Tag Archives: blackface

Carnet D’Racisme entre les Animaux

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Are comic books really not for kids anymore if their pretenses at intellectualism are taking shape as the miasma of rhetoric excusing the straightforward use of crude racist stereotypes by white male cartoonists as satirical and over the heads of the rest of (x) unsophisticated rubes.  And hey, is the racist iconography in question even really a known quantity, or something the cartoonist deliberately inserted to provoke reader (x)’s assumption that it is exactly what it looks like, dummy (x).

I’ve used sarcasm to draw your inference that I meant the opposite of the words I just typed (I am very sophisticated).  Ugly, stereotyped, demeaning images of non-white people are racist.  As Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr has pointed out specifically, sambo art’s past prevalence (or onmi-presence) in society was a deliberate social tool to shape dominant white attitudes about black people with the specific goal of dehumanizing and politically repressing them, which is exactly what happened (continues to happen).  The lines on paper, the blots of ink, when arranged in this way traces a current of malice from history to the artist’s hand today.  Even though it’s fashionable in some circles to affect a veneer of cash-and-carry general repulsiveness as a shield against any specific allegation of consciously doing ill with ink on paper, degrading racist cartoons do hurt people.
 

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This is supposed to be funny under the assumption that this is scenario is alien to white Westerners.  It is not because it is not.

How we cartoon people is important, even if we’re cartooning people as animals. I’ve written previously (before I was officially HU’s correspondent on Furries) about the furry detective comic Blacksad and transposing human racial attributes onto a setting with anthropomorphic animals. Blacksad is not an example of a lucid and well-measured application of this trope. In fact, it’s a disaster. In contrast to Blacksad’s racialized concept of speciation, I remember reading the cartoonist Dana Simpson mentioning in a response to a reader question that using funny animals was a way to avoid racial prejudice in a reader as a barrier to empathizing with each character. Cute animals are just cute animals.  The pitfall here is that without context, characters in this setting can sometimes be read as white by default. Still, some funny animal cartoonists elect to take the route of no thought or consideration and draw the same offensive stereotypes, but now it’s a cat. This is an old idea. Look at Mickey, here.
 

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The Mouse’s features mirror those of his companion, though it’s clear that Mickey is supposed to read as white, in blackface, and his purpose in this cartoon is to humiliate his black counterparts.  Of course these cartoons have been buried as an embarrassing fart of less-enlightened history. I can’t help compare the racist Mickey Mouse pictures to their contemporaries from the old Fleischer Studios, where black music and performance were showcased; rotoscoping technology turning the magnificent Cab Calloway into a spooky ghost in Snow White.  Bimbo the dog shares Mickey’s white/black distribution of shade, but less of the minstrel attribution.

When I was studying comics at the SCAD campus in Lacoste, France, and later goofing around in Spain, I discovered that cartoonists were still drawing funny animals this way.  In Madrid, a sambo holding a saxophone at a jaunty angle spray-painted on the wall with the text “jazz club,” etc etc etc.  I was shocked and puzzled at the ubiquitous caricature of non-white people I saw in the comics shops in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre and Angouleme that only the boldest and self-consciously controversial American artists would think of rendering.  In my extreme naivete, I just didn’t… mention…. how weird it was, at the time.  In Apt, I even picked up second-hand copies of two of Jean Leguay (aka Jano’s) travelogues, Carnet D’Afrique and his collaboration with fellow cartoonists Dodo and Ben Radis, Bonjour les Indes. Inside, Jano’s uproarious, chaotic, sensational, grotesque drawings show an exaggerated portrait of the places the French cartoonists is fond of visiting.
 

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From Bonjour les Indes.

While often poking fun at clueless white tourists, the book generally portrays Indian people  as dirty, simple, venal, self-interested and exotically dangerous, mostly for comedic effect.

