What’s Underneath The Costume

Ed Ayers: Amidst news last month surrounding his yearbook page, Ralph Northam admitted to darkening his face to resemble Michael Jackson for a dance contest in 1984. Soon after Northam’s admission, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said he, too, wore blackface in 1980 for a costume of another African-American musician, rapper Kurtis Blow.

Eric Lott: For a white person to have known about and have been interested in Kurtis Blow in 1980 indicates a discerning taste on the part of that person. I was a little impressed. That doesn’t defend by any stretch at all his having put on blackface.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Eric Lott: Putting on blackface is, at least to my mind, always highly racially offensive even when it’s done in apparent affection or appreciation of African-American culture.

Ed Ayers: That’s scholar Eric Lott. He studied the history of blackface minstrelsy for decades and its ripples through modern popular culture. He says the behavior of Northam and Herring in the 1980s represents white folks wanting to express an interest in black culture.

Eric Lott: … but needing to protect yourself as it were with the racist mask. That mask, I mean, that’s always been the [inaudible 00:27:07] all the way back into the 1820s and ’30s. It handles cross-racial interest on the part of whites in a way that manages it, contains it, makes it safe by adding a dose of ridicule at the same time as it expresses fascination, and to have to do that as late as 1980s or, indeed, the present day is a mystery.

Ed Ayers: Lott is right to clarify that this isn’t an old phenomenon. Seemingly every Halloween, photos go viral of white people donning blackface mostly for costumes of prominent black celebrities. In fact, a recent study by the Pew Research Center said about a third of Americans think it is always or at least sometimes acceptable for a white person to wear blackface for Halloween. The same study revealed that white adults are about twice as likely as black adults to say blackface for a Halloween costume is acceptable. The survey was conducted mostly before the Northam news broke.

Ed Ayers: I talked more with Lott about current attitudes around blackface. We also discussed how the legacy of minstrelsy has influenced black folks’ presence in the entertainment industry and the fine line between artistic appreciation, appropriation and mockery.

Eric Lott: I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules or lines one can draw. It’s a case-by-case argument or debate. Many people whose opinions I respect have written off Elvis as simply an imitator or a thief, and it seems to me that, taken all around with all the materials he was putting together to produce his work and his persona, he managed to do something fresh and interesting. There’s a charisma there and a dynamic and a certain kind of dynamite that he managed to put together. There seems to be some kind of class element that redoubles or over-determines or inflects the racial … the obvious racial borrowings so that there’s a tilt back in the direction of personal or individual expression as well as appropriation.

Eric Lott: Ralph Ellison posed these problems so well. There is no cultural location in the United States that is untouched by African-American culture. The real melting pot is of disparate African and post-African cultures melded into a brand new world culture in the new world, and that new world post-African culture has influenced everyone in the United States so that, as Ellison put it, most white Americans are significantly African-American many times without realizing it.

Eric Lott: At the same time, that incredibly mixed and melded culture is handled in racist and segregated ways obviously so that the two kind of thrusts coexist of mixing and of segregation or separation, and Ellison’s fine image of the young, white kid at a Klan rally with a transistor radio up to his ear blasting Stevie Wonder, and that really is a situation right there.

Ed Ayers: Let’s go back and talk about the history of blackface minstrelsy specifically, and I’m wondering if you might consider it the opening moment where white people began to at least recognize black folk as having a culture. Obviously, there’s black folk as property, but black folk as vessels of culture. Is that really the first time that this happens in American life?

Eric Lott: It is in entertainment form, yes, in order to put the show on in the first place and for white audiences in significant numbers, and it’s a big hit right away, to go to these shows, made visible and public and collective and commercially profitable the notion that there were such things as African-American dance, songs, humor that existed, and, although they did their best to deny it, right behind that lies the notion that, wait, these are actual human beings with complicated and fascinating cultural practices. There are all kinds of ways, of course, all kinds of languages whites used to degrade, to dismiss, to devalue a black man’s ways of being and association in the world, but, even if subterranean, there was some recognition there.

Ed Ayers: Now, concurrent with minstrelsy’s emergence in the north in the 1830s, and really it’s mainstreaming by that time, you have, at the same time, African-Americans who can act and who are in theater, but, as their participation expands in the theater, they’re almost bound by the fact that minstrelsy has become through the 1850s, 1860s, certainly, by the late 19th Century, one of the most widely acceptable, widely loved forms of performance, and so to what extent does this ramping up of minstrelsy basically box in what black performers can do?

