Eric Lott, American Quarterly. 43.2 223–The current consensus on Blackface Minstrelsy probably is summed up best by Frederick Douglass's righteous response in The North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were "the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens"–a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy's further commodification of an already enslaved, non-citizen people. From a contemporary vantage point, the minstrel show does seem a transparently racist curiosity, a form of leisure that–in inventing and ridiculing the slow-witted-but-irrepressible "plantation darky" and the foppish "northern dandy negro"–conveniently rationalized racial oppression. The culture that embraced it, one would assume, was either wholly enchanted by racial travesty or so benighted, like Melville's Captain Delano, that it took such distortions as authentic.
Eric Lott, American Quarterly. 43.2 225–At present, the notion of blackface minstrelsy as an African-American "people's culture" seems a distinctly odd view. Nevertheless, it is the other side of a debate about the early minstrel show that understandably has been repressed in anti-racist accounts. Scholars have yet to appreciate W.E.B. Du Bois's belief that Stephen Foster compositions such as "Old Black Joe" and "Old Folks at Home" were based on Negro themes; Du Bois included them in his assertion that black music was the "only real American music." In Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson similarly remarked that minstrelsy originated on the plantation and constituted the "only completely original contribution" of America to the theater. These judgments appear extremely misguided today, given that blackface minstrelsy's century-long commercial regulation of black cultural practices stalled the development of Negro public arts and generated an enduring narrative of racist ideology–a historical process by which an entire people has been made the bearer of another people's "folk" culture. However, one ought to know how such positive assessments of the minstrel show were possible as well as wrong.
Eric Lott, Representations No. 39, p. 25–A strong white fascination with black men and black culture, that is to say, underwrote this popular expropriation. Balckface performers were conspicuously intrigued with the street singers and obscure characters from whom they allegedly took the material that was later fashioned to racist ends. There are several accounts of these men's attraction to their "donors," and it is no wonder that an aura of illicit sexuality–nineteenth-century observers called it "vulgarity"–shadowed the most chaste of minstrel shows. From the start it appeared that a sort of generalized illicitness was indeed one of minstrelsy's main objectives. So much is suggested, at least, by the lengths to which reviews and playbills typically went to downplay (even as they intimated) its licentious atmosphere.
Michael Rogin, Representations 46, Spring 1994, p. 2-3.--[Al Jolson], the most popular entertainer of the first half of the twentieth century, was the first Jew to become an American mass idol. He belonged to the white immigrant group that was most involved both in the struggle for Civil Rights and in the dominant American mass-entertainment forms, blackface and motion pictures. That American politics was organized around anti-black racism rather than anti-Semitism was hardly without consequence, however, either for European immigrants facing nativist pressure as they made themselves into white Americans, in general, or for Jewish moguls, blackface entertainers, and song writers, in particular, putting their American dream on the screen during Hollywood's golden age. Jews neither invented blackface nor, anti-Semitic fantasies notwithstanding, made the motion picture industry into a tool of Jewish power. On the contrary, Jewish immigrants inherited and often struggled against the racial representations that signified American belonging. But they also made those representations their own. Jews were the immigrant group most identified with blacks, and one form of that identification, blackface, defamiliarizes the other, the Jewish-black Civil Rights alliance, as it appears on the Hollywood screen.
Rogin, p. 8–In defining Americanness as entertainment, however, blackface musicals slid from content to form, presenting American identity in terms of performance and self-making. Calling attention to their nostalgia, blackface musicals are self-reflexive at the core. They self-consciously make not the world they represent but themselves as performances the basis for American patriotism. Synecdochical for Hollywood, blackface gives America its meaning–self-making through role-playing...
Minstrelsy on the WEB: Visit the following URL and browse several sites to learn more about the history of blackface minstrelsy: http://afroamhistory.about.com/homework/afroamhistory/cs/minstrelsy/