His characters are ducks, dog-things, sometimes vaguely bovine creatures with generally blank features, skin like pitch and painted red lips, their individual qualities, background, social status differentiated primarily by costume. It’s a jarring tableau, the post-imperial plundering of faux-quotidian details for broad, sometimes brutal comedy intertwined with mundane, naturalistic, documented daily life that we Americans omit from our envisioning of the world when we reflexively chide ourselves for our “first world problems.” Jano’s travelogues sometimes humanize overlooked experiences while simultaneously reveling in images, exoticism and racist stereotypes meant to dehumanize them.  We see people in markets, at the cinema, on a train, buying a guitar, and on the last plate of Carnet D’Afrique, a comic beheading with a sword.  Jano has an eye for detail, but too often he misuses it.  Instead of highlighting the richness and variety of the lives of his subjects, he instead focuses on sordidness, a cheap thrill here, an ugly little chuckle there, which diminishes them.  Gallows humor is a wonderful thing, but artists should keep in mind who erects the gallows and who swings from them.

Reading these books, I can’t really find a reason why Jano draws the people in his travelogues as anthropomorphic animals instead of humans.  What thought went into the creation of these images other than “this will look cool?”    My great fear, especially writing my own funny animal comic, is that there really is no right way to translate human culture into a world of differentiated animal species that isn’t glib, clumsy and married to racist narratives. Are animal people inherently cruder and cheaper and less dignified than people-people?  Was that the whole purpose of the funny animals’ creation?  Does drawing a racist image as a dog deflect from the awfulness of the image, or does it enhance what is already a purposeful dehumanization?  If furry art is, as I think it is, or ought to be, an imaginative space, furry artists have to consider the historical backdrop in which funny animals have been used and misused to represent people, and do better.  Much, much better than’s been done before.
 

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For god’s sake at least better than this.  Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.
 

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Attempting to Answer the Questions Darkest America Doesn’t

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Bert Williams in blackface.

 
Let me say up front that I really liked Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen. It does one very important things you don’t often find in books about American minstrelsy (I’m looking at you, Love & Theft)—it describes what a minstrel show was like in clear and engaging language that conveys some of the charm of the art form without making you feel like you’re drowning in boring overly-academic prose. For that alone, it’s worth reading.

There’s also this really, really nice moment where Taylor and Austen describe Flournoy Miller and Johnny Lee, both black comedians, doing a blackface comedy routine in the movie Stormy Weather. Then they give a whole paragraph to the history of the routine, which Miller had been doing since at least the Twenties. And then the paragraph ends in this: “By the estimation of black comedy historian Mel Watkins, it was as familiar to black audiences as Abbot and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First?’ was to white audiences.” (p. 292) This bit of contextualizing is so amazing—you get the bit (or a bit of the bit), the bit’s history, and then a sense of the bit’s reach.

But I don’t think that Taylor and Austen ever quite satisfactorily address why blackface minstrelsy was so popular among black people—both performers and audiences. They brush up against it in the chapter on the Zulu parade in New Orleans, when they say, “Zulu history has been largely whitewashed, scrubbed clean of its origins in caricature, parody, and stereotype. Instead, blacks paint their faces out of respect for a tradition that, like the rest of the black minstrel tradition, has always been focused on entertaining its audience. For the Zulus, as for many black and white minstrels in the nineteenth century and earlier, blackface simply stands for a very good time.” (p. 106-107).

Tradition and pleasure are strong motivating factors and I wish Taylor and Austen had wrestled more with the implications of this insight. We like a lot of things because they’re familiar and because we find their familiarity pleasurable. I kept waiting for them to make this explicit—black people didn’t/don’t enjoy black blackface minstrelsy or its popular culture descendants because (or only because) they recognize some truth of who they are on stage; it’s pleasurable because they recognize the performance.

