Blackface

This reproduction of a 1900 minstrel show poster, originally published by the Strobridge Litho Co., shows the transformation from white to "black".

Blackface is a style of theatrical makeup that originated in the United States, used to take on the appearance of an archetype of American racism—that of the darky or coon. In the United States, blackface was most commonly used in the minstrel performance tradition. White blackface performers in the past used burnt cork and later greasepaint or shoe polish to blacken their skin and exaggerate their lips, often wearing woolly wigs, gloves, tailcoats, or ragged clothes to complete the transformation. Later, black artists also performed in blackface.

Blackface was an important performance tradition in the American theater for roughly 100 years and was rapidly popular overseas, particularly so in Britain, where the tradition lasted even longer.

Stereotypes embodied in the stock characters of blackface minstrelsy played a significant role in cementing and proliferating racist images, attitudes and perceptions worldwide. In some quarters, the caricatures that were the legacy of blackface persist to the present day and are a cause of ongoing controversy.

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. However, it remains in relatively limited use as a theatrical device, mostly outside the U.S., and is more commonly used today as edgy social commentary or satire. Perhaps the most enduring effect of blackface makeup is the precedent it established in the introduction of African American culture to an international audience, albeit through a distorted lens. Blackface's groundbreaking appropriation, exploitation, and assimilation of African-American culture—as well as the inter-ethnic artistic collaborations that stemmed from it—were but a prologue to the lucrative packaging, marketing, and dissemination of African-American cultural expression and its myriad derivative forms in today's world popular culture.

History

"Displaying Blackness" and the shaping of racist archetypes

There is no consensus about a single moment that constitutes the origin of blackface. John Strausbaugh places it as part of a tradition of "displaying Blackness for the enjoyment and edification of white viewers" that dates back at least to 1441, when captive West Africans were displayed in Portugal. Whites routinely portrayed black characters in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, most famously in Othello (1604). However, Othello and other plays of this era did not involve the emulation and caricature of "such supposed innate qualities of Blackness as inherent musicality, natural athleticism," etc. that Strausbaugh sees as crucial to blackface.

Lewis Hallam, Jr., a white actor using blackface makeup of American Company fame, brought blackface in this more specific sense to prominence as a theatrical device in the United States when playing the role of "Mungo", an inebriated black man in The Padlock, a British play that premiered in New York City at the John Street Theatre on May 29, 1769. The play attracted notice, and other performers adopted the style. From at least the 1810s, blackface clowns were popular in the United States. George Washington Dixon was already building his stage career around blackface in 1828, but it was another white comic actor, Thomas D. Rice, who truly popularized blackface. Rice introduced the song "Jump Jim Crow" accompanied by a dance in his stage act in 1828 and scored stardom with it by 1832.

First on de heel tap,

Den on the toe

Every time I wheel about

I jump Jim Crow.

Wheel about and turn about

An' do j's so.

And every time I wheel about,

I jump Jim Crow.

— Thomas D. Rice, 1832

This postcard, published circa 1908, shows a white minstrel team. While both are wearing wigs, the man on the left is in blackface and drag.

Rice traveled the U.S., performing under the stage name "Daddy Jim Crow". The name Jim Crow later became attached to statutes that codified the reinstitution of segregation and discrimination after Reconstruction.

1830s and early 1840s blackface performers performed solo or as duos, with the occasional trio; the traveling troupes that would later characterize blackface minstrelsy arise only with the minstrel show. Skits were mixed with comic songs and vigorous dances. Initially, Rice and his peers performed only in relatively disreputable venues, but as blackface gained popularity they gained opportunities to perform as entre'actes in theatrical venues of a higher class. Stereotyped blackface characters developed: buffoonish, lazy, superstitious, cowardly, and lascivious characters, who stole, lied pathologically, and mangled the English language. Early blackface minstrels were all male, so cross-dressing white men also played black women who were often portrayed either as unappealingly and grotesquely mannish; in the matronly, mammy mold; or highly sexually provocative. The 1830s American stage, where blackface first rose to prominence featured similarly comic stereotypes of the clever Yankee and the larger-than-life Frontiersman; the late 19th and early 20th century American and British stage where it last prospered featured many other, mostly ethnically-based, comic stereotypes: conniving, venal Jews; drunken brawling Irishmen with blarney at the ready; oily Italians; stodgy Germans; and gullible rural rubes.

