It ’s 1889 . Missouri newsprint editor program Chris Rutt and his friend Charles Underwood have create the world ’s first battercake quick - mix , but they take a schema to sell it . Rutt had seen a minstrel show that feature the popular song " Old Aunt Jemima . " Inspired by the character , who was often portrayed by a blanched male in blackface and drag , he make up one’s mind to name their new breakfast concoction " Aunt Jemima " and attach her stereotypical mammy image — a genial and submissive smuggled cleaning lady who worked as nanny or housekeeper for blank families — to the product .
But the two fail in market the business , and they betray the company to the R.T. Davis Milling Co. in 1890 . R.T. Davis Co. not only fine - tunes the griddlecake recipe , but it also lash the Aunt Jemimamarketing ployinto shape . The company decides to turn Aunt Jemima into a real black woman , and theyput former slave Nancy Green on displayat the1893 World ’s Expositionin Chicago , where she sings songs , Captain Cook pancakes and tell inoffensive stories about the Old South . tight - forward more than 100 twelvemonth , past many looping of Aunt Jemima and gobs of boxes of flapjack admixture sold , and vestiges of the company ’s racist theme remain . And so does blackface .
As is evident from the word , blackface — the 100 - old practice of using make-up to translate into a caricature of a smutty person — is still active and well . College students across the worldwear costume and blackface at Halloween party . Performers come out on stageand televisionin blackface . Businesses and homes stillproudly exhibit darky iconography(think googly white eyes , ink - colored skin and big cherry-red lips ) andracist memorabiliawithout addressing their complicated story .
Blackface Then and Now
That complicated chronicle of blackface goes way back . So , the fact that people are still stroll into shindigs in blackface should come as no surprise .
But the reason that current blackface instances — like theold photo of rapper Drake in blackfacethat Pusha T surface — shove along up in the news and in societal spiritualist conversation is because the practice session has long been controversial and deemed harmful to democratic perception of black people .
grim hoi polloi have been parade for the enjoyment of white masses and imitated by whitened actors for centuries . In the book " Black Like You : Blackface , Whiteface , Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture " by journalist and cultural observer John Strausbaugh , the author even argues that the come of blackface were implant " with the first organized contacts between Europeans and Africans . " But blackface as we know it today , a cultural practice mean to mock , exoticize , disparage , compassion and generalize African - American people and culture , can be traced back to nineteenth - century theater .
A Short History of Minstrel Shows
Minstrel show started out as performances by white male minstrels ( traveling musicians ) who wore blackface and caricatured slaves . The shows were basically an absurd portmanteau word of stereotyping , racism and capitalist economy at its finest — minstrels parodied black song and dance , cauterise bobfloat to blacken their face and pretty much acted like mug on stage , touring the U.S. and sometimes Britain to divert white audiences . Most blackface minstrelsy was performed by nonblacks , but black people read part in the theatrical hijinks , too . ( Billy Kersands , the composer of the vocal " Old Aunt Jemima , " was a black comic known for his blackface minstrelsy and large mouth — seriously . ) In fact , after the " Father of Minstrelsy " Thomas Dartmouth " Daddy " Rice popularized troubadour shows with hisJim Crow characterin the former 1800s , someabolitionists embraced the platformas a fomite for spreading antislavery sentiment .
At first , folk singer performed solo , perpetuating stereotypic narration like that of the mammy , the uneducated rural slave and the clumsily sophisticated sinister human being . By the mid-1800s , the preponderance of minstrel shows had grown so tremendously that minstrel ensembles were drink down up everywhere and a show formula had grow . Christy Minstrels , a group that played on Broadway for almost a decade , established a data formatting where the isthmus faced the audience in a semicircle , the interlocutor sit in the center and the terminal man recreate the tambourine and clappers . ( The destruction men were named Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones , severally . ) There were jokes , ballads , one - deed plays , dancing , burlesque and a bunch of other act that by and large make a show entertaining .
Minstrel show were a hit for years to come — they even make traction in the last decades of the nineteenth 100 , after emancipation and in cities where livid people did n’t interact much with disastrous people . famed performer like Al Jolson , Shirley Temple , Ronald Reagan and Judy Garlandcontributed to the popularity of blackfacein the former 1900s , and unskilled minstrel show persisted in small local locale until the mid-1900s . But by the former 1800s , jongleur shows were dwindle away — vaudeville performance and movies were on the rise , and finally the civil rights epoch rendered blackface minstrelsy impossible . The problem was , the disparaging depiction , belittling stereotype and bias toward contraband people the show imparted were already deeply entrenched in the American cultural consciousness .
Blackface minstrelsy perpetuated substance that black people are clownlike , dim - witted , exotic and enigmatic , among other negative enactment . field of study show that medium portrayals can affect the means people comprehend blacks in material life and thatstereotypes can affectthe fashion the great unwashed interact with others and perform . And there ’s secure evidence that inexplicit preconception , the tendency for multitude to assign certain characteristics to different demographic based on stereotype , can affect how people treat blacks . For illustration , subway system areas with greater average unquestioning bias havemore racial disparities in police shootings . To this day , the perception of disastrous male asaggressive and criminalremains and rationalize the habit of vehemence .
As research and time have shown , there are long - lasting implication of impute negative stereotype to dim people . ( Just reckon at how the full term " Jim Crow " transformed to report Torah in the southerly United States that mandate discrimination found on race . )
So , when the internet erupts in an uproar against a person endure blackface , the problem is not political rightness , and it is not generational sensitivity . Blackface ’s bequest is one of white mastery and exploitation of blackened identicalness , and the weight and consequences of that history can not be divorce from it , no matter how great a student may think a costume is . As Strausbaughput it , " The problem , of class , is that so few of us experience our history . "