Or let’s look at it it from a slightly different angle. In 1993, Alan Jackson took “Mercury Blues” to Number 2 on Billboard’s country chart. It’s a cover of K. C. Douglas’s 1949 song, which is sometimes called “Mercury Blues” and sometimes called “Mercury Boogie.” “Mercury Blues” contains a line, which, in Alan Jackson’s version goes, “gal I love, stole her from a friend, he got lucky stole her back again” and in Douglas’s version goes, “girl I love I stole from a friend, the fool got lucky stole her back again.” But the line also lives in other songs. In Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen” (1936) it goes, “the woman I love, took from my best friend, some joker got lucky, stole her back again.” Back in ’31, Skip James, in “Devil Got My Woman,” sings “The woman I love took off for my best friend, but he got lucky, stole her back again.” But it goes back further to at least Ida Cox’s “Worried Mama Blues” back in 1923—“I stole my man from my best friend, I stole my man from my best friend. But she got lucky and stole him back again.”

There’s a real power in recognition. When I learned about this repeated verse, I felt as if some great secret history of America had been revealed to me in a lightning flash, as if I had learned a way pop culture connects through time. It pleases me to recognize those same words in all those very different songs and I trust that at least some of you will be delighted to recognize them too. And it’s not because all of us have experience passing a loved one back and forth with our best friend. We take pleasure in recognizing the familiar bits. Of course, this kind of recognition of familiar bits can also be disturbing. When you know Walt Disney took inspiration from The Jazz Singer when he made “Steamboat Willie,” how do you ever look at Mickey Mouse’s white gloves the same way again?

So, when J.J. Walker makes his entrance, or later, Flavor Flav, isn’t there a delight in recognition—not of that type in the community, but of that type in entertainment?

Which brings me to the thing that I think Taylor and Austen fundamentally misunderstand. It’s up there in the Zulu quote, but they also state it explicitly on the third page of the book, “The minstrel tradition, as practice by whites in blackface, was a fundamentally racist undertaking, neutering a race’s identity by limiting it to a demeaning stereotype. But what Chappelle and other contemporary performers draw upon is the more complicated history of black minstrelsy.”All this is true. But, it misses an important and complicating component of white minstrelsy—a lot of white minstrel performers thought they loved black culture (I say “thought they” because any kind of black culture white men could have observed in the 1800s would have been carefully performed by those black men, because of the incredible danger the black men would have been in had it been misinterpreted).

In Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Eric Lott says that, for these white minstrels, “To wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon or gaité de coeur that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood.” (p. 52) (I don’t want to get sidetracked from my point, but I also feel like it’s important to state explicitly how terrible this belief of white men—that they could know black men through mimicking them—was for black men. It is at the heart of why white men could justify all the terrible things they did to black men. White men believed they knew the secret motivations of black men, because some of the white men, white men believed, had literally been black men briefly through imitation.) And this is the hard thing to accept, but the only thing that makes sense of minstrelsy, both black and white: it is racist and demeaning AND it is about a deep fantasy of how awesome it is to be black. Those things are both true, and, in fact, in a racist society like ours, you rarely have an admission of the latter without the former firmly in play.

Once you get that, the power and attraction of blackface minstrelsy—not just the components of the minstrels show, but the actual wearing of blackface makeup—for black people is obvious. If every single thing in the broader popular culture is either explicitly racist or does not mention black people at all (and is therefore implicitly racist), of course the racist art form premised on white people finding so much value in black culture (even if the value they find is not what black people would have called valuable themselves) is going to be incredibly popular with black people. And is it so hard to imagine the appeal of standing on a stage dressed as the object of desire of people who systemically hate you?

But as easy as it is to see the appeal, it’s also then easy to understand why the most egregiously racist components of black minstrelsy fell out of favor as black people gained control of their own representations in popular culture. After all, it is racist and relies on demeaning stereotypes. Of course, when other, less problematic, representations of black people became available, people preferred them.

Still, for a time, it was incredibly popular, both because the bits were funny, the songs beloved, and the insult of blackface muted by the twisted confession of envy that it represented. Yes, it was racist, but what popular culture wasn’t? Blackface was demeaning, but in the hands of black artists, it was also more than that. Black performers in blackface recognized that the culture portrayed by performers in blackface was black culture (or a fantasy of it)—which meant that culture had value, was something worth looking at, even to the very white people who, when they weren’t sitting in the audience, were denying that black people had any worth.

