Going in Blackface/Going in Drag

Having dressed up in blackface should be the basis for less criticism than it is currently receiving, and, at the same time, it should be the basis for a broader criticism.

The issue of white people appearing in blackface has become current as the old schoolbooks of various celebrities and political figures become easily available to view and to examine for reprehensible leanings the individuals might have manifested as young people. I do believe that going to a frat party dressed in a caricature of “blackness” reflected a certain coarseness and thoughtlessness at the time. I don’t however think that people who did that should be demoted from their present jobs or even that that they should be made to abjectly apologize. There are likely so many other more simpleton vulgarities and more actual cruelties that they (and that we all) have perpetrated along the way. There were worse things done that people should apologize for and that should be taken into account when evaluating anyone’s current claim to status and respect.

However, it is sometimes hard not to suspect that a person who would do such a thing is fundamentally flawed – in these cases, fundamentally racist. I remember being shocked years ago when Candice Bergen appeared on David Letterman’s show, obliviously explaining how she enjoyed dressing up her dogs. She congratulated herself on one costume she thought she’d been particularly ingenious about contriving. She’d dressed her dog as “a Jew,” complete with cute “little yarmulke and everything.”

In general, Candice Bergen has solid credentials as a liberal, a champion of all good causes aimed at advancing equality for minority groups. That particular foray into doggie dress-up seems to have just represented a blind spot, or as people say now, an instance of being “tone deaf.” So it likely was with many people who went to bygone costume parties in blackface or who played into similar racial/ethnic stereotypes with their costumes. While some might have been boors and/or racists, many more were probably just suffering from some youthful lapse of sensitivity.

But this current focus on who might have come to a high school party in blackface has spread into a more generic criticism of a large part of American musical tradition, namely the tradition of the minstrel show. For the purposes of these shows, white performers corked up and appeared singing in blackface. Some commentators have cast back and seen in these shows the ultimate racist offense to black people.

Well, not so fast. It’s true that many old-time entertainments featured mocking caricatures of African Americans. There was the shuffling, the ogle-eyed stupefaction, and the slurping consumption of watermelon slices. But more often, minstrel shows didn’t fall back on such demeaning stereotypes. The performers more often simply appeared in blackface, singing songs that featured the themes and rhythms of black Southern music. Much of the intent of these performances was not cruel caricature, but just the opposite. However much many whites discriminated against blacks – black people were acknowledged as being supreme when it came to making music. The whites wanted to ride on the coattails of this strain of creativity. So they imitated blacks to the extent of appearing in blackface and singing songs that cast back to a sentimentally re-imagined plantation life, or to rural and urban birth-of-the-blues settings.

Ken Burns emphasized these less reprehensible roots of minstrel shows in his recent “Country Music” history series. He pointed out how white musicians from Appalachia and from other rural backgrounds staged minstrel shows as a way of merging their music-making into the older, more earthy musical laments and revels coming out of the African American experience. The white country folk added their twang to the music, but their performances were clearly meant to tap into the roots of African American styles.

This impulse on the part of whites to participate in the creative success of black musicians was carried a step further by the predominantly Jewish entertainers who came to this country from Eastern Europe. There was very little impulse to take pride in one’s European ancestry then. Immigrants were often more interested in denying their heritage than in searching for it. The goal of most recent immigrants, and especially of their children, was to become AMERICAN. They aspired above all else to shed any remaining traces of the shtetls their parents came from and to thoroughly assimilate into the American way of life.

They wanted not only to assimilate, but to simulate all aspects of what they perceived as being typically American. When they went out onto the wider stage of American life as musical performers, the Jewish entertainers in particular wanted to adopt what they regarded as the most authentic, the most quintessentially American styles. To many of them, that automatically meant assuming black rhythms, black appearances. So they performed in minstrel shows and solo in blackface. It was a way of making their music evoke what was considered to be America’s most distinctive contribution to music. It was a way, not of mocking blacks, but of identifying with them. Yes, sometimes the subtext of minstrel shows was to present black people to white audiences as harmless, happy naïfs. But in a larger sense, many of the minstrel shows could actually be seen as tribute performances.

