Op-Ed: The grey areas of blackface

It started as a simple question. A stupid question, I thought; one I was a little embarrassed to ask, because it seemed such an obvious thing and everyone seemed to get it except me. Why is it funny? I asked. What is the joke? Why are white people dressed as black people funny?

At first, nobody answered me. I thought this was because they all thought I was being obtuse. So I asked some more people and promised that it was an honest enquiry. I then got one or two answers, although they were vague. Because dressing up is fun, even if not necessarily funny, one said; because it’s role play, said another; a third said, in more detail: “The point is to get the contrast. It would hardly be funny if I played what I am, a coloured queer man with a periodic lisp and bitchy comebacks. But if you played me, it'd be funny.”

Now we were starting to get somewhere, I thought. But it didn’t answer the question sufficiently. It was still only glossing over the surface.

The question, for me, was important because of this: it is easy enough to see why dressing in blackface is offensive to some. But because of this, the offence is easy enough to dismiss, too. We take the offence for granted just as we take the joke for granted. It’s all too… glib. You can’t turn the tables till you know what the tables are.

Why are people dressing up in blackface?

Why do they think it’s funny?

And why is it happening now, so many years after the early blackface performances?

All the arguments I have seen so far for dismissing offence at dressing up in blackface have failed to address what 'blackface' actually is. These arguments have attempted to find things that are equivalent, things that are worse, things that are better, etc., but none of them have attempted to explain the “humour”.

Firstly: What makes things funny? Ironically, the analysis of comedy makes for very dour reading indeed. I’ll spare you the agony, and keep it brief. Broadly, the root components of humour need to either contain some imitation of reality, or else some kind of inversion of it – some surprise, misdirection, paradox or contradiction.

The methods of humour broadly comprise farce, hyperbole, metaphor, pun, reframing, and timing. Other tools of humour are exaggeration or tools of behaviour, place and size: by behaving in an unusual way, being in an unusual place, or by being the wrong size. Exaggeration can also fall under the latter, and is referred to by some theoreticians as the universal comic device, by “exaggerating [salient traits] to the point of absurdity” (Eastman & Fry, 2008).

If blackface is comedy, exaggeration is the most recognisable comic tool that is uniformly used throughout, along with a hearty dose of stereotype (this, one assumes, is meant to be the “reality” component).

Early examples of blackface did not only use burnt cork to darken the skin. Blair Kelley writes: “Wearing tattered clothes, the performances mocked black behaviour, playing racial stereotypes for laughs… one of the most famous minstrel performers, a white man named Thomas ‘Daddy’ Rice’s performances, with skin blackened and drawn on distended blood red lips surrounded by white paint, were said to be just Rice’s attempt to depict the realities of black life.

“Jim Crow grew to be minstrelsy’s most famous character… Jim Crow was depicted as a runaway: ‘the wheeling stranger’ and ‘travelling intruder’. The gag … was that Crow would show up and disturb white passengers in otherwise peaceful first-class rail cars, hotels, restaurants, and steamships. Jim Crow performances served as an object lesson about the dangers of free black people, so much so that the segregated spaces first created in northern states in the 1850s were popularly called Jim Crow cars. Jim Crow became synonymous with white desires to keep black people out of white, middle-class spaces.”

Kelley adds that minstrel shows in the 1840s added a broad cast of characters including “Zip Coon, the educated free black man who pronounced everything incorrectly, to Mammy, a fat, black faithful slave who was really just obviously played by a man in a dress. Black children were depicted as unkempt, ill-raised piccaninnies. The running joke about piccaninnies was that they were disposable; easily killed because of their stupidity and the lack of parental supervision.”

The irony here – and one that brings us back to the point of exaggeration – is that at this time, black actors themselves were often told they were not black enough and if they got acting jobs at all, were told to blacken up with cork or polish and dress up in the minstrel costume. The black actors themselves were forced to go in blackface to perpetuate the joke. They had to exaggerate the stereotypes to find the funny; they had to degrade themselves to make the “comedy”. And through it all, the joke – the exaggeration – was their blackness.

In South Africa, there are echoes of the same history. It has emerged that Boeremusiek as we know it has rather less white roots than its followers would have us believe – and the Boere originally performed much of the minstrel-influenced music in blackface, which provided them with a mask to hide behind. (“[B]lackface was a mask: it’s not you playing that adulterous music,” writes music journalist Trevor Sacks.) Here, the black mask was one of shame; shameful music went with blackness, even as the musical traditions were adopted, whitewashed and later became a source of (white) pride.

Certainly the layers of history around blackface were not always clear-cut. Stanford PhD candidate Kellen Hoxworth, whose field of expertise is exactly that, explains: “Blackface in South Africa has a very complex history that makes it difficult to make any definitive statements based on surface readings. Sometimes blackface is clearly a performance that denigrates blackness; other times, the apparent meaning is more ambiguous.”

According to Hoxworth, the earliest forms of blackface arose through colonial theatre productions of British plays such as Shakespeare's Othello and Charles Dibdin's The Padlock. In these early productions, black figures were represented as being sympathetic and even noble; however, the politics of performance still mandated that persons of colour could not perform themselves on theatrical stages, Hoxworth says. “Even these ‘sympathetic’ portrayals were haunted by the colonial divisions that entitled white people to ‘play’ black while barring people of colour from the public stage.”

Hoxworth adds that humour in blackface performances, too, is not always straight up and down. “If a white person finds a white person in blackface humorous, that does not necessarily mean that it is universally ‘funny’ or ‘just a joke’. Humour can be violent, and blackface often plays on the double-edge of race.”

This double edge is an issue that comes to the fore in the rise of minstrel shows, too. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) writes in Blues People: Negro Music in White America about the history of white and black minstrelsy in the US, arguing that white people caricatured and ridiculed black people so as to ensure the lines between the two groups were firmly delineated – a process of ‘othering’ which underscored their 'superior' social position.

But black people then started with minstrelsy themselves, and started caricaturing the caricatures in white minstrelsy. The result was a rather complex comedy that involved black people being entertained by black people pretending to be white people lampooning black people – a level of Russian-doll absurdity that takes some doing to unravel. Nonetheless, Baraka argues, modern blues and jazz emerged out of this tradition, and the layers of irony buried in it allowed for the birth of a fantastic musical idiom. Or, as a friend put it, “White people in blackface is not funny, but I think black people lampooning white people lampooning black people might just be.”

Another possible analysis of the ‘humour’ in blackface, besides othering and creating a feeling of superiority, is reassuring the self about something that is perceived as threatening, some believe. This is a common tool used in humour: one which, for example, is used in this Monty Python skit, where the feared figure (Hitler) is made into an object of ridicule to diffuse that fear. In the case of blackface, the feared figure is the black person or the swart gevaar – and the fear, although it may not be justified as in the case of Hitler – is nonetheless neutralised through making it absurd.

Hoxworth, however, cautions that this is not always the case. “Again, it is difficult to make any hard and fast statements about such a complex performance form. I will say that humour and satire are often used to de-fang perceived threats. Blackface humour can be read that way, but not necessarily so. In short, humour depends on the relationship between the performer and audience,” he says. In other words, it entirely depends on the power dynamics that exist between all the players at the time.

“The historical dynamics of blackface performance never escape racial dynamics of power,” Hoxworth says. “For white individuals, to put on blackface is always inflected with historical patterns of domination, ownership, colonisation, and subjugation. Even without venturing into negative stereotypes, wearing blackface asserts the privilege afforded whiteness to name, to own, and to perform blackness.”

Two key points arise here: firstly, that racial caricatures are still being used as a ‘humour’ tool today because of, and not despite, our ongoing anxiety around race, given our pained history; and secondly, that specifically because of this history, sensitivity is essential.

This last point is particularly relevant in relation to the recent incident involving two students dressing as the Williams sisters. Although the students released a statement apologising, and although their apology seemed sincere, they failed to recognise this crucial aspect: that they had “the privilege to name, to own, and to perform blackness”. Another crucial element they missed was that although they apologised, a friend made light of the previous case on Facebook, joking, “Let’s hope they don’t get kicked out of university for this one!” This made light of a previous case, which had used negative stereotypes – and was insensitive.

Jonathan Jansen makes a compelling point when he argues that it would perhaps be more productive to educate students about why it’s insensitive to dress in blackface than to throw them out of university, which simply polarises the rest of the country along opinion lines and results in two more uneducated people being out on their ear. Hoxworth agrees that there is a grey area here and that combating anxiety around race through alternative measures may be a viable route.

“I think that people are still dressing up in blackface today for a variety of reasons,” he says. “I think that race provokes a great deal of anxiety in individuals and in societies at large, particularly in contexts with deeply marked racial histories such as South Africa and the United States.

“The invitation to ‘play’ another race offers the hope that such weighty histories can be made light by making light of them. Unfortunately, play can lead to harm, intentional or not, that hurts all the same.”

It’s the hurt, unfortunately, that one sits with. And if your Mama taught you right, you should try to avoid hurting people – even if you’re not sure why you’ve struck a nerve. Nobody’s going to suffer much if they stop dressing up in blackface for as long as it offends. After all, Ellen DeGeneres has a sense of humour, got dressed up as Nicky Minaj without painting anything – and she’s doing just fine. DM

Photo: Al Jolson as 'blackface'.

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