Ty Burr, film critic for the Boston Globe, had a “think piece” in yesterday’s paper that served as a reminder of why I’d stopped reading the articles in the Globe’s “Ideas” section. His article on blackface was not incorrect so far as it went, but it didn’t go very far. It took me a little time to sort out why the article was so lame: He doesn’t follow his own exhortation for readers to “confront” minstrelsy and blackface.
Burr pretty accurately traces the history of the American minstrel show, echoing accepted thought about how the “mask” of blackface gave both white and black performers room in their acts to address race, and the special case of the immigrant experience, in which the white non-American-born used blackface as an aid to assimilation. If you’ve read anything on these topics before, you pretty much know where Burr is going on these points.
But the reason for writing the article relates to Burr’s beat, the movies. He watched the new DVD of The Jazz Singer with his children and its use of blackface prompted a discussion of same. Burr says, rightly, that blackface should not simply be dismissed as racist out of hand; that it should be looked at with all its difficult history included. “Only by understanding blackface,” he writes, “can we recognize where we haven’t progressed; only then can we see the places where blackface still thrives in our culture, disguised and still potent.”
He then proceeds through many column inches to fail at exactly that task.
After his (again, generally correct) overview of minstrel practice and its move into modern times, typified by The Jazz Singer, Burr makes a closing leap to more recent pop music — Elvis Presley singing R&B; and now suburban white boys copping black attitude — and states, “The mask remains.” He goes so far as to reduce his own argument about current white appropriation of black culture to the question, “What is hip?” He’d have been better off sticking to movies and not making such stupid, overly general statements.
His leap forward leads to only one other movie reference: Spike Lee’s blackface satire, Bamboozled (2000). It is here, in Burr’s own field of motion picture criticism, that he fails utterly to “understand” blackface, or any representation of race, in a useful way. Sadly, purely racist practices existed in movies with consistency and impunity from 1927, when The Jazz Singer was released, at least into the 1950s — the very period Burr skips over in his rush to tell us to confront issues of race today.
Movies from the period in question included blackface scenes. If Burr wants a good shock — or to prompt another discussion — he should give the uncut version of Holiday Inn a whirl. Yes, the perennial in which Bing Crosby introduced a little song called “White Christmas.” Various holidays receive musical settings at the movie’s titular establishment; in the case of President Lincoln’s Birthday the number is “Abraham,” done completely in blackface. Even the servers at the Inn wait on customers while in blackface. The year was 1942. (It should be noted that in the virtual remake, 1954’s White Christmas, there is a neo-minstrel, though not blackface, “Mr Bones” number.)
A little research can turn up any number of examples, I’m sure, like the pickaninnies in the centaur sequence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), later excised from the home video version. Cartoons were particularly egregious in this regard and should have been mentioned by Burr because their depiction of blacks was based on stereotypes established through minstrelsy. See, for instance, such infamous shorts as Coal Black and De Sebbin Dwarfs (1943). Jim Crow was still alive and well after 1927.
Then there was the practice of allowing black performers, even as talented as Lena Horne or the incredible Nicholas Brothers, to appear in “white” (i.e. typical Hollywood) pictures only in separate “specialty” numbers that could be easily removed from prints shown in the South.
It may be well and good to assess the minstrel mentality and the “mask” of blackface from an historical and cultural vantage point, but let’s not get too abstract about it. Burr is, I think, flatly incorrect in stating that Jolson’s 1927 turn in blackface “came at the tail end of a long history of (mostly) white entertainers dressing up as African-Americans.” It could be argued, especially given the cultural impact of The Jazz Singer, that the film actually represented the peak of blackface, at least in the era of technologically modern mass entertainment, and that the “tail end” of contemporary blackface extended from 1927-47 or so.
There, I said it. Contemporary blackface practice lasted a lot longer than Burr acknowledges. Not in the form of appropriation, or any of the forms we see today, the forms Burr extorts us to recognize. His argument would be more forceful if he weren’t so eager to see actual, burnt cork blackface end around 1927. That it survived for decades beyond that, even if in weakened form, should be understood if we are to confront the “invisible modern minstrelsy” Burr laments.
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