Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask

Harriet J. Manning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317096870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Blackface minstrelsy, the nineteenth-century performance practice in which ideas and images of blackness were constructed and theatricalized by and for whites, continues to permeate contemporary popular music and its audience. Harriet J. Manning argues that this legacy is nowhere more evident than with Michael Jackson in whom minstrelsy's gestures and tropes are embedded. During the nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy held together a multitude of meanings and when black entertainers took to the stage this complexity was compounded: minstrelsy became an arena in which black stereotypes were at once enforced and critiqued. This body of contradiction behind the blackface mask provides an effective approach to try and understand Jackson, a cultural figure about whom more questions than answers have been generated. Symbolized by his own whiteface mask, Jackson was at once 'raced' and raceless and this ambiguity allowed him to serve a whole host of others' needs - a function of the mask that has run long and deep through its tortuous history. Indeed, Manning argues that minstrelsy's assumptions and uses have been fundamental to the troubles and controversies with which Jackson was beset.

Chapter 1
Conflict and Contradiction:
Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy

Nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy – the white parody of black song and dance – was a complex world; its meanings were multivalent, ambiguous and contradictory, both over time and at once among its spectators. Not only did minstrelsy exist over a prolonged historical sweep, in a wide variety of contexts and publics (who moulded it to the shapes of their desires), but it was also built on parody – always unstable and double-edged in its meaning. As Dale Cockrell asks: ‘What exactly are intentions, facts, fallacies, in this kind of world, where burlesque is everything?’1 With the mask a central convention, minstrelsy was inevitably about twoness – most obviously black and white – about being other than who one was or seemed to be, and this ‘two-facedness’ allowed it to symbolize all sorts. As David Roediger writes: ‘Blackface could be everything – rowdy, rebellious and respectable – because it could be denied that it was anything.’2 This chapter introduces these complexities, a discussion structured round the tradition’s historiography, itself reflective of its subject’s ambiguous nature. Indeed, the historiography of blackface minstrelsy has witnessed not just diversity but an array of contradictions brought together only by their circulation around one fundamental: blackface minstrelsy’s role in meeting the needs of whites.

While relatively early documentations of minstrelsy exist (such as Edward LeRoy Rice’s Monarchs of Minstrelsy, from ‘Daddy’ Rice to Date, 1911), the first scholarly accounts of the tradition largely emerged in the early 1960s. These were led by Hans Nathan with Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (1962) and other similar accounts, including that by Robert C. Toll – Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (1974) and Alexander Saxton – ‘Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology’ (1975). A ‘second generation’ of approaches, which represents a clear departure from these early accounts, emerged in the 1990s, marked by Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993). This new approach was later consolidated by, among others, Dale Cockrell in Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World (1997), W.T. Lhamon Jr in Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (1998) and William J. Mahar in Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (1999). However, this revisionist historiography is not without its critics, David Roediger (Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, 1991) and Michael Rogin (Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, 1996) among them.

As well as its subject’s ambiguous nature, a key reason for this turnabout in blackface historiography, from first to second generation, is the differences in historical location of its subject matter: the first generation focuses on the classic minstrel show, the second on minstrelsy’s existence prior to this formalization. Of further note, the varying approaches to minstrelsy, however, are also the consequence of the differing historical locations of their writers. The first wave of scholars broadly represents traditional empirically-based historiography, functionalists who work from a presentist view and base their understandings on binary social structures and meta-narratives. This scholarly interest rose out of the same moment of the Civil Rights movement and Black Power and of the breakthrough of black American pop, including Motown, into the white mainstream. The second wave of accounts, meanwhile, illustrates the impact of cultural studies, post-structuralism and anti-foundationalist discourse and post-colonial theory. These approaches display the postmodernist favouring among cultural critics of the particular over the general and the subsequent interest in, and celebration of, multiply determinable, positioned subjects.

Early historiography: the minstrel show, racism and social division

As typical approaches of their generation, those of Nathan, Toll and Saxton focus on blackface minstrelsy in its commercial form, as it existed on the northern theatrical stage during the antebellum years. Toll does this by documenting the evolution of the institutional minstrel show of the 1840s while Nathan follows the career of Dan Emmett – the founder and leader of the Virginia Minstrels, the most successful group working in minstrelsy during its classic years. Saxton discusses what he introduces as ‘the first three decades of minstrelsy’, which he describes as being those from ‘roughly 1845 to 1875’.3 With this typical focus on the classic minstrel show, however, Nathan, Toll and Saxton all generally ignore the fact that minstrel entertainment had been in existence well before then, for at least twenty years in fact.

These texts present minstrelsy at face value, understanding its image – the grotesque blackface mask – to be its unproblematic referent. Indeed, the product of its time, minstrelsy in this context played out in popular culture the white racism of the ‘real world’ and, for Saxton specifically, the worst aspects of Jacksonian Democracy. This was the political philosophy of Andrew Jackson, President of America from 1828 to 1837. Andrew Jackson was a propagandist of popular democracy and individual liberty for white men, and strongly supported slavery. In these early accounts, minstrelsy’s politics are clear: ‘From the outset, minstrelsy unequivocally branded Negroes as inferiors.’4