In 1843, Dan Emmett and his Virginia Minstrels broke blackface minstrelsy loose from its novelty act and entre'acte status and performed the first full-blown minstrel show: an evening's entertainment composed entirely of blackface performance. (George Christy did more or less the same, apparently independently, the same year.) Their loosely structured show with the musicians sitting in a semicircle, a tambourine player on one end and a bones player on the other, set the precedent for what would soon become the first act of a standard three-act minstrel show. By 1852, the skits that had been part of blackface performance for decades expanded to one-act farces, often used as the show's third act.

White minstrel shows featured white performers pretending to be blacks, playing their versions of black music and speaking ersatz black dialects. Minstrel shows dominated popular show business in the U.S. from that time through into the 1890s, also enjoying massive popularity in the UK and in other parts of Europe. As the minstrel show went into decline, blackface returned to its novelty act roots and became part of vaudeville. Blackface featured prominently in film at least into the 1930s, and the "aural blackface" of the Amos 'n' Andy radio show lasted into the 1950s. Meanwhile, amateur blackface minstrel shows continued to be common at least into the 1950s.

As a result, 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. Writes Eric Lott in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, "The black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them."

American humorist and author Mark Twain reminisced near the end of his life about the shows he had seen in his youth:

the real nigger-show—the genuine nigger-show, the extravagant nigger-show—the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience.... if I could have the nigger-show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera. It seems to me that to the elevated mind and the sensitive spirit the hand-organ and the nigger-show are a standard and a summit to whose rarefied altitude the other forms of musical art may not hope to reach.

The songs of northern composer Stephen Foster figured prominently in blackface minstrel shows of the period. Though written in dialect and certainly politically incorrect by today's standards, his later songs were free of the ridicule and blatantly racist caricatures that typified other songs of the genre. Foster's works treated slaves and the South in general with an often cloying sentimentality that appealed to audiences of the day.

Blackface in film

Through the 1930s, many well-known entertainers of stage and screen also performed in blackface. Whites who performed in blackface in film included Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby. and Judy Garland,

In the early years of film, black characters were routinely played by whites in blackface. In the first known film of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903) all of the major black roles were whites in blackface. Even the 1914 Uncle Tom starring African American actor Sam Lucas in the title role had a white male in blackface as Topsy. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) used whites in blackface to represent all of its major black characters, but reaction against the film's racism largely put an end to this practice in dramatic film roles. Thereafter, whites in blackface would appear almost exclusively in broad comedies or in the context of a vaudeville or minstrel performance within a film. This stands in contrast to made-up whites routinely playing Native Americans, Asians, Arabs, and so forth, for several more decades.

Blackface makeup was largely eliminated even from live film comedy in the U.S. after the end of the 1930s, when public sensibilities regarding race began to change and blackface became increasingly associated with racism and bigotry. Still, the tradition did not end all at once. The radio program Amos 'n' Andy (1928–1960) constituted a type of "aural blackface", in that the black characters were portrayed by whites and conformed to stage blackface stereotypes. The conventions of blackface also lived on unmodified at least into the 1950s in animated theatrical cartoons. Strausbaugh estimates that roughly one-third of late 1940s MGM cartoons "included a blackface, coon, or mammy figure." Bugs Bunny appeared in blackface at least as late as "Southern Fried Rabbit" in 1953.

Blacks in blackface

Bert Williams was the only black member of the Ziegfeld Follies when he joined them in 1910. Shown here in blackface, he was the highest-paid African American entertainer of his day.

By 1840, African-American performers also were performing in blackface makeup. Frederick Douglass wrote in 1849 about one such troupe, Gavitt's Original Ethiopian Serenaders: "It is something to be gained when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience." Nonetheless, Douglass generally abhorred blackface and was one of the first people to write against the institution of blackface minstrelsy, condemning it as racist in nature, with inauthentic, northern, white origins.

When all-black minstrel shows began to proliferate in the 1860s, they often were billed as "authentic" and "the real thing". These "colored minstrels" always claimed to be recently-freed slaves (doubtless many were, but most were not) and were widely seen as authentic. This presumption of authenticity could be a bit of a trap, with white audiences seeing them more like "animals in a zoo" than skilled performers. Despite often smaller budgets and smaller venues, their public appeal sometimes rivalled that of white minstrel troupes. In the March 1866 Booker and Clayton's Georgia Minstrels may have been the country's most popular troupe, and were certainly among the most critically acclaimed.

These "colored" troupes—many using the name "Georgia Minstrels"—focused on "plantation" material, rather than the more explicit social commentary (and more nastily racist stereotyping) found in portrayals of northern blacks. In the execution of authentic black music and the percussive, polyrhythmic tradition of pattin' Juba, when the only instruments performers used were their hands and feet, clapping and slapping their bodies and shuffling and stomping their feet, black troupes particularly excelled. One of the most successful black minstrel companies was Sam Hague's Slave Troupe of Georgia Minstrels, managed by Charles Hicks. This company eventually was taken over by Charles Callendar. The Georgia Minstrels toured the United States and abroad and later became Haverly's Colored Minstrels.

From the mid-1870s, as white blackface minstrelsy became increasingly lavish and moved away from "Negro subjects", black troupes took the opposite tack. The popularity of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and other jubilee singers had demonstrated northern white interest in slave songs, especially spirituals. Some jubilee troupes pitched themselves as quasi-minstrels and even incorporated minstrel songs; meanwhile, blackface troupes began to adopt first jubilee material and then a broader range of southern black religious material. Within a few years, the word "jubilee", originally used by the Fisk Jubilee Singers to set themselves apart from blackface minstrels and to emphasize the religious character of their music, became little more than a synonym for "plantation" material. Where the jubilee singers tried to "clean up" Southern black religion for white consumption, blackface performers exaggerated its more exotic aspects.

African-American blackface productions also contained buffoonery and comedy, by way of self-parody. In the early days of African-American involvement in theatrical performance, blacks could not perform without blackface makeup, regardless of how dark-skinned they were. The 1860s "colored" troupes violated this convention for a time: the comedy-oriented endmen "corked up", but the other performers "astonished" commentators by the diversity of their hues. Still, their performances were largely in accord with established blackface stereotypes.

These black performers became stars within the broad African-American community, but were largely ignored or condemned by the black bourgeoisie. James Monroe Trotter—a middle class African American who had contempt for their "disgusting caricaturing" but admired their "highly musical culture"—wrote in 1882 that "few… who condemned black minstrels for giving 'aid and comfort to the enemy'" had ever seen them perform. Unlike white audiences, black audiences presumably always recognized blackface performance as caricature, and took pleasure in seeing their own culture observed and reflected, much as they would half a century later in the performances of Moms Mabley.

Despite reinforcing racist stereotypes, blackface minstrelsy was a practical and often relatively lucrative livelihood when compared to the menial labor to which most blacks were relegated. Owing to the discrimination of the day, "corking (or "blacking") up" provided an often singular opportunity for African-American musicians, actors, and dancers to practice their crafts. Some minstrel shows, particularly when performing outside the South, also managed subtly to poke fun at the racist attitudes and double standards of white society or champion the abolitionist cause. It was through blackface performers, white and black, that the richness and exuberance of African-American music, humor, and dance first reached mainstream, white audiences in the U.S. and abroad. It was through blackface minstrelsy that African American performers first entered the mainstream of American show business.

With the rise of vaudeville, Antiguan-born actor and comedian Bert Williams became Florenz Ziegfeld's highest-paid star and only African American star.