It’s little wonder, then, that its remnants linger on. Blackface minstrelsy was the popular culture for most people for at least half our country’s existence —where our comedy came from, where we heard and learned our favorite songs, and where a type of fundamental “American” sound in music was codified (including banjos and later the Blues)—and there’s still a lot of cultural resonance. And it’s little wonder that those remnants continue to be a source of controversy and pain—because it was racist and demeaning. That’s the legacy of blackface minstrelsy—a source of great pleasure that still resonates in our time AND a source of great pain, which we are still grappling with.

The Art of Racism

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A version of this review first appeared at the Chicago Reader.
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“It was shocking that in a city bursting with parade enthusiasts and curious tourists, a pair of European women who stayed less than an hour were the only white faces in the crowd other than ours,” write Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen in their new book Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. (100-101) The two are describing their experiences at Mardi Gras, where they went to watch the Zulu parade, one of the few places in contemporary America where African-Americans will wear blackface as a matter of course. Taylor and Austen describe their own experiences at the parade in order to convey the manic strangness of carnival; to show why and how even blackface can be normal there. At the same time, though, by highlighting their presence at an all-black parade, they emphasize their whiteness — and, paradoxically, their adoption of blackness. The Mardi Gras description is, at least in part, about two white authors momentarily joining the black community. In that sense, the passage can itself be seen as a kind of literary blackface.

This is not to criticize Taylor and Austen. On the contrary, this very mild stumble — if it even rises to a stumble — serves mostly to throw into relief how very surefooted, thoughtful, and perceptive they are for the bulk of the book. This is no mean achievement, since black minstrelsy — the practice of blacks donning blackface and/or performing routines associated with minstrel shows — is surely one of the most charged and uncomfortable topics in American pop cultural history.

In the late nineteenth and early 20th century, blackface performances by whites perpetuated vicious racist stereotypes of happy, lazy, stupid chicken-eating, watermelon-slurping, vacuously-grinning darkies. And yet, as Taylor and Austen show, blacks themselves have been long time, and even enthusiastic participants in the minstrel tradition. From Louis Armstrong to Flavor Flav, minstrel clowning and tropes have been central to black American music and black American comedy.

What, then, did blacks get from minstrelsy? Was it an example of false consciousness, with African-Americans duped into adopting hurtful stereotypes as their own? Or were black entertainers forced to adopt minstrelsy to make a living in a white-controlled entertainment industry?

Such explanations have been staples of the longstanding black anti-minstrelsy tradition, from Richard Wright to Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled. But while Taylor and Austen have great respect for anti-minstrelsy’s commitments and aesthetic achievements, they mostly reject its conclusions. Black minstrelsy, they argue convincingly, was not, at least for the most part, the result of self-deception or coercion. No one, for example, forced the politically engaged Paul Robeson to record “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” a minstrel type song which told blacks to labor cheerfully in the cotton-fields and “accept your destiny.” (208)

Instead, Taylor and Austen argue, blacks used minstrel traditions in a number of different ways. Sometimes, they deployed it as a critique— as Spike Lee does in Bamboozled. Sometimes, they adapted and subverted racist messages, as in Robeson’s version of “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” Robeson, Taylor and Austen argue, treats the song as a spiritual, in which blacks shoulder suffering, hardship and injustice on their way to the Promised Land. Rather than a justification of racism, in Robeson’s hands the minstrel song becomes a dream of liberation. In a similar vein, the great early-20th century black blackface performer Bert Williams injected pathos and nuance into his performances and songs, undermining the racism of minstrelsy by emphasizing the humanity of his characters.

