BLACKFACE: The Representation of Race Through Ste...

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Black Identity: The Perception of Race Through History

concepts of race and indentity analysed through three different contexts

BLACKFACE: The Representation of Race Through Stereotypes

by zamdeneme
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Denis Bettio (U1135153) University of East London

In this post Im going to analyse the historical and cultural phenomenon of blackface as an exemplar mean used by the cultural oligarchs of white society in order to define through stereotypes a second ethnic group, the black society the former positioning itself in a condition of superiority, while denigrating and lowering the latter. Focusing in particular on the post-colonial United States, Im going to illustrate the process through which the main signifiers of black peoples physical and cultural features were distorted and exploited, and how they affected the white-driven society until the modern days.

THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF BLACKFACE

What is intended with the term blackface is the practice of representing the features of Afro-American people in a caricaturist and exaggerated way, practice which has been taking place during the centuries in different forms with the main purpose of entertaining the white audience.
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The first episodes of black people being physically exploited to entertain a white audience can be 15-02-2014 18:24 referred to the XIV century, when the Portugal slave market traders began to take African natives to the

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mother country. Being seen as something exotic, the interest for black characters influenced several theatrical plays such as Shakespeares Othello, though these kind of early representations were lacking the stereotypical aspects that later on will be the key themes of blackface. Things came to a turning point during the 1780s, when the British comedian actor Lewis Hallam started to perform on stage the character of a drunken black man called Mungo. He used to apply a black tint to his skin and whitened the area around his lips, in order to imitate and exaggerate black peoples physiognomy. The popular interest generated on the subject inspired other actors to perform similar roles. In the early years of 1800, blackface characters became very popular in the States, and this trend culminated with the success obtained by white comedian Thomas D. Rice while performing a dance of the song Jump Jim Crow (jimcrowmuseum, 2012).

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The increasing attention given by the white public to blackface performances brought many actors to organize in travelling groups, performing the so called minstrel shows, adding to the repertoire of black songs parodies some short sketches representing different types of characters, according to the stereotypical behaviours associated with black people as being lazy, liar, superstitious, lascivious and incapable of speaking proper English. The characters bad behavioural attitudes and slang were based on white peoples perceptions of black slaves. In fact, those were the years of the American Civil War, when discrimination and segregation laws were having great impact on popular culture, particularly influencing the Southern States.

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Wm. H. Wests Big Minstrel Jubilee (circa 1900)

(http://vt2013group9.files.wordpress.com/2013/05 /blackfaceminstrelspostcard.jpg) Blackface Minstrels (1908) Blackface representations, originally exclusively performed by white actors, begun to be interpreted by black people themselves. This represented the beginning of a slow but ascending control of the way they were represented as. As Mel Watkins (2000) writes: By the 1860s black performers [were] going on the stage themselves and performing in a similar manner. Because basically when the black performers did minstrel shows, they were doing the same acts that whites had done before, it was necessary for themit was necessary for them to do that to be on stage. Otherwise, they would not have been allowed there. Gradually, they would change it, they would make modifications. (Watkins, 2000) In spite of the fact that those black actors were just re-interpreting the parodist dynamics coined from the white counterpart, they encountered a greater success from the public which recognized them as more realistic. This gain of power over the blackface plays, even if limited, allowed black actors to subtly make fun of the racist way they were depicted and to get some handle on the way their culture was misrepresented. At the end of the century, the popularity of blackface as a show was dying out, but its parodist style was conveyed in new forms of expression, with special success in the cinema industry. Bert Williams found his fame thanks to his interpretation of blackface characters in comic silent movies, playing with the myth of the black person as a scoundrel and vicious character, always ending up in troubles. A Natural Born Gambler (riverbends1, 2012) illustrates well the features of his characters. Even later on, major roles for black characters in movies were all interpreted by white actors in disguise, as in the first version of Uncle Toms Cabin (1910).
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A Natural Born Gambler (1916) Bert Williams Silent Film

Photo portrait of Vaudeville star Bert Williams in blackface with cigarette (Samuel Lumiere, 1921) This practice fell in dismay approximately around the 30s when sensitivity against racism slowly begun to hatch in the popular culture. Summarizing what Octavia Graham (2011, p.9) states, with the growing popular consensus of the Civil Rights Movement in America, blackface practice fall in dismay for its racial and denigrative aspects and becoming a taboo in a growing number of countries. Nonetheless, its deep eradication in the popular culture influenced the production of a huge amount of blackface imagery and products in the everyday commodities, industrial branding, famous radio programs and animated series until the late 60s and in some extent to the present days.