A poster for the 1939 Broadway show The Hot Mikado using blackface imagery

In the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), an all-black vaudeville circuit organized in 1909, blackface acts were a popular staple. Called "Toby" for short, performers also nicknamed it "Tough on Black Actors" (or, variously, "Artists" or "Asses"), because earnings were so meager. Still, TOBA headliners like Tim Moore and Johnny Hudgins could make a very good living, and even for lesser players, TOBA provided fairly steady, more desirable work than generally was available elsewhere. Blackface served as a springboard for hundreds of artists and entertainers—black and white—many of whom later would go on to find work in other performance traditions. For example, one of the most famous stars of Haverly's European Minstrels was Sam Lucas, who became known as the "Grand Old Man of the Negro Stage". Lucas later played the title role in the 1914 cinematic production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. From the early 1930s to the late 1940s, New York City's famous Apollo Theater in Harlem featured skits in which almost all black male performers wore the blackface makeup and huge white painted lips, despite protests that it was degrading from the NAACP. The comics said they felt "naked" without it.

Authentic or counterfeit

The degree to which blackface performance drew on authentic African American culture and traditions is controversial. Indeed, in many cases it is hard to say which aspects of American culture are specifically African American. Blacks, including slaves, were influenced by white culture, including white musical culture. Certainly this was the case with church music from very early times. Complicating matters further, once the blackface era began, some blackface minstrel songs unquestionably written by New-York-based professionals (Stephen Foster, for example) made their way to the plantations in the South and merged into the body of African American folk music.

Early blackface minstrels often claimed that their material was largely or entirely authentic, but there is little reason to believe that this was anything other than hype. Still, well into the 20th century, even scholars took this at face value. Constance Rourke, one of the founders of what is now known as cultural studies, largely assumed this as late as 1931. In the Civil Rights era there was a strong reaction against this view, to the point of denying that blackface was anything other than a white racist counterfeit. Starting no later than Robert Toll's Blacking Up (1974), a "third wave" has systematically studied the origins of blackface, and has put forward a nuanced picture: that blackface did, indeed, draw on African American culture, but that it transformed, stereotyped, and even caricatured that culture, resulting in often racist representations of black characters.

As discussed above, this picture becomes even more complicated after the Civil War, when many African Americans became blackface performers. They drew on much material of undoubted slave origins, but they also drew on a professional performer's instincts, while working within an established genre, and with the same motivation as white performers to make exaggerated claims of the authenticity of their own material.

"Darky" iconography

Florence Kate Upton's "Golliwogg" in 1895, described as "a horrid sight, the blackest gnome." Note the formal minstrel attire.

The darky icon itself—googly-eyed, with inky skin; exaggerated white, pink or red lips; and bright, white teeth—became a common motif in entertainment, children's literature, mechanical banks and other toys and games of all sorts, cartoons and comic strips, advertisements, jewelry, textiles, postcards, sheet music, food branding and packaging, and other consumer goods.

In 1895, the Golliwogg surfaced in Great Britain, the product of American-born children's book illustrator Florence Kate Upton, who modeled her rag doll character Golliwogg after a minstrel doll she had in the U.S. as a child. "Golly", as he later affectionately came to be called, had a jet-black face; wild, woolly hair; bright, red lips; and sported formal minstrel attire. The generic British golliwog later made its way back across the Atlantic as dolls, toy tea sets, ladies' perfume, and in myriad other forms. This word golliwog may have given rise to the ethnic slur wog.

Darky iconography frequently adorned the covers of sheet music from the 1870s through the 1940s, but virtually disappeared by the 1950s.

U.S. cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s often featured characters in blackface gags as well as other racial and ethnic caricatures. Blackface was one of the influences in the development of characters such as Mickey Mouse. The United Artists 1933 release "Mickey's Mellerdrammer"—the name a corruption of "melodrama" thought to harken back to the earliest minstrel shows—was a film short based on a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin by the Disney characters. Mickey, of course, was already black, but the advertising poster for the film shows Mickey with exaggerated, orange lips; bushy, white sidewhiskers; and his now trademark white gloves.