Many of the Jewish performers who are remembered today did turns in blackface. There was George Jessel, Eddie Cantor, and above all - there was Al Jolson. Under the YouTube pictures available of his performances in blackface, most of the comments are favorable, recalling Jolson as the “World’s Greatest Entertainer.” However, a minority of comments condemn such performances as utter racism. But these critics are getting it wrong. That’s especially true when those submitting comments assume Jolson himself must have been an unconscionable racist, akin to the White Supremacists of today, using his act as a way of showing contempt for black people. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

Al Jolson had many character flaws, as documented by his biographers. His enormous ego caused him to predictably upstage other performers and to undermine rivals in every way possible. He was also a philanderer and a neglectful husband. However, the one area in which he was sterling, outside of his performing talent – was in the area of race relations. It’s acknowledged that he did more than perhaps any other performer of his era to promote black entertainers. He breezed into hotels and venues with the irresistible assumption that all black members of his troupe would get equal accommodations and treatment. The energy of his assumptions helped black performers in his orbit be appreciated on an equal footing with whites.

This can most notably be seen in the movie that he largely produced and directed, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. He chose Edgar Connor, a relatively little-known black actor, as his co-star in the movie. The two of them sing their way through the vicissitudes they face, as pals. What’s most interesting about this partnering is how unself-conscious it is. There’s no sense in which it looks as if Jolson is being paternalistic in advancing Connor, as if he is inwardly congratulating himself on his liberal beneficence in promoting Connor’s career. There’s just an implicit equality and comradeship between the two of them on screen, something that the viewer can feel reflected Jolson’s attitudes off-screen as well. Those who cite Tony Curtis’ and Sidney Poitier’s partnering in The Defiant Ones as a trailblazing depiction of ultimate friendship between a black man and a white man on screen, forget that that trail had already been blazed by Jolson and Connor.

So there was nothing invariably racist about performers appearing in blackface in the latter part of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century. Commentators who today would automatically condemn those who performed in minstrel shows or anywhere in blackface are missing a few pages of meanings in American history.

However, at the beginning of this essay, I said that while those who have appeared in blackface don’t always deserve to be criticized as utter racists, I also said that there’s a sense in which appearing in blackface should be criticized in a wider context.

Growing up, I did tend to at least temporarily think less of any classmate or acquaintance who came to a costume party in blackface. But I was equally put-off by those men who chose to dress-up as women for these occasions. That’s because almost invariably, these revelers’ appearances were cruel, mocking caricatures of womanhood. The costume representing femininity almost always consisted of four elements: a big-hair blonde wig, inch-long dark eyelashes, stiletto heels, and, above all else, HUGE false bosoms. The party-goer would sashay into the room bouncing these bosoms to the accompaniment of some course mammary humor, and then would spend the evening acting like a flirtatious, ditzy embodiment of a blonde joke. That’s what being a woman obviously reduced to in the eyes of these people.

As a woman, I was offended by this cheap, contemptuous representation of womanhood – for the same reason that Native Americans are offended by people who rain-dance into parties with a feather and a war whoop – for the same reason that Jews are offended by either humans (or dogs) dressed up in payot (sidelocks) and yarmulke – for the same reason that black people are offended by those who shuffle and jive into frat parties and Halloween parties dressed in blackface. The effect of such costumes is not to identify with the kind of person being portrayed. It’s not to become like that person in the way a girl might feel she’s becoming a princess or a ballet dancer when she dresses in flowing gown or tutu. Instead, the effect of many of the people who arrive at costume parties in these types of blackface, war-paint, be-bosomed outfits is indeed sometimes to distance themselves from such “other” lesser beings. It’s to reduce and demean those others into stereotypes, to make them the butt of a big, broad joke.

So while I don’t think people who have dressed up in these caricatures should have forced apologies wrung out of them, I do wish liberal critics of this behavior would be more inclusive, more consistent in their reproach. If they criticize those puerile party-goers who dressed in blackface in the past – why don’t they as roundly criticize those who continue even into the present day to dress-up as grotesquely reductive caricatures of women?

In some ways, the frat party/Halloween party drag queens pose more of an insult to womankind than those shuffling blackface revelers posed to African Americans in the past. At least those who came in blackface still represented characters who could function in the real world. By contrast, those who come in the kind of demeaning drag I’ve described, reduce women to almost complete incapacity. No women who actually had foot-long breast implants, streaming mascara and inch-long false eyelashes, a cocooning blonde wig, and stiletto heels, could function in the real world. Such an outfitted individual couldn’t perform the job of either police officer or military office. She couldn’t even reliably get to work as a secretary, a stockbroker, a chef, or an electrician. She certainly couldn’t make her way into the Oval Office. She could neither pursue a villain nor run away from danger. She’d be trapped in situ, a rag doll propped upright in gruesome rictus.

