Blackface has been in the news a lot lately on account of repeated instances of white people painting themselves black in order to caricature, ridicule, and demean African Americans.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam apologized on Feb. 1 after racist images emerged showing blackface and Ku Klux Klan photos on his medical school yearbook page from 1984. Less than a week later, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring admitted that he wore blackface at a college party in 1980. Despite calls for their resignations, both men continue to serve.
In early February, luxury fashion brand Gucci was denounced after social media users called attention to a sweater sold on the company’s website that resembled blackface, with oversized, bright red lips and a pitch-black half-mask covering the mouth and nose. Gucci apologized and no longer sells the sweater.
The Virginia occurrences are the latest in America’s extensive history of blackface, which dates to the early 19th century. Playing to all ages, white performers would dress up in unkempt clothing, draw on their mouths outlandish red lips, paint their skin the darkest shade of black—usually with shoe polish or burnt cork—and prance and dance about, speaking in a crude dialect that they believed mimicked uncivilized African Americans, who were portrayed as stupid, lazy, cowardly, oversexualized, and thieves.
From its early stages, black people have raged against this bigoted and cruel spectacle. In 1848, abolitionist and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass, writing in The North Star, called blackface performers “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and to pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”
Countless times thereafter, African Americans have made plain its harm and offense. Nonetheless, blackface remains.
Penn Today sat down with Mia Bay, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History and scholar of American and African-American intellectual, cultural, and social history, to discuss the history of blackface and why it continues to endure in the 21st century.
First, are you surprised that we’re having a conversation about blackface in 2019?
I am a little surprised. I was in college in the 1980s and I was not aware that people were entertaining themselves with blackface at that time. I would have thought it was dated. And the fact that it’s coming out in these sort of Southern contexts makes me wonder whether it persisted longer in the South than elsewhere. But, on the other hand, blackface has been one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the U.S. for literally centuries.
Why do you think that is the case? What is the appeal?
Probably for different reasons at different times. It has always stoked certain kinds of group solidarities. It started out in the 1820s and ‘30s. Part of what it did during that period is draw these strict distinctions between blacks and whites. White working-class people could make fun of blacks. It was also taking place at a time when slavery was dying out in the North. African Americans were being emancipated, and there was a lot of social anxiety about blacks maybe doing well under freedom, and becoming equal and actually the same. What blackface often signifies is that [black people being equal] is an absurd concept, that blacks are always going to be lazy plantation hands or badly dressed dandies. Blackface often makes fun of blacks with any aspiration towards any kind of status, and it also naturalizes the figure of a black agricultural worker who sits around and sings all day.
That sounds almost like psychological warfare. That might be a little extreme, but blackface performers are trying to show that black people, no matter how hard they try, cannot advance from a certain status?
One of the blackface figures is Jim Crow or Zip Coon. He’s portrayed in some of the most famous images. He’s the kind of dandy figure and he’s wearing nice clothes, but they’re all ripped up and in tatters. The idea is that black people may aspire to be middle class, but they can’t really do it.
When did blackface become taboo and no longer acceptable in a public platform?
Probably not until the 1960s. When talking pictures first come along, you have Al Jolson. When radio first gets big, you have ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy,’ which I guess isn’t actually blackface but might as well be. I think it doesn’t really become fully taboo until the 1960s—and apparently, it’s not fully taboo even now.
Do you think this is something that has been continuous and there just wasn’t social media? Or are these recent incidents just isolated incidents?
It seems like a tradition that still hasn’t entirely timed out. I guess people think it’s funny.
The Pew Research Center released a study on Feb. 11 that found that about one-third of Americans think blackface is acceptable in a Halloween costume, at least sometimes. Black people are almost always angered when someone dresses up in blackface, yet some people still believe it is OK. Why do you think some people fail or cannot comprehend the harm or offense of blackface?
I saw that too. There always seems to be a third of Americans who think almost nothing is offensive. I think it’s complicated and hard to understand in the same way that some people find it hard to understand why the word n---er is offensive. They insist that nothing is off limits. Part of why that word is so odious and why blackface is so odious is that they have this long association with racism—and vicious kinds of racism at that. The best possible case scenario is that the people who think it’s OK don’t fully understand that, and maybe don’t know as much about it as they should. How many different times does someone have to tell you something offends them before you take it seriously? And would white people really enjoy people dressing up in whiteface and doing silly imitations of them? It’s actually never been a serious issue. There is no tradition of whiteface among blacks or no serious tradition of making fun of whites in that way.
The New York Times produced a poll on Feb. 10 that reported that one in five American adults have seen someone wear blackface in person. The findings were pretty even across genders, age groups, political parties, and education. Why did you think it seems to be a popular form of entertainment for 20 percent of the population?
Maybe it reflects the fact that we continue to be a very segregated society. Would blackface even be a thing in truly integrated environments where you had an expectation that actual black people would be looking on and supposed to be amused? One wonders.