Reproduction of an old, tin sign advertising Picaninny Freeze, a frozen treat

In the U.S., by the 1950s, the NAACP had begun calling attention to such portrayals of African Americans and mounted a campaign to put an end to blackface performances and depictions. For decades, darky images had been seen in the branding of everyday products and commodities such as Picaninny Freeze, the Coon Chicken Inn restaurant chain and the like. With the eventual successes of the modern day Civil Rights Movement, such blatantly racist branding practices ended in the U.S., and blackface became an American taboo.

Modern-day manifestations

Over time, blackface and darky iconography became artistic and stylistic devices associated with art deco and the Jazz Age. By the 1950s and '60s, particularly in Europe, where it was more widely tolerated, blackface became a kind of outré, camp convention in some artistic circles. The Black and White Minstrel Show was a popular British musical variety show that featured blackface performers, and remained on British television until 1978. Actors and dancers in blackface appeared in music videos such as Taco's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and Grace Jones's "Slave to the Rhythm", which aired regularly on MTV during the 1980s. Darky iconography, while generally considered taboo in the U.S., still persists around the world. When trade and tourism produce a confluence of cultures, bringing differing sensibilities regarding blackface into contact with one another, the results can be jarring. Darky iconography is still popular in Japan today, but when Japanese toymaker Sanrio Corporation exported a darky-icon character doll in the 1990s, the ensuing controversy prompted Sanrio to halt production. Foreigners visiting the Netherlands in November and December are often shocked at the sight of whites in classic blackface as a character known as Zwarte Piet, whom many Dutch nationals love as a holiday symbol. Travelers to Spain have expressed dismay at seeing "Conguito", a tubby, little brown character with full, red lips, as the trademark for Conguitos, a confection manufactured by the LACASA Group. In Britain, "Golly", a golliwog character, finally fell out of favor in 2001 after almost a century as the trademark of jam producer James Robertson & Sons; but the debate still continues whether the golliwog should be banished in all forms from further commercial production and display, or preserved as a treasured childhood icon. The influence of blackface on branding and advertising, as well as on perceptions and portrayals of blacks, generally, can be found worldwide. Black and brown products, particularly, such as licorice and chocolate, remain commodities most frequently paired with darky iconography.

The Netherlands' and Flanders' Zwarte Piet

Main article: Zwarte Piet

A white Dutch woman in blackface costume as Zwarte Piet.

In Dutch and Flemish folklore, Zwarte Piet—"Black Peter"—is a servant of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas). In the past, Zwarte Piet was more identified with the chastising of bad children than the rewarding of the good, but both characters have softened since the mid-19th century, and today the 5 December feast of Saint Nicholas is mainly an occasion for giving gifts to children. Zwarte Piet inherited many of the classic darky icons, contemporaneous with the spread of darky iconography. To this day, holiday revellers in the Netherlands blacken their faces, wear afro wigs and bright red lipstick, and walk the streets throwing candy to passers-by. As at Carnival, some of the actors behave dim-wittedly, or like buffoons, and/or speak mangled Dutch as embodiments of Zwarte Piet. Blackfaced, googly-eyed, red-lipped Zwarte Piet dolls, die cuts and displays adorn store windows alongside brightly packaged and displayed, holiday merchandise.

Accepted in the past without controversy in a once largely ethnically homogeneous nation, today Zwarte Piet is controversial. While many see him as a cherished tradition and look forward to his annual appearance, others—especially people of color and visitors from countries that lack this tradition—detest him and see him as a racist caricature that shapes Dutch children's perceptions of black people.

As a result of the allegations of racism, some of the Dutch have tried replacing Zwarte Piet's blackface makeup with face paint in alternative colors such as green or purple. This practice, however, has not caught on.