While black minstrelsy could be used consciously to confront or undermine racial tropes, however, that does not seem to have historically been its main appeal to black performers and black audiences. On the contrary, in many cases, Taylor and Austen suggest, minstrelsy was enjoyed by blacks in much the same way it was enjoyed by whites — as low humor and nostalgic escapism. Southern hip hop performers who gesture towards minstrelsy with clowning about chicken or watermelon do so because they enjoy such humor…and aren’t going to be embarrassed about it just because various cultural arbiters say they should be. Similarly, Louis Armstrong sang “When Its Sleepy Time Down South” — with its evocation of the lazy “dear old Southland” — because a nostalgic vision of ease and plenty appealed to him and other blacks during the Great Depression, just as it appealed to whites. (211)

In minstrelsy, this paradise of laughter and ease is, of course, racialized. A world of blackface is a world in which, by definition, everyone is black. For whites, this world is in part an object of ridicule. But it is also, as Taylor and Austen argue (and with their trip to Mardi Gras, perhaps demonstrate) an object of yearning. To put on blackface is, for whites, to be free, crazy, funny, authentic, cool. And this is also, Taylor and Austen suggest, what it means, or can mean, to put on blackface for blacks. Thus, Zora Neale Hurston, who loathed white minstrelsy but used minstrel tropes extensively in her work, often spoke admiringly about black primitivism, naturalness, and spontaneity. “[T]he white man thinks in a written language,” she said, “and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics.” (269)

Hurston’s investment in black minstrelsy and black folk traditions inspired her to create Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, built on her love of black people and black community. But her investment in minstrelsy also arguably inspired her to oppose integration, on the grounds that she didn’t want black primitivism and naturalness to be contaminated. Racial pride and racism for Hurston were two sides of the same mule bone.

Hurston’s habit of calling herself “your little pickaninny” in letters to a white benefactor is viscerally jarring. But her black minstrelsy is perhaps only a more exaggerated and painful form of a problem that confronts any minority cultural production within a racist society. Black music, theater, literature, entertainment, and comedy, from the days of black minstrelsy to the present, have been a glorious, seemingly limitless aesthetic treasure. But those riches have been created, and are in some sense dependent upon, the subcultural marginalization resulting from segregation and oppression. To celebrate black cultural achievement, whether Mardi Gras, or Hurston, or even Paul Robeson, is to celebrate in part the fruits of racism.

Nothing could make this clearer than black minstrelsy, a black art form built — with courage and cowardice, subversion and acquiescence — out of racism itself. Darkest America is, in this sense, not a story about an obscure and forgotten curiosity. Instead, it is a surprisingly graceful and erudite recuperation of what may be our most inspiring, most shameful, and most American art form.
 
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Cheap Thrills

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Yesterday, Robert Stanley Martin argued that there was satirical intent in R. Crumb’s Cheap Thrills album cover.

Contrary to Noah Berlatsky’s reading of the second panel in his “Crumbface” essay (click here), I don’t feel any of it is gratuitous. It’s a pointed rebuke that did not flatter its ostensible targets. Telling Joplin that’s she’s engaging in a “Mammy” routine, as well as identifying her audience in part with an Al Jolson figure, is not something that would be calculated to endear Crumb to either. And given the avowedly anti-racist liberal politics of the San Francisco counterculture scene that Joplin and her early audiences belonged to, Crumb also pointed the way for their political enemies to cluck at them for hypocrisy. It didn’t cause offense because Joplin and her audience were sophisticated enough to both recognize and at least tacitly acknowledge the failing Crumb was highlighting.

It’s a thoughtful defense. I’m still not convinced though.

First, Robert says that Joplin and her fans would not have found Crumb’s satire of their black appropriations comfortable.

However, Drew Friedman’s account seems to contradict this:

Interestingly, Crumb’s original intention was for this art to run on the back cover and a portrait of Joplin to run on the front. But Joplin loved the the comic strip art so much, (she was an avid underground comics fan, especially the work of Crumb, and already at that point in her escalating career, had the power to hire her own cover artist), she decided to run it on the front.

That certainly doesn’t sound like Crumb’s satire made Joplin at all uncomfortable. I haven’t been able to find anything online suggesting that fans were put off either. Maybe Joplin’s just kind of dumb of course…or maybe, as Robert suggested, she was self-aware enough to find a pointed reference to her black roots amusing. Still, if satire doesn’t cause its targets even the least discomfort — if they in fact want to put it on the cover of their product — does it make sense to call it satire?

