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Blackface: It's not just about cork anymore

Hi MFH -- thanks for chiming in. (So what do you think of the new blog format?) Yeah, I'll admit I paused slightly before going with "blackface" to describe what this idiot did, since we have as a culture a pretty clear image of blackface -- heavy cork, white outlines exaggerating features, Al Jolson / Bert Williams.

But I went with it, because (and now we delve into my history-of-American-popular-music obsession) as with the corking-up (aka blacking up) of yore, what this guy did when he "darkened" was a performance, and specifically a performance of an assortment of racial stereotypes connected to skin color. The blackface performers in the minstrel shows purported to be acting like "real" [we'd say black folk or African Americans, but other words were used then], but by and large of course it was pure hokum. (One of the things that fascinates me about Bert Williams, in fact, is that he was a man who was in part of African descent, who found no congruence nor reality in the awful stereotypes he saw in blackface performances, but who ended up working in blackface and trying, even succeeding to some extent, to infuse it with our common humanity. Amazing man. I digress.)

Anyway, blackface was something performers did to indulge an array of stereotypes for the amusement of onlookers, springing from an era when stereotyping was a major, major part of pop culture. Irish? Jewish? Italian? Greek? Hawaiian? Japanese? Chinese? Native American? Ruthlessly stereotyped on stage and in song -- and not just in the lyrics but very, very often in looks. One didn't apply the burnt cork for those, but there were other visual "cues," so to speak. Same stuff, different target.

And so we have a guy who wants to communicate a set of stereotypes. Obviously he dressed a certain way (or he wouldn't have won his contest); I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he affected an accented speech; maybe he carried props or the name to make it clearer what he was supposed to be costumed as. And he corked up -- maybe not so much as to indicate "Dahomenian," as our Mr. Williams would have had it, but that wasn't what this doofus was pretending to be. The shade varies, but the semantic intent remains the same.

The only thing that changes is that it's been about 90 years since we as a culture have found blacking-up an even REMOTELY acceptable thing to do. I reiterate the initial point: Dude's an idiot. (I mean the guy in the initial post, not Jiyu the commenter -- hard to hate on anyone who just gave me an excuse to talk about Bert Williams and semantic intent for 15 minutes!)