"Coons" of Cape Town and Auckland

Inspired by blackface minstrels who visited Cape Town, South Africa, in 1848, former Javanese and Malaysian slaves took up the minstrel tradition, holding emancipation celebrations which consisted of music, dancing and parades. In the African-American cakewalk tradition, their songs often parodied their former masters and the privileged, white class. Such celebrations eventually became consolidated into an annual, year-end event known as the Cape Coon Carnival.

Today, carnival minstrels are mostly Coloured ("mixed race"), Afrikaans-speaking revellers. Often in a pared-down style of blackface which exaggerates only the lips, they parade down the streets of the city in colorful costumes, in a celebration of Creole culture. Participants also pay homage to the carnival's African-American roots, playing Negro spirituals and jazz featuring traditional Dixieland jazz instruments, including horns, banjos, and tambourines.

Over time, carnival participants have appropriated the term coon and do not regard it as a pejorative. However, city officials changed the name of the celebration to the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival in 2003, so as to avoid offending tourists. Former South African president Nelson Mandela endorsed the carnival in 1986, and is a member of the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival Association, which presides over the event. Now officially more than a hundred years old, the carnival has become a major tourist attraction, vigorously promoted by the nation's tourism authority, complete with corporate sponsorship. In any case, the South African term Kaapse Klopse, meaning "Cape Town Carnival Troupes Festival", is not controversial in any means whatsoever.

A multi-ethnic group of New Zealanders, taking their cue from the Cape Town tradition, have started their own "Cape Coon troupe", calling themselves the "Auckland City Dukes". Wearing modified minstrel attire and modified blackface similar to that of their Cape Town counterparts, the Dukes participate in the annual Cape Town Minstrel Carnival and enthusiastically embrace the "coon" moniker.

In the U.S.

Promotional poster for Spike Lee's movie Bamboozled (2000)

The darky, or coon, archetype that blackface played such a profound role in creating remains a persistent thread in American culture. It continues to resurface. Animation utilizing darky iconography aired on U.S. television routinely as late as the mid-1990s, and still can be seen in specialty time slots on such networks as TCM. In 1993, white actor Ted Danson ignited a firestorm of controversy when he appeared at a Friars Club roast in blackface, delivering a risqué shtick written by his then love interest, African-American comedienne Whoopi Goldberg. Recently, gay white performer Chuck Knipp has used drag, blackface, and broad racial caricature while portraying a character named "Shirley Q. Liquor" in his cabaret act, generally performed for all-white audiences. Knipp's outrageously stereotypical character has drawn criticism and prompted demonstrations from black, gay and transgender activists.

In New Orleans in the early 1900s, a group of African American laborers began a marching club in the annual Mardi Gras parade, dressed as hobos and calling themselves "The Tramps". Wanting a flashier look, they later renamed themselves "Zulus" and copied their costumes from a blackface vaudeville skit performed at a local black jazz club and cabaret. The result is one of the best known and most striking krewes of Mardi Gras, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Dressed in grass skirts, top hats and exaggerated blackface, the Zulus of New Orleans are controversial as well as popular.

The wearing of blackface was once a traditional part of the annual Mummers Parade in Philadelphia. Growing dissent from civil rights groups and the offense of the black community led to a 1964 official city policy ruling out blackface.

Former Illinois congressman and House Republican party minority leader Bob Michel caused a minor stir in the early 1990s, when he fondly recalled minstrel shows in which he had participated as a young man and expressed his regret that they had fallen out of fashion.

Blackface and minstrelsy also serve as the theme of Spike Lee's film Bamboozled (2000). It tells of a black television executive who reintroduces the old blackface style and is horrified by its success.

In recent years, there have been several inflammatory blackface "incidents" where white college students donned blackface as part of possibly innocent, but insensitive, gags, or as part of an acknowledged climate of racism and intolerance on campus. Such incidents usually escalate around Halloween, with students often acting out racist stereotypes.

This elaborate, figural, Art deco Ronson tabletop cigarette lighter, manufactured in 1936, is an example of an everyday consumer item rendered in classic darky iconographical style. It sold on eBay in June 2006 for $2,225.