More important than intention or audience reaction, though, is the image itself. And I don’t think that image sustains a claim of satire.

Look at the rest of the album cover; the images other than the blackface caricatures. None of those images is satirical, or pointed. Instead, they’re silly and/or sexy and/or energetic. Many of them rely on goofy puns (“Piece of My Heart”, “Combination of the Two”) The center top image shows a woman (probably meant to be Joplin) in a sultry pose with prominent nipples clearly visible through her top. On the left hand side, there’s a drawing of a goofy, stereotypical Indian with traditional headdress. On the bottom, there’s a caricature which seems to conflate Jesus and Eastern mysticism.

Robert argues that the blackface caricatures are different. Instead of an expression of high-spirited high-times and easy irreverence, he argues, the blackface caricatures are a critique. In them, Crumb is showing Joplin’s connection to and reliance on a black musical tradition, and linking her to earlier white performers who relied on that tradition, like Al Jolson.

But, as an alternate reading…couldn’t Crumb just be more or less thoughtlessly using blackface iconography because it’s funny and energetic? Couldn’t the images just be examples of high-spirited high-times, and of Crumb’s irreverent refusal to bow to the 60s equivalent of political correctness? Couldn’t his use of blackface be like his use of prominent nipples or his use of a sacrilegious Jesus caricature? That is, couldn’t the blackface caricatures be used because they are fun, and because they are (at least somewhat) shocking, rather than because they skewer Joplin and her fans?

Intent is hard to parse, of course. But I think if you’re going to argue for satire, you need to explain what Crumb has done to distinguish between blackface-as-critique and blackface-as-nostalgic-scandalous-good-times. If the cover can be read as fun good times, and the blackface can be easily incorporated into the idea of fun good times, and Joplin and her fans embraced it, presumably as an icon of fun good times, it’s really not clear to me why I should give Crumb credit for making a pointed political statement. On the contrary, it seems to me that he’s using blackface like he’s using nipples and silly puns — as a cheap thrill. And, as I said before (to Jeet Heer’s annoyance)using blackface as a cheap thrill still makes Crumb, to my mind, kind of a shithead.

I have to say too…even if Robert is right, and it’s a satirical take, I still find it pretty dumb. As I note in that Comixology article, “Summertime” is one of the great interracial collaborations in American song. Written by George Gershwin about the black experience, it was based on Eastern European folk melodies and adopted by many of the greatest American performers of various races. It’s a song whose history challenges the usual narrative of white appropriation of black music. George Gershwin didn’t don blackface to become a pretend black person; he collaborated with black people over decades in order to interpret an American experience through an American art that was neither white nor black.

The usual narrative of blackface appropriation— applied to Elvis, or Janis Joplin, or whoever — is itself part of our racist past. It assumes that blacks are the authentic creators of music, the magical Negroes, to whom whites must go to draw upon true musical genius. And I think you can actually see Crumb’s cover as plugging directly into this; his use of black caricatures does not so much critique Joplin’s music as light-heartedly validate it. The caricature in the center bottom panel, the black man digging Joplin’s music, is not a sneer at Joplin — it’s a goofy thumb’s up. See! Whoohoo! Even black people dig this music! Similarly, the shouting baby, all gusto and throat, is not a critique, but a funky wink. Joplin gets her lungs from that true source. And that true source is a stereotypical black mammy.

American music is, and has always been, both black and white, with performers of every race borrowing and learning from each other. The reason blackface is racist is not because white performers were inspired by blacks, but because they gilded their black influences with invidious racist stereotypes. Crumb’s use of blackface caricature is, therefore, neither fun nor, even in the most generous interpretation, insightful. It perpetuates simplistic images of black people and of race in the U.S. The Cheap Thrills cover is an ongoing testament to Crumb’s great illustration and design skills, and to the extremely limited intelligence with which he often employs them.

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Update: This post is part of an ongoing roundtable on R. Crumb and race.