BlackFace

You ever get the feeling someone wrote an article about a derogatory subject and they went somewhere they wasn’t supposed to go? I was doing my research on the history of blackface and of course I used Wikipedia as one of my sources. I read something about a “dandified coon.” I’m like.. bruh..

“Blackface is a form of theatrical make-up used predominantly by non-black performers to represent a caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the spread of racial stereotypes such as the “happy-go-lucky darky on the plantation” or the “dandified coon”. – Wikipedia

Historian Dale Cockrell once noted that poor and working-class whites who felt “squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm. Put another way, if you not better than a black man, than who are you better than. He also said , “By distorting the features and culture of African Americans—including their looks, language, dance, deportment, and character—white Americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis.” It what I always said and thought. Although there are some rock hard, fully loaded racist, most racist just want to belong to the club. They want to be accepted by their peers.

John Strausbaugh, the author of Black Like You, describes the phenomena of blackface in these terms:

“Blackface was an ancient European theatrical device that the Europeans brought with them to America. In Europe, it doesn’t seem to have been so much a racial signifier as a color symbolism. And it was pretty simple: White meant light and daytime and good and safety; black meant night, darkness, bad, and danger. So in Europe, for instance, demons and devils were often portrayed as black — and that wasn’t their way of saying they thought they were from Africa, it was their way of saying they were creatures of the night, creatures of the darkness. In America, the slave nation, where your whiteness or blackness is of paramount importance for the quality of your life and your social standing, blackface took on a very different meaning.”

Also according to Strausbaugh, “Blackface was created and performed mostly in the early years by white guys who had grown up poor and often Irish in the North. It was not a Southern art form at first at all. They were imitating blacks that they saw every day because the Irish and blacks, in places like the Lower East Side of New York City, were in the same ghetto together. They were sharing the lowest rung of the social ladder.” During the mid 1800’s, Ireland suffered a devastating famine. Millions died, while hundreds of thousands more immigrated to the United States. Penniless and destitute upon arrival, with most settling in Lower Manhattan in New York, they ran into an equally oppressed group, free African Americans. Here in the slums of Lower Manhattan, the two culture’s vied for living space and employment.

Blackface was a performance tradition in the American theater for roughly 100 years beginning around 1830.  By the mid-20th century, changing attitudes about race and racism effectively ended the prominence of blackface makeup used in performance in the U.S. and elsewhere, except Britian, where it endured to the late 20th century. “Are You Being Served,”
the misadventures and mishaps of the staff of the retail ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing departments in the flagship department store of a fictional chain called Grace Brothers, was the last of the British television shows employing blackface. It went off the air in 1981.

Today blackface is viewed for what it is, a highly offensive and degrading imitation. Recent stories concerning politicians and others who have been put into the public trust, only to betray that trust, shows how enduring the legacy of hatred and bigotry survives even to this day.