Eric Lott: I think it really does box them in, and it’s both the ticket to public performance and a severely restricted space that which to perform, starting with the fact that when African-American performers take the stage in significant numbers after the Civil War, they have to put on the blackface mask and they had to do things that proceed according to showbiz routine so that they’re recognizable, but, right away, it would seem to me that, when you have African-American performers in blackface, they’re doing all kinds of complicated things at once, and there’s all kinds of ironic gestures one might make toward the very mask that one is being forced to wear.

Ed Ayers: Give me an example.

Eric Lott: The donning of the mask for white audiences is just expected. What might have even been more fascinating, the mask reminds everybody that everything is under control here, and it’s the same brand of entertainment that we’re familiar with and everything’s going to be fine, but black performers, George Walker, Bret Williams later in the 19th Century and the early 20th Century are making reference to the notion that … They had a show called Two Real Coons, and so the idea is, like, okay, you’ve seen the facts, these are the real ones, but they’re in blackface …

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Eric Lott: … immediately, in the very title of the show, [ironizing 00:33:24] the idea of blackface, and they have to put on blackface because here’s the real thing, and so you can imagine the ironic winking, even if they’re actually winking, that’s going on to black audiences and to the hipper white patrons who understand that this is all a kind of performative rules just to allow black performers on the stage.

Ed Ayers: There’s a double and triple act that the blackface artist has to basically perform. You’ve got basically a century of blackface performance from 1830s through the 1930s, and as much as we all wish that you could have a dozen Dave Chappelles exploding, the stereotypes playing a pimp or a crack head or a black, white supremacist, there are many, many more examples of blackface’s visual grammar basically being replicated without the paint, and how do we make sense of that or even locate when that’s happening?

Eric Lott: Just through debate, it seems to me. The big offender in recent years is Tyler Perry, and I think there’s a fair amount of debate about that. Didn’t Spike Lee take issue as they say with …

Ed Ayers: Right. I think that might be right …

Eric Lott: … with Tyler Perry?

Ed Ayers: … and did a whole film about blackface, Afterlife, with Bamboozled. Right?

Eric Lott: Exactly. Exactly, and that really is … I mean, now that you mentioned it, that really is … and visual grammar is really the perfect phrase for locutions that don’t seem to harken back to this tradition, but that actually speak the same language, so that I think performers might think that they’re eluding that template or trying to work with it and work beyond it, but the grammar is the same.

Eric Lott: Bamboozled, much of it, Spike Lee maintains a sense and puts forward in very interesting ways the way in which the framing, visual and performative, of blackface, extends to the present day and, unfortunately, delimits what black performers can do. I mean, that’s an interesting … this crazy conceit that, okay, then we’ll just do a minstrel show so as to produce a flop so that the TV producer can get out of his contract and go do something else because he’s so sick of producing television. It winds up an unintended hit.

Ed Ayers: You raised a very powerful question and, really, a through line, again, across this century now and after, which is that so much of the minstrelsy story and its various permutations really is about how profitable it is, and, thinking about the mass acceptability and marketability of hiphop culture, sports, outfits, it sounds at least that there’s a connection here between minstrelsy as a really important piece of profitable popular culture and what then comes after it.

Ed Ayers: Is there anything about our current moment and then just thinking forward about the echoes of minstrelsy in today’s culture that can somehow challenge the profitability of certain kinds of stereotype or assumptions about black people and their culture and their modes of living?

Eric Lott: A few years ago, I thought that there was a moment of Beyonce at the Superbowl in New Orleans in her halftime show, which was a kind of Charlie’s Angels riff, and there were at least a dozen black female performers surrounding Beyonce on the stage in the New Orleans Super Dome, taking it back as it were from George Bush’s Katrina disaster.

Ed Ayers: Interesting.

Eric Lott: To have this Charlie’s Angels theme, the reuniting of Destiny’s Child on stage under the guise, very lightly staged, of a crime-fighting troop of black women surrounded by black women playing instruments and dancing with martial steps, that struck me as a thrilling performative analog to some new dispensation. In other words, it staged the struggle that must continue and that has to go on, because I don’t think, once one finds the right moves, you can count on them staying forever.

Ed Ayers: Eric Lott is a professor of English and American studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His latest book is called Black Mirror, The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism.