If anything goes at Mardi Gras, does blackface count?
F. Brobson Lutz Jr. is one of those prominent Southern white men who once made a public appearance in blackface. It was at a big Mardi Gras parade years ago, and he knows there is photographic evidence.
And yet Lutz, a 71-year-old internist, is not in the least bit worried about any of it surfacing to embarrass him.
“I figure that since every Black person of any prominence I knew was also in that parade” — and also in blackface, he said — “then I was in pretty good company.”
That parade was Zulu, famously staged each carnival morning by the historically African-American philanthropic and social club of the same name. Zulu’s paraders, mostly Black but some of them white, wear blackface and grass skirts, a tradition that stems from a 1909 visit that club members made to a theatre performance in which Black people in blackface portrayed members of the southern African ethnic group.
This month, the revelation that Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia and other white public figures once wore blackface has opened a conversation among New Orleanians about Zulu’s very different blackface tradition — about what it means, who should be allowed to participate and whether it should continue.
The debate in the U.S. is as intense now as at any moment since midcentury, when some embarrassed Black leaders urged the group to give up its costumes. In 1956, Clarence Laws, a former field secretary for the NAACP, called the parade “degrading and depressing,” and “perpetuating a stereotype which selfrespecting Negroes detest.”
More than 60 years later, the tradition remains distasteful to some New Orlea- nians.
“It’s always made me cringe,” wrote Jarvis DeBerry, a columnist with the Times-Picayune newspaper, earlier this month on Twitter. “That said, they swear it’s satire.”
Kim Coleman, 29, who like DeBerry is African-American, said this month she no longer attended Zulu’s parade because of the sight of white people in blackface. “I find that disgusting,” said Coleman, curator of the city’s McKenna Museum of African-American Art.
This particular, and peculiar, blackface debate is at once familiar and different, whirled into some other thing by the complicated semiotic daiquiri machine that is New Orleans — and by the taboobusting spirit of its carnival season. The pre-Lenten celebration of Mardi Gras, which this year falls on March 5, is a party that has long exposed the city’s serious social divisions, with its parading groups, or krewes, largely hewing to divides between Black and white, subur- banite and city-dweller, old money and new.
But Mardi Gras is also about a radical suspension of seriousness. It was in that spirit that Sylvester Francis, 72, founder of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, which displays Mardi Gras Indian suits and other exuberant expressions of Black Mardi Gras traditions, defended Zulu this week.
“It’s carnival. Do what you wanna. Be what you wanna,” said Francis, who is Black.
“Even the governor,” he added, referring to Northam, “if he wants to wear blackface that one day, nobody would care.”
It was an intentional exaggeration, much like the Zulu costumes themselves. Members of the group and outsiders alike offer various opinions on their meaning and intent. In an interview, Zulu’s historian emeritus, Clarence A. Becknell Sr., said the early paraders wore blackface because they were too poor to wear masks. “These people were labourers who started this organization — they couldn’t afford anything,” he said. “And blackface meant nothing.”
In a statement Feb. 13, Becknell urged people to not compare or conflate blackface with Zulu’s use of black makeup, calling the latter a way for the group to honour its African ancestry and the “continent’s most fierce warriors.”
There are other theories. Kim VazDeville, an associate dean at Xavier University of Louisiana who has studied carnival, said that Zulu’s use of the Black men wearing blackface is a satirical weapon subtly wielded against an exclusionary white society in the midst of the annual grand debauch.
Vaz-Deville said that it became unsafe for Black residents to protest their condition after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that enshrined separate but equal accommodations for the races. (The case had been sparked by Black New Orleanians testing segregated rail cars.)
Zulu, she argued, was a sendup of the whites-only carnival krewes that mimicked European royalty while upholding the segregated social order. Early kings wore a lard can for a crown and a banana stalk for a sceptre.
“One of the ways that we found that people resist is through satire and irony and parody when they’re in oppressive situations, because it gives the cover of, ‘I’m making fun of you, but this is just a big joke in case you get angry,’ ” VazDeville said. “They blackened their already-dark skin to say, ‘You white people are putting on white powder and coming from some mythical European space, so in the same way we’re going to darken our faces even more and say we come from a magical mystical place in Africa.”