So why don’t those who appear in such pointless party drag rouse the same kind of criticism today as those who came in blackface yesterday? It seems that despite all the sensitivities of the MeToo movement, few people are sensitive to the implicit degradation of women that is manifest in Halloween drag. Women are still not granted the respect that other “minorities” have now been granted, at least in principle.

Women are still portrayed and perceived in stereotypical ways that it would currently be unthinkable to portray minorities When a woman appears on-screen, it’s still a disproportionate number of times as a prostitute, a dominatrix action figures, or in some other form of sexually fetishized role or some role signaling heightened sexual availability. While in some sense, this may represent the reality that many women face, there’s a current prohibition against portraying other minority groups only in such starkly reduced circumstances, even when that might actually be what they are experiencing in certain areas. Any movie that presented black youths only as gang-bangers or middle-aged black women only as servants (except in some specifically historical context) probably would be censured, if it got made at all. However, it’s common to see movies and TV shows in which all the women who come on-screen are there merely to service and excite men sexually. Sit-coms such as Two and a Half Men which featured women only as bimbo ditzes ripe for sexual conquest are still popular and accepted. However, it would have been unthinkable to have the Two and a Half Men Harper brothers’ housekeeper and any other household help that were featured characters to be portrayed as shuffling blacks. As ever, concern for the rights and sensibilities of women has lagged far behind concern for the rights and sensibilities of the various racial and ethnic groups.

Women are always the last to be advanced into any facet of equality. Before the Civil War, there were many ardent abolitionist groups advocating the emancipation and enfranchisement of blacks. Some have argued that there were more such groups in the South than in the North. But wherever these groups worked to advance the freedom of blacks, their membership consisted mostly of women fighting for liberty on all fronts. As the time approached when it seemed blacks would be freed from slavery and black men at least would be granted the right to vote – the abolitionist/suffragette women who’s been the main movers and shakers to bring this about assumed that black men would turn back and give a helping hand to the women who had fought for them. They assumed that black men would in part use their new ability to vote to help gain that right for women too. But it didn’t happen. With few exceptions, the women were left in the dust. They had to fight for themselves for almost another fifty or sixty years before they were granted the right to vote in 1920. There’s no one alive today who technically couldn’t themselves vote or whose parents couldn’t vote because they were black. However, there are many people alive today who legally couldn’t vote themselves, or whose parents couldn’t vote – simply because they were women. Women’s victory is relatively recent.

The long lag time that women suffered is still not recognized by many. I just recently read a noted historian’s celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation and then, finally, passage of the 15^th Amendment prohibiting the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This author crowed that “at last, all citizens had the right to vote.” Ahem. Excuse me. There was still the substantial 51+% of U.S. citizens who did NOT have that right. But people forget that, as they forget women in so many ways.

So while the sensibilities of black people and many ethnic minorities are currently being respected in the sphere of political correctness – the sensibilities of women are still disregarded. The Halloween caricature of womanhood as big wig and boobs goes on. Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club lampoons femininity more crudely than ever. When the Club started holding its theatrical performances in the mid-1800’s, no women were students at Harvard, so, as with Shakespearean performances in Shakespeare’s own time, all the women’s parts were perforce played by men. More often then, the men dressed as serious representations of historical women. There was a legitimately sober and recognizable Mary Todd Lincoln and a serious Queen Victoria. However, in recent decades, the Club has drifted into little more than frat house caricature of women. Each year the honored guest artist of the Club is expected to don the stereotypical accouterments of what’s regarded as womanhood – and everyone laughs, makes bawdy jokes, and has a high old time.

Not long ago, YouTube star Shane Dawson went into blackface to do a takeoff on Wendy Williams – and he had to abjectly apologize to the world for his insensitivity and presumed racism. Around the same time, Mel Gibson was the Hasting Pudding Club’s honored guest at their annual bash. He accordingly had to appear in the reductio ad absurdum that people still regard as womanhood. He had to sport an impossible fetching flounce of curls and a Scottish plaid tickle bra. No one thought to find this latter portrayal offensive. The display drew the predictable yuks, approval, and applause. Where is the logic in this? When will women themselves and men see that it’s as offensive for someone to wear goofily stereotyping drag to a Halloween party as it is to come in blackface?

What’s the essential difference between these two pictures….?