalence of this and other forms of minstrelsy were not far from equal immediately before and shortly after the War (Glomska, and Begnoche). During this period in American history, education was becoming more widespread in the black community. With or without slavery, African-Americans were finally beginning to break free from the chokehold of ignorance spoken of by one Dr. Cartwright in DeBow’s Review and other similar articles (Cartwright). This was terrifying to the Southern whites in particular, and they needed to produce a means of strengthening the walls of ignorance they had constructed that were slowly breaking down. Rather than enforcing the faults of the black culture, it revealed the faults in their own.
It is vital to now review the opposite viewpoint, which is that of the African-American. We can today refute the claims of the black minstrel culture, but no research is more powerful than the emotion felt by the direct targets of the practice. One such victim was the familiar and reputable Frederick Douglass, who thoroughly analyzed the topic in The North Star (Douglass). Douglass respectfully reviewed the talent of the performers with quite an objective position before mentioning the malevolence of the gig. He expressed hope that although the performances were malicious by design, it was perhaps a step forward for white folks to even tolerate the appearance of a black character on stage. However, he continued to describe it as something that could only “shock the taste of the one (race,) and provoke the disgust of the other.” Thus, to the whites it was intriguing only due to its mask of exaggeration, while to the African-Americans it was so blatantly false that they turned from it altogether. In fact, they were so disgusted by it that it played essentially no part in their own culture, except in the backlash produced by Douglass and others. But even in the midst of it, they articulated their hope for change.
Practices borne from hatred can never be cleansed of the loathsome amniotic fluid in which it developed—they retain if not just a little of their original meaning. It is because of this that black minstrelsy cannot ever be a gag or a joke, due to its connotations with slavery in the post-Revolutionary, pre-Civil Rights South. After the United States finally dragged itself over the peaks of the mountains of racial inequality in the 1960s, it became widely accepted that blackface and black minstrelsy was wrong on a number of levels. We have reached the point where even mild applications or jesting recreations, such as the recent incidences in “Next Top Model” and Australian TV show “Hey Hey It’s Saturday,” draw explosive condemnation from the general public ("Australian TV Show Apologizes For Blackface Skit"). Perhaps it is not only the attempt to repress malevolent stereotyping, but also the unconscious determination to scrub clean the image of “whiteness” culminated by hundreds of years of racism. It is a selfish motivation, albeit an effective one, and it reveals the important role that black minstrelsy played in white culture, if not more so than in black. Minstrelsy was a jar in the rain for the white society—it encapsulated very little of the African-American culture, only a few droplets of the truth. To those few drops they added chemicals and dyes until they had nothing but a jar of delusion to fixate upon. That, to them, was African-American culture. Ironically it was nothing but a part of their own.
Current Mood: N/A
Listening To: N/A
No comments:
Post a Comment