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ANALYSIS OF BLACKFACE THROUGH POST-COLONIALISM AND RACE THEORIES

The social environment we live in is the result of centuries of struggles and fights for human rights and equality, therefore it may not be so easy to fully understand the factors that formed the the concept of race and the dynamics through which discrimination was generated. Popular perception on racial diversity has varied through cultures and times, and was inspired and supported by a prolific academic discourse based on different studies by scholars and scientists. With the purpose of analyzing the popularity of the blackface phenomenon I am going to circumscribe my discourse around the colonialism era in America to the present days, as it is the span of time when the practice of blackface has encountered its greatest influence and developments. Summarizing what Michel Weviorka (1995, p.12) writes, at the beginning of the 19th Century is possible to observe the seeds of an evolutionary process in the American society. The starting point was a condition of neat separation between the white dominant class and the black one, subjugated by slavery. The latter started to organize itself into a cast system, but yet devoid of any independence from the power of white people impending among all of them. This change brought the formation of new social classes inside the black communities and therefore a new self-awareness, which led to a social fight for better conditions and recognition. This take of position was feared by the white class, because it threatened the power of control over its most important force of labor. It also carried the threat of giving equal opportunities to black people among the white hierarchical society, threatening their previously undisputed superiority. Racial prejudice became then a weapon for preventing and restraining any attempt of social revolution, by denigrating black people as unfitted for being equal to white. This is an important factor that contributed to the growing affirmation and popularity of blackface representations, as they were degrading black culture, along with classifying blackness as an inferior condition due to its stereotyped negative intrinsic values. As Octavia Graham (2011, p.8) writes referring to blackface: the genre played an important role in shaping perceptions of and prejudices about blacks generally and African Americans in particular. Some social commentators have stated that blackface provided an outlet for whites fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar, and a socially acceptable way of expressing their feelings and fears about race and control. The nature of the plays was based on depicting stereotyped characters to mimic black people performing socially despised behaviors. The hilarious effect that those kind of representations generated in the white audience was also thanks to the highlighting of the supposed innate despicable and beast-like qualities of the black nature, as opposition to the superior and refined behaviour of the white one.
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Summarizing what Robert Hornback (2007) writes about blackface iconography, this type of

representation bases its features on associating the features of black people to the animal figure of the

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ape. Their enslaved condition was rationalized by white society as a position comparable to that of domesticated animals. The concept of bestialization of those human beings was subtly proposed by culture, and generated in the association of black peoples supposed reasoning capabilities with the basic instinct and animal irrationality of the primates. As the last ones were considered by tradition as natural fools, the same characteristic was applied to the blackface play when representing the black stereotype. Using Hornbacks words (2007):

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Such a rationalized assumption of reason as the exclusive, natural inheritance of whites, as against purportedly innately, permanently irrational and beast-like blacks, who were deemed natural or born fools, prefigured and prepared the way for nineteenth-century scientific racist discourse on the nature of different races that may be traced in part to the natural fool traditions. (Hornback, 2007, p.64) The concept of fool or buffoon brings out an interesting analytic point of view, as its purpose is to entertain through been ridiculed. The unconscious terror for what is unknown or not understandable is intrinsic part of the human nature, manifested in white society by the creation of a symbolism, the blackface, which has been used specifically with the aim of being ridiculed, and therefore soothing that fear. Being black characters interpreted by white actors it allowed the crowd to convey, through this symbolism, its uneasiness into a sense of control and authority over the black population. As Eric Lott (1995, p.25) claims: the black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threateningand maleother while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them.

INFLUENCES OF BLACKFACE IN MODERN SOCIETY

The white supremacy in the form of control over the black stereotype has varied according to the mainstream type of media of the times. From the minstrelsy practice performed by actors, blackface then brought its racial discrimination in the representation of characters from the movie industry, radio programs, literature, product branding and a massive production of memorabilia and black imagery.

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A reproduction of a tin advertising sign for Picaninny Freeze (1922)

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There is a significant transition that undergoes the phenomena in the period between 1940 to 1960 that sees the the decline of blackface representations in the States, due to the affirmation of The Civil Rights Movements and the following sensitization of the popular culture. It will be only during the 80s that blackface will surface again, but under a totally different perspective. Summarizing what Horace Brockington (1997) writes on the artistic scene of the time, blackface and allthe racist imagery produced in the previous century was now serving the purpose of questioning the issue of race through its remarkably caricaturist features, which were more effectively perceived in a society were racism had became a taboo.

