Post by Will DockeryPost by Michael PendragonPost by Will DockeryPost by Will DockeryI have never really been a fan of racist performers wearing blackface.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/northam-blackface-racism.html
"The most popular form of entertainment in 19th-century America, which continued well into the 20th, blackface minstrelsy was defined by its caricature of and gross hostility toward black Americans. In the minstrel show, blacks — and free blacks in particular — were objects of ridicule, lampooned for seeking equality and respectability. Beyond simple mockery, the pleasure of blackface for white performers and their audiences lay in the vicarious experience of an imagined blackness — a wild, preindustrial “savage” nature that whites attributed to black Americans..."
"Blackface was a form that “implicitly rested on the idea that Black culture and Black people existed only insofar as they were edifying for whites and that claims to ‘authentic’ blackness could be put on and washed off at will... In other words, blackface is so thoroughly associated with the worst of American racism that we should expect immediate condemnation..."
Al Jolson is of course by far the most famous white performer who used blackface.
"Was Jolson a racist? Although he was guilty of many faults, Jolson showed no overt signs of ethnic hatred. Indeed, the songwriter and performer Noble Sissle, a longtime partner of the ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake, recalled Jolson's unprompted act of kindness after a Hartford restaurant refused to serve the two black musicians. A local newspaper mentioned the incident, and, Sissle later recalled: 'To our everlasting amazement, we promptly got a call from Al Jolson. He was in town with his show and even though we were two very unimportant guys whom he'd never heard of until that morning, he was so sore about that story he wanted to make it up to us.' The next evening, Jolson treated Sissle and Blake to dinner, insisting that 'he'd punch anyone in the nose who tried to kick us out.'" -- https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/links/essays/jolson.htm
Of course any do and many don't, tha's the way almost everything is, or isn't you notice?
Is you is you ain't done noticed?
The question is less one of whether blackface is racist, so much as whether Jolson was.
The answer is that he wasn't.
Jolson adopted the blackface as a means of overcoming his onstage inhibitions. Unlike other blackface entertainers, he never engaged in any racially demeaning humor, or portrayals while wearing it. He simply became his alter ego, "Gus," who could express himself more freely than Jolson the Cantor's son (initially) could.
The popularity of Jolson's music (and of his character, "Gus") helped to brigde a large gap in the racial integration of American music. Before Jolson, it was considered improper in many parts of America for a white woman to attend a show where black musicians were entertaining. This led to rise of minstrel shows in the early 19th century, as it was acceptable for white audiences to attend shows where white musicians pretended to be black. The minstrel shows mixed low brow, racial humor with the performance of "negro" songs, the former of which helped to mold many of the negative racial stereotypes that survived well into the 20th century.
Jolson's "Gus" helped to change all of that. "Gus" humanized the minstrel. When "Gus" got down on one knee and spoke to his departed Mammy with tears in his eyes, his audiences cried as well. And it was this cultural acceptance of "Gus" that paved the way for audiences to accept black entertainers like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller in the 1920s.
People today, who have no idea who Jolson was apart from having seen a film clip or two of him in blackface, mistakenly accuse him of having been a racist on the Duncian logic that blackface was a racist for of entertainment, therefore all blackface entertainers must have been racists; when in actuality, both the premise and conclusion are incorrect. Blackface was a tool that helped to overcome the racial prejudices that forbid whites from attending black performances, that often, but not always, depicted blacks in racially demeaning ways. Therefore, while some blackface performers may have been racists, many others may not have been.