In November 2005, controversy erupted when African American journalist Steve Gilliard posted a photograph on his blog. The image was of black Republican Maryland lieutenant governor Michael S. Steele, then a candidate for U.S. Senate. It had been doctored to include bushy, white eyebrows and big, red lips. The caption read, "I's simple Sambo and I's running for the big house." Gilliard defended the image, commenting that the politically conservative Steele has "refused to stand up for his people."

Further, commodities bearing iconic darky images, from tableware, soap and toy marbles to home accessories and T-shirts, continue to be manufactured and marketed in the U.S. and elsewhere. Some are reproductions of historical artifacts, while others are so-called "fantasy" items, newly designed and manufactured for the marketplace. There is a thriving niche market for such item in the U.S., particularly, as well as for original artifacts of darky iconography. The value of vintage "negrobilia" pieces has risen steadily since the 1970s.

Legacy

Despite its racist portrayals, blackface was the conduit through which African-American and African-American-influenced music, comedy, and dance first reached the American mainstream. It played a seminal role in the introduction of African-American culture to world audiences. Wrote jazz historian Gary Giddings in Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years 1903-1940:

Though antebellum (minstrel) troupes were white, the form developed in a form of racial collaboration, illustrating the axiom that defines - and continues to define - American music as it developed over the next century and a half: African-American innovations metamorphose into American popular culture when white performers learn to mimic black ones.

As with jazz, many of country's earliest stars, such as Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills, were veterans of blackface performance. More recently, the American country music television show Hee Haw (1969–1993) had the format and much of the content of a minstrel show.

The immense popularity and profitability of blackface were testaments to the power, appeal, and commercial viability of not only black music and dance, but also of black style. This led to cross-cultural collaborations, as Giddings writes; but, particularly in times past, to the often ruthless exploitation and outright theft of African-American artistic genius, as well—by other, white performers and composers; agents; promoters; publishers; and record company executives.

While blackface in the literal sense has played only a minor role in entertainment in recent decades, various writers see it as epitomizing an appropriation and imitation of black culture that continues today. As noted above, Strausbaugh sees blackface as central to a longer tradition of "displaying Blackness". "To this day," he writes, "Whites admire, envy and seek to emulate such supposed innate qualities of Blackness as inherent musicality, natural athleticism, the composure known as 'cool' and superior sexual endowment," a phenomemon he views as part of the history of blackface. For more than a century, when white performers have wanted to appear sexy, (like Elvis or Mick Jagger); or streetwise, (like Eminem); or hip, (like Mezz Mezzrow); they often have turned to African-American performance styles, stage presence and personas. Pop culture referencing and cultural appropriation of African-American performance and stylistic traditions-often resulting in tremendous profit-is a tradition with origins in blackface minstrelsy.

The international imprint of African-American culture is pronounced in its depth and breadth, in indigenous expressions, as well as in myriad, blatantly mimetic and subtler, more attenuated forms. This "browning", à la Richard Rodriguez, of American and world popular culture began with blackface minstrelsy. It is a continuum of pervasive African-American influence which has many prominent manifestations today, among them the ubiquity of the cool aesthetic and hip hop culture.

Face paint and ethnic impersonation

Other types of performances involving ethnic impersonation are yellowface, in which performers adopt Asian identities; brownface, for East Indian or non-white Latino; and redface, for Native Americans. Whiteface, or paleface, is sometimes used to describe non-white actors performing white parts (for example, in the film White Chicks), although it more commonly describes the clown or mime traditions of white makeup. Dooley Wilson, famous for the role of Sam the piano player in Casablanca, earned his stage name "Dooley" from performing in whiteface as an Irishman.

In West African folk theatre and puppetry, there is a tradition of satirical represention of white Europeans. Performers will wear white masks and white gloves. In the Yoruba Egungun festivals overly affectionate white couples are made fun of due to their unseemly and ridiculous behaviour. The imagery is very similar to the representation of white colonists, sometimes with a humorous undercurrent, in wood carvings from the same regions.

