Blackface is not an anomaly. Beginning in the 1830s in the North, minstrel shows featured whites who darkened their skin with burnt cork and played highly exaggerated negative depictions of blacks — huge lips formed by leaving the skin around lips white and huge eyes also ringed by the white skin of the person playing at a white supremacist fantasy of black people.
In addition to the physical distortions, the characters were portrayed as so stupid they were hardly able to speak English, were childlike, lazy, shiftless, and depending on the era — for blackface has a long history — other negative characteristics for black women as well.
The first minstrel show was performed on the Bowery on the Lower East Side in New York City to a largely working class Irish audience. The shows were wildly popular and spawned the same hideous depictions of black men, women, and children in sheet music, children’s books, toys, product labels and household goods such as cookie jars, salt and pepper shakers, and boot scrapers, among other things.
These images were popular and ubiquitous all over the country. Some of these items can still be seen in antique shops, but they can also be viewed on the website of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The centrality of blackface to American popular culture was demonstrated again in 1927, when the plot of the very first talking movie, “The Jazz Singer,” featured Al Jolson as a Jewish immigrant who wanted to be a popular entertainer rather than the rabbi his father expected him to become and his medium was blackface.
Jolson went on to become a movie icon and blackface continued to be popular in the North and in the United Kingdom as well. White culture, U.S. culture, is steeped in blackface, as Spike Lee’s film “Bamboozled” so brilliantly demonstrates, though with all of the commentary on this issue in the media, no one I know about has mentioned the insights from this film.
All of the stereotypes about blacks are enshrined in blackface. The burnt cork and grease applied to white skin to turn it a flat black, not like any human color, was even used by black entertainers, most famously by Bert Williams. Blackface was used in “Birth of a Nation,” the movie justifying lynching by representing black men as oversexed beasts who aimed to defile young white women. All of the black characters were played by whites in blackface.
The film was first shown in President Woodrow Wilson’s White House, and subsequent prints had Wilson’s imprimateur in the first frame. Wilson, a historian, stated that this film was “history written with lightening.”
Even the film adaption of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery book that is reputed to have started the Civil War, had no black actors. Instead, white actors blackened up to play Uncle Tom, Little Eva, and the other black characters in the novel.
And here it is again in the yearbook picture of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who admitted to blackening up for the dance contest in which he was portraying Michael Jackson, but is not sure if the picture of a person in blackface in his medical school yearbook standing next to someone in a KKK robe is him. Obviously not well schooled in blackface, the governor used shoe polish to darken his skin and rather than apologizing for his use of blackface, he complained about how hard it was to get the polish off his face.
Northam’s parents were among the few whites who gave him the advantage of going to the newly integrated schools of the Eastern shore. Unlike the majority of the whites in the region, they did not send him to the all-white state funded “private” schools that were established after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. the Board of Education ruling that determined segregation in education to be unconstitutional.
According to an account in the New York Times, Northam still has black friends from his high school days who report that race was never an issue between them. But race is always an issue in this country — and the world — and so once again, we have another “opportunity” for the nation to engage in a dialogue about race.
But as Gov. Northam and Mark Herring, the attorney general of Virginia, have shown, white people in positions of power are no more ready now than they ever were to have serious dialogue about race. Neither have really apologized for their behavior, neither have taken the opportunity to admit to the viciousness of blackface, a caricature that drains all humanity from black people.
Though not always as overt as it was in Northam’s yearbook pictures, blackface still underlies representations of black people. The 19th century justifications for lynching in the tropes of dangerous, animalistic black men and stupid, lazy representations of black men and women of the minstrel shows live on in our culture, though in altered forms.
They are referenced in the words of the current occupant of the White House; in the impunity with which police shoot to kill black men, women, and children; in the only slightly veiled blackface representations of people of color in popular culture; and in many other places in U.S. culture.
Blackface is emblematic of how deeply white supremacy is embedded in our country keeping alive the myth of the inferiority of people of color. The United States has never faced the ways in which our history of genocide and slavery has shaped who we are as a nation and as individuals living within that context.
Blackface lives on because white supremacy is alive and everywhere. We only need to open our eyes to it, see it, and combat it.
Arlene Avakian is a professor emeritus in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.