The Blackface Problem: It’s Deeper Than Northam
Yes, there is a photo of me, broad sombrero on my head, fake mustache and all, a picture of cliche-stereotyped Western film bravado. The…
Yes, there is a photo of me, broad sombrero on my head, fake mustache and all, a picture of cliche-stereotyped Western film bravado. The bad Mexican, the bad hombre. An image that, I’m sure, gives Donald Trump nightmares, that is the very stereotype he elicits to strike fear into the mind of the American electorate.
The photo is on Facebook, taken at my niece’s taco-themed 30th birthday party. There were tacos and Mexican beer, bean dips and the like, a piñata filled with candy. It was all harmless fun — and yet, I look at that photo today, less than a year after it was taken, and ask myself what I was thinking.
I’d like to claim I wasn’t, or that the photo was a subtle critique. It both was and wasn’t — my initial post to Facebook of the photo (I cropped family members out of the photo) captioned it “Culturally inappropriate desperados,” indicating that I knew what was at stake. The caption was both a dig at the appropriation of ethnic identities that become broad cultural stereotypes (see the Mexican lawmen in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and a criticism of our tendency toward a cultural censorship that narrows the avenues available for humor. How meta of me.
The caption, of course, is an after-the-fact effort at reconfiguring the meaning of my pose, an effort to explain it away, I think, to perhaps excuse a moment of dumb fun by a 55-year-old white Jew who should have known better.
Or not. Consider this a mea culpa for my pose, but one with a purpose, one being made in the wake of the seeming implosion of the Democratic Party in Virginia as two of its top three statewide elected officials are engulfed in a scandal concerning their wearing of blackface in the 1980s. And one that reminds me that whites need to pay closer attention to how seemingly innocuous actions