In Thailand, actors darken their faces to portray the the Negrito of Thailand in a popular play by King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), Ngo Pa (Thai: เงอะป่า), which has been turned into a musical and a movie.

Other contexts

There are black face performance traditions, the origins of which stem not from representation of racial stereotype and are not in the stereotypical blackface mode. In Europe there are a number of folk dances or folk performances in which the black face appears to represent the night, or the coming of the longer nights associated with winter. Many fall or autumn North European folk black face customs are employed ritualistically to appease the forces of the oncoming winter, utilizing characters with blackened faces, or black masks.

In Bacup, Lancashire, England, the Britannia Coco-nut Dancers wear black faces. Some believe the origin of this dance can be traced back to the influx of Cornish miners to northern England, and the black face relates to the dirty blackened faces associated with mining.

See also

• Butterbeans and Susie
• Dusty Fletcher and Open the Door, Richard
• Moms Mabley
• Amos 'n' Andy
• List of blackface minstrel songs
• List of blackface minstrel troupes
• Censored Eleven
• Coon song
• List of entertainers known to have performed in blackface
• Little Black Sambo
• Papa Lazarou
• Spiritual (music)
• Two Black Crows
• Louis Armstrong
• Young and Innocent — 1937 Alfred Hitchcock movie

Compare

• Border Morris, a traditional English male folk dance tradition from the borders of England and Wales
• Ganguro, a fashion trend among Japanese girls

References

• Armstron-De Vreeze, Pamela (1997). ""Surviving Zwarte Piet — a Black mother in the Netherlands copes with a racist institution in Dutch culture"". Essence magazine. Retrieved 2005-11-15. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
• Hughes, Langston and Meltzer, Milton (1967). Black Magic: A Pictorial History of Black Entertainers in America. New York: Bonanza Books. ISBN 0-306-80406-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Lott, Eric (1993), Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195078322
• Malik, Sarita. "The Black and White Minstrel Show". Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved 2007-01-08.
• Sacks, Howard L, and Sacks, Judith (1993). Way up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Strausbaugh, John (2006), Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture, Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, ISBN 1585424986
• Toll, Robert C. (1974), Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-century America, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0819563005
• Twain, Mark (1924). "XIX, dictated 1906-11-30". Mark Twain's Autobiography. New York: Albert Bigelow Paine. LCCN 24025122.
• Watkins, Mel (1999). On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock. Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill Books. ISBN 1-55652-351-3.

Further reading

• Cockrell, Dale (1997). Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama. ISBN 0-521-56828-5.
• Fox, Anna (1999). Zwarte Piet. Black Dog. ISBN 1-901033-86-4.
• Henderson, Stephen (1972). Understanding the New Black Poetry. William Morrow and Company.
• Levinthal, David (1999). Blackface. Arena. ISBN 1-892041-06-5.
• Lhamon, Jr., W.T. (1998). Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-74711-9.
• Various authors (1999). Matthews, Gerald E. (editor) (ed.). Journey Towards Nationalism: The Implications of Race and Racism. New York: Farber. ISBN 0-8281-1334-3. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
• Rogin, Michael (1998). Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21380-7.

External links

General

• "Auckland gets its own Cape Coon troupe" from the SANZ Charitable Trust
• Blackface and other historic racial images from the Authentic History Center
• "Bambizzoozled - Blackface in Movies and Television"
• "Banned Cartoons" from Rotten.com
• "The Blackface Stereotype", Manthia Diawara
• "Coon Carnival, Cape Town" from Africape Tours
• "Nigger and Caricatures", Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, from Ferris State University
• Recent blackface stories in the news, from the Colorblind Society
• "Zulu Blackface: The Real Story!"

Zwarte Piet

• Zwarte Piet? - Boom Chicago rap video satire of Run DMC's "Christmas in Hollis"
• Expatica's Dutch News in English: Annual Zwarte Piet Debate
• "Who is Black Peter?" from Ferris State University
• Zwarte Piet film by Adwa Foundation, Rotterdam, and the Global Afrikan Congress
• Zwarte Piet (in Dutch)