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The interest in racist artifacts still generates a vast interest. As David Pilgrim (2012), curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia refers in the dedicated website: There are about fifty thousand collectors of Black Memorabilia an umbrella term which includes any object related to the African American experience. Black memorabilia, especially the older artifacts, include a disproportionately large number of racist anti-black collectibles. Since the 1970s there has been an upsurge in interest in black collectibles, especially blatantly racist objects. Summarizing what Manthia Diawara (2008) analyzes about the renewed interest on the blackface iconography, a significant majority of the collectors now are black people. The reasons why blackface is being re-appropriated by the same ethnic group it denigrates is symptomatic of the social and political changes that affected society. Its use for self-expression among the black art movement as well has its connections with the new stereotypes generated in modern society. The use of the blackface by black people is driven by the necessity to re-appropriate their historical meaning, while erasing the white ideology behind them. By resisting the stereotype and deconstructing it, blackface serves now the purpose of establishing racial equality in society. In David Levinthals (1998) book Blackface, the artist questions the perception of what is race by appropriating and photographing racist memorabilia, challenging the viewer to identify the unconscious connoted meanings of these representations.

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from Blackface (1998) Using Diawara (2008) words, True to the function of every stereotype, stereotyping a blackface stereotype corrupts it by giving it a new reified content. The new blackface is therefore the criterion of transtextuality: an artifice which enables the performer to fill all the spaces that the old stereotype occupied and to be the star of the new show. If the old stereotype is the projection of white supremacist thinking onto black people, the new stereotype compounds matters by desiring that image, and deforming its content for a different appropriation. In conclusion, I think that blackface is still an important subject in order to understand the dynamics that rule our contemporary multicultural society, involving themes that are strictly related to our perception of other cultures. Understanding the mechanism behind a representation which is implicitly stereotypical in its nature is fundamental in a world now more than ever ruled by media and visual culture.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Blackface Minstrels (1908) Blackface Minstrels [Postcard] Available at http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/File:BlackfaceMinstrelsPostcard.jpg (http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/File:BlackfaceMinstrelsPostcard.jpg) (Accessed: 2 May 2013). Brockington, H. (1997) David Levinthal: Black Face, Review, February [Online]. Available http://www.plexus.org/review/brockington/levinthal.html# BROCKINGTON at: (http://www.plexus.org/review/brockington/levinthal.html#%20BROCKINGTON) (Accessed: 19/04/2013). Diawara, M. (2008) Black Cultural Studies. Available at: http://www.blackculturalstudies.org /m_diawara/blackface.html (http://www.blackculturalstudies.org/m_diawara /blackface.html) (Accessed: 19/04/2013). Graham, O. C. (2011) Black Enough: Blackface and Identity in Japanese Culture, Interdisciplinary Humanities, 28, 2, pp. 5-19, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost [Online], (Accessed: 15 April 2013). Hornback, R. (2007) The Folly of Racism: Enslaving Blackface and the Natural Fool Tradition, Medieval & Renaissance Drama In England, 20, pp. 46-84, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost [Online], (Accessed: 15 April 2013). https://www.youtube.com jimcrowmuseum (2012) Jump Jim Crow. Available at /watch?v=T5FpKAxQNKU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FpKAxQNKU) (Accessed: 2 May 2013). Levinthal, D. (1998) Untitled [Online]. Available at: http://www.davidlevinthal.com/works.html (http://www.davidlevinthal.com/works.html) (Accessed: 2 May 2013). Lott, E. (1995) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Open University Press. Lumiere, S. (1921) Photo portrait of Vaudeville star Bert Williams in blackface with cigarette [Online] Available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bert_Williams_blackface_2.jpg (http://en.wikipedia.org at: /wiki/File:Bert_Williams_blackface_2.jpg) (Accessed: 2 May 2013). Pilgrim, 9 de 10 D. (2012) Ferris State University. Available at: http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow 15-02-2014 18:24

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/newforms/ (http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/newforms/) (Accessed 19/04/2013).

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riverbends1 (2012) A Natural Born Gambler (1916) Bert Williams Silent Film. Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIghOyFvAaw (https://www.youtube.com at /watch?v=eIghOyFvAaw) (Accessed: 2 May 2013). Wieviorka, M. (1995) The Arena of Racism, London: Sage Publications. Watkins, M. (2000) /sf_minstrelsy_9.html (Accessed: 14/04/2013). PBS. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy_9.html)

Wm. H. Wests Big Minstrel Jubilee. (circa 1900) Wm. H. Wests Big Minstrel Jubilee [Lythography] New York : Strobridge Litho. Co..

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