In these texts the narrative paradigm of minstrelsy’s origins is one of cultural expropriation and exploitation; white entertainers consciously seeking out and learning to copy, and lampoon, black cultural material to create what became antebellum America’s defining popular form. Toll, for example, names Englishman Charles Matthews somewhat exclusively as ‘the first’ to adopt plantation gestures to create specific stage characterizations through the close observation of slaves. ‘While visiting America in 1822’, Toll explains, ‘[Matthews] studied Negro dialect, transcribed songs, lore, speeches, and sermons, and eagerly collected “scraps and malaprops”.’5 Similarly, for both Toll and Nathan, Jim Crow – the most popular minstrel stage-type – was born out of individual pilferage from black culture by New York-born Thomas Dartmouth Rice, known as ‘T.D. Rice’, a woodworker apprentice from New York’s Seventh Ward. Keen to forge a career in theatre, Rice, while touring the South in 1828, secretly observed a crippled black stable hand perform an ‘odd, disjointed dance’. Rice appropriated this style and, after he had perfected it by making some ‘refinements’, took it to the theatrical stages of New York and London where it was received as triumphant.6 For Saxton, blackface minstrelsy was shaped by Rice but also by Dan Emmett and his Virginia Minstrels, E.P. Christy (another white entrepreneur and owner and operator of the renowned Christy’s Minstrels) and Stephen Foster – ‘the major white innovator of minstrel music’ (though Foster did not emerge until towards the end of the 1840s, which was relatively late in the era of the classic minstrel show).7 It is these men who Saxton refers to as the ‘founders and purveyors’ of the form.8

Running as a theoretical thread, particularly through Toll’s documentation of the gestures and politics of minstrelsy, is the notion of containment through racial differencing and distancing. Toll typically paints a social picture of nineteenth-century northern America within which races failed to mingle (ignoring the South where they more freely did). Consequently, Toll suggests most free American whites ‘did not know what slaves were like, [but] believed or wanted to believe that black slaves differed greatly from [themselves]’.9 For this reason fugitive slaves posed the biggest threat, running to the North where whites wanted no part of them, in the hope for social betterment. As Toll details, the heavily stereotyped images of blackness, which came to define minstrelsy, satisfied this white fantasy of racial difference. By mapping over-determined, derisive images – fixed attributes and physical characteristics and gestures – onto blacks from the white ‘outside’, minstrelsy worked, as Toll explains, to keep blacks under tight control. Minstrelsy’s characterizations showed blacks worthy of and fit only for plantation life, wholly incapable of self-possession, as the helpless, hapless northern black dandy (the stage-type counterpart to Jim Crow the slave) proved. This disguise of racial containment, as a gift to the ‘Negro’, assuaged white discomfort over the morality of slavery as well as the threat and dread of living with difference. Serving white superiority and white self-aggrandizement, the minstrel show successfully confirmed and sustained the unequal distribution of power between races.

The notion of racial containment persists in Toll’s recognition of how some song texts referenced, even quietly celebrated, slave retaliation while the harsh reality of white power was sometimes apparently questioned. But although, at such moments, an anti-slavery stance through sympathy with oppressed slaves was being voiced, for Toll this was always within the safe confines of the plantation: sympathy could be expressed, but not so as to pose any real threat of change. At other times, these were moments when minstrelsy could acknowledge or portray slave discontent, stupidity and mischievousness and in the process was a mode by which to merely get a laugh rather than represent any real racial critique.10 For Saxton, minstrelsy presented an almost entirely monolithic attitude to slavery, particularly through the 1850s and the war years during which it ‘faithfully reproduced the white slaveowners’ viewpoint’.11

Largely due to the focus on the minstrel show as it existed during the antebellum years, Hans Nathan in his study of classic minstrelsy (Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy) fails entirely to acknowledge black performers (who, denied access onto the minstrel stage during its heyday, emerged latterly after the Civil War). The only exception to this in Nathan’s account is William Henry Lane, better known as ‘Juba’ – the only black performer who found professional success during the antebellum years. Saxton, likewise, despite his account extending through postbellum minstrelsy, does not mention the involvement of black performers at all but remains focused instead on its white versions and the white-led ridicule of blacks. Toll, however, devotes some time to black minstrels.

Far from providing a corrective to minstrel stereotypes, black entertainers had no choice but to reinforce them even as white actors moved away from such images. Toll uses a mid-century advertisement promoting minstrel character wind-up toys to visualize the way black performers were constructed and ‘controlled and manipulated by and for whites’ in the realm of minstrelsy.12 Toll draws on the highest paid postbellum black minstrel Billy Kersands as an example of this. Perpetuating the image of the wide-mouthed slave, Kersands made his large mouth the central feature of his acts while he played to the traditional roles of ignorance and slow-wit. Acceding to the stereotypes of their race, black actors had to pay a great price for entering white show business (although it is probable that to some degree the pervading racial ideology these images symbolized had also become internalized on the black psyche; a process Eric Lott, among others, argues for later). Despite Toll’s persistent assertions that black minstrels were in numerous ways controlled by whites, he does look to suggest there was also an undercurrent of protest among them and their audience: ‘Since such indirect and covert jibes were common in black folk culture but not in white’, Toll notes, ‘many blacks in the audience would have been sensitized to hear and enjoy even such surreptitious barbs, while most whites might not even have noticed them.’13 While white racial fantasies were being confirmed and indulged by black minstrels, a covert arena for black rebellion was also being created, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Conflict and Contradiction: Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy
• 2 ‘Black or White’: From Jim Crow to Michael Jackson
• 3 The Continuum of Blackface Minstrelsy
• 4 Ghosts: Racial Fantasy and the Lost Black Self
• 5 Turnaround: Love and Theft
• 6 Just Using It: Eminem, the Mask and a Fight for Authenticity
• 7 The Burden of Ambiguity
• 8 This Is It
• Bibliography
• Index