Blackface is racist. I can see that by looking at it, kind of like I can tell a Native American Halloween costume is racist, or most depictions of Asians/Asian-Americans in popular media are racist.
But I didn’t know what made blackface so racist.
I consider myself a fairly “woke” individual, but only in the sense that I enjoy/propagate some of the more harmless conspiracy theories out there. I’m definitely not “woke” in the sense where I can ask my roommate if he wants to go get tacos for breakfast without worrying I’ve said something politically incorrect.
So, as the news out of Virginia erupted, I decided to find out why blackface is even more racist than it already appears. And, as a resident of The Internet™, I turned to Wikipedia to do this.
It turns out there were these things in the 1800’s called minstrel shows in which white people would put on blackface and make fun of black people by acting like buffoons. Predictably, these shows were really popular among white Americans. The shows traveled around the country. Their performers were celebrities. They were an institution in the early days of American culture. Blackface had existed in performances before minstrel shows, but minstrel shows made it ubiquitous.
Eventually, minstrel shows stopped being so popular. As happens with these sorts of things, they kind of faded away, interest in them decimated by competition from other theatrical genres, along with, you know, that whole war where over half a million Americans died because half the country wanted their rich people to have slaves and the other half didn’t want the first half’s rich people to have slaves.
Still, minstrel shows made their mark. Blackface continued to be used in theatre and, once they had been invented, film and cartoons, well into the 20th century. Meanwhile, characters from minstrel shows—or rather, one particular character—lived on in damning fashion.
Which brings me to Jim Crow, the subject of collateral learning in this particular Wikipedian foray.
Jim Crow, contrary to what one would reasonably assume, did not invent Jim Crow laws (unless, of course, you’re a college student who needs to hit a home run on the thesis of a six-page paper about race relations following the Civil War, in which case Jim Crow definitely invented Jim Crow laws but only in an abstract way which you will lay out neatly for your professor over the following eight paragraphs).
Jim Crow couldn’t have invented these laws because Jim Crow was not a legislator. Jim Crow, or at least the Jim Crow for whom the laws were named, was not even a real person. Jim Crow was a character in minstrel shows, particularly depicted in the racist song Jump Jim Crow (side note: All this stuff is racist, but I’m going to keep throwing in “racist” now and then as an adjective to drive home the point. Just because I don’t call one particular thing racist doesn’t mean it wasn’t racist. If it happened and I’m talking about it in this blog post, it was probably racist.).
This character, Jim Crow, may or may not have been based on a real person. If he was based on a real person, that real person was a physically disabled slave encountered by Thomas D. Rice (a big name in the minstrel industry) at some point in his travels.
Jim Crow, the character, was popular enough that twenty years before the Civil War exploded onto the scene, his name was being used as a slur for black people in America. His name was so prominent that when state governments within the United States started passing segregation laws, he was the racist icon whose name was colloquially assigned to the laws in retrospect (the laws started in 1877, and were first referred to by their now-all-encompassing name in 1892). He was also popular enough that one particular depiction of him on a poster has become an iconic image of racism in America, which is why Donald Glover a.k.a. Childish Gambino struck a very similar pose in the This is America video.
To sum it all up:
- Blackface is even more racist than it looks.
- Blackface comes from minstrel shows.
- Minstrel shows were really racist.
- Jim Crow was a character in minstrel shows.
- Jim Crow was such an iconic racist image that his name became synonymous with racist segregation laws, and Childish Gambino alluded to a poster of him in the video for his Grammy Award-winning single This is America.
Wikipedia articles enlisted in this search for knowledge:
