Why Is Blackface So Controversial?

It may seem like folks make too big of a deal over blackface, but its history puts that outrage into perspective. Learn why in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. It's eighteen eighty nine. Missouri newspaper editor
Chris Rutt and his friend Charles Underwood have created the
world's first pancake ready mix, but they need a scheme
to sell it. Rutt has seen a minstrel show that
featured the popular song Old Aunt Jemima. Inspired by the character,

(00:24):
who was often portrayed by a white man in black
face and drag, he decides to name their new breakfast
concoction Aunt Jemima and attached her stereotypical mammy image, a
genial and submissive black woman who worked as a nanny
or housekeeper for white families to the product. But the
two fail in marketing the business and they sell the
company to the RT. Davis Milling Company. In eight RT

(00:45):
Davis Company not only fine tunes the pancake recipe, but
also the Antjemima marketing ploy. The company decides to turn
Aunt Jemima into a real black woman, and they put
former slave Nancy Green on display at the eight three
World Exposition in Chicago, where she sings songs, cook's pancakes,
and tells euphemistic stories about the old South Fast Board

(01:06):
more than one years to today, many iterations of an
Jemima and tons of boxes of pancake mix have been sold,
and vestiges of the company's racist roots remain. And so
does black face, as is evident from the news. Black face,
the centuries old practice of using makeup to transform into
a caricature of a black person, usually with googly white eyes,

(01:27):
ink colored skin, and big red lips, is still alive
and well college students across the world, where costumes and
black face at Halloween parties, performers appear on stage in
television in black face. Businesses and homes still proudly display
the iconography and racist memorabilia without addressing their complicated history,
because that complicated history stretches so back into our cultural history.

(01:49):
It's not a surprise that some people are still strolling
into shindigs and black face. But the reason that current
instances of black face blow up in the news and
in social media conversation, like, for example, the old photo
of Rapper Drake in black face that surfaced, is because
the practice has long been deemed harmful to the popular
perception of black people. Take abolitionist Frederick Douglas's comments on

(02:10):
musical performers wearing black face called minstrels. He wrote in
the newspaper The North Star in eighteen forty eight that
there quote the filthy scum of white society who have
stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature,
in which to make money and pander to the corrupt
taste of their white fellow citizens. Black people have been
paraded for the enjoyment of white people and imitated by

(02:30):
white actors for centuries. In the book Black Like You,
black Face, white Face, Insult and Imitation in American popular culture,
journalist and cultural commentator John Strasbaugh argues that these seeds
of black face were planted quote with the first organized
contacts between Europeans and Africans. But black face as we
know it today, a cultural practice meant to mock, exoticize, disparage, pity,

(02:53):
and generalize African American people in culture, can be traced
back to nineteenth century theater. Let's talk about minstrel shows.
These shows started out as performances by white male minstrels,
traveling musicians who wore black face and caricatured slaves. The
shows were basically an absurd blend of stereotyping, racism, and capitalism.
At its finest, minstrel's parodied black song and dance, burned

(03:16):
cork to blacken their faces, and acted like fools on stage,
touring the United States and sometimes Britain to amuse white audiences.
Most black face minstrel cy was performed by non blacks,
but black people did perform in these shows. Two Billy Cursands,
the composer of the song Old Aunt Jemima, was a
black comedian known for his black face minstrel cy. At first,

(03:37):
minstrels performed solo, perpetuating stereotypical narratives like that of the mammy,
the uneducated world slave, and the clumsily sophisticated black man.
By the mid eighteen hundreds, the prevalence of minstrel shows
had grown so tremendously that minstrel ensembles were popping up everywhere,
and a show formula had developed. There were jokes, ballads,
one act plays, dancing, burlesque, and a bunch of other

(03:58):
acts that generally make a show entertaining. Minstrel shows were
a hit for years to come. They even gained traction
in the last decades of the nineteenth century after emancipation
and in cities where white people didn't interact much with
black people. Famous performers like Al Jolson, Shirley Temple, Ronald Reagan,
and Judy Garland contributed to the popularity of black face
in the early nineteen hundreds, and amateur minstrel shows persisted

(04:21):
in small local venues until the mid nineteen hundreds, But
by the late eighteen hundreds, minstrel shows were dwindling of
vaudeville performances and movies were on the rise, and eventually
the Civil Rights earra rendered black face minstrel see unacceptable,
but the disparaging portrayals, belittling stereotypes and prejudices toward black
people that the shows imparted were already deeply entrenched in

(04:42):
the American cultural consciousness. Black Face minstrel see perpetuated messages
that black people are buffoonish, dimwitted, exotic, and enigmatic, among
other negative characterizations. Studies show that media portrayals can affect
the way people perceive blacks in real life, and that
stereotypes can affect the way people interact with others, and
there's strong evidence that implicit bias the tendency for people

(05:05):
to attribute certain characteristics to different demographics based on stereotypes
can affect how people treat blacks. For instance, metro areas
with greater average implicit bias have more racial disparities in
police shootings. To this day, the perception of blackmails as
aggressive in criminal remains and is used to justify the
use of violence against them, as research and time have
shown their long lasting implications of assigning negative stereotypes to

(05:27):
black people. So when the Internet erupts in an uproar
against a person wearing black face, the problem is not
political correctness, and it's not generational sensitivity. Black Face's legacy
is one of white suprevacy and exploitation of black identity,
and the weight and consequences of that history cannot be
divorced from it, no matter how great someone might think
their costume is. As Strasbaugh put it, the problem, of course,

(05:49):
is that so few of us know our history. Today's
episode was written by Eve's Jeff Cote and produced by
Tyler Playing. For more on this and lots of other
historical topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.

(06:15):
M