Stop celebrating slavery, lynching
Get past the KKK and the Confederacy
One might have assumed America got over its love of blackface a century ago. Yet, a USA TODAY Network look at yearbooks from the 1970s and 1980s found America awash in blackface images. It’s amazing that an art form (for lack of a better phrase) invented in the early 1800s still has such a grip on America’s soul. But apparently it does, which is why Virginia has tied itself in knots trying to make sense of decisions that led future leaders to paint themselves in shoe polish or such.
Should there be a statute of limitations on such youthful indiscretions? After all, the internet did not really exist back then. It wasn’t assumed in the 1970s and 1980s that ill-conceived images would eventually live forever on the web. Most youthful mistakes, it was presumed, would die with one’s youth.
How should we respond when such images surface? And is there a meaningful difference between, say, curating a photo of guys in blackface and a Ku Klux Klan robe (which Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam now denies) and painting one’s face with shoe polish to mimic Michael Jackson (which, for some odd reason, Northam admits to)?
Put aside the complete insanity in thinking the key to looking like Michael Jackson is black shoe polish, what should we make of such behavior? Or of putting on “brown” makeup and a wig, as Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has confessed, in homage to rapper Kurtis Blow?
Why was there not national outrage when Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen wore dark makeup to portray Prince, Barack Obama or former New York Gov. David Paterson? And why are folks accusing Ariana Grande of “brownface” because she wore dark makeup in a video? Are people just being intermittently super sensitive? Or is there something particularly offensive about white people darkening their skin in an apparent nod to blackness?
Musicologist Charles Hamm explains that America’s relationship to blackface has always been complicated. Blackface sprang up in the early 1800s, notes Hamm, and for “most of the 19th century and well into the 20th, blackface minstrelsy was the most distinctive and widely disseminated product of American popular culture.”
In short, it was the face America chose to show not just to itself but to the world. And that face was one in which black folks, for the most part, were stupid but happy. The art form, always political, became more so during the 1850s.
As “slavery became the center of a struggle that threatened to destroy the Union and to allow millions of blacks to challenge whites for land, jobs, and status,” argued historian Robert Toll, minstrel shows increasingly focused on “contented slaves and unhappy free Negroes, (helping) the Northern public to overlook the brutal aspects of slavery and to rationalize racial caste.”
Blackface, in other words, was not just simple entertainment; it was propaganda for the dehumanization and subjugation of a supposedly grateful but incompetent and inferior race. And the reason it is painful for so many people is that it still carries those connotations — even if the people perpetrating it don’t intend to send that message.
On some campuses, Brookings Institution fellow Andre Perry told USA TODAY, the “way to fit in, sadly, is to make fun of black people. It is a unifying act. It’s sad but racism pulls people, particularly white people, together.”
I would argue for erring on the side of understanding such things. I don’t care how much tanner an entertainer wears. And I think it’s possible for a white performer to impersonate a black personality without that performance being offensive — even though I might wonder why a show such as SNL can’t employ a black performer to do such tasks, or how fans might react if Kenan Thompson, say, slapped on white foundation to play Attorney General William Barr.
My problem is not that a few people, when they were young and stupid, behaved in ways they would regret today. Or that certain people occasionally forget they live in a world that is not totally white. My problem is with people who refuse to acknowledge that celebrating the KKK, even in “fun,” is celebrating the lynching of black Americans, or that honoring Confederate heroes is not just showing Southern pride but honoring people who killed fellow citizens for the right to enslave people they racistly rejected as citizens.
My problem, in short, is that too many of us don’t take history seriously enough to learn from it. We wallow in stereotypes of the 19th century instead of vanquishing them en route to a more enlightened future.
Ellis Cose, a fellow at the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is writing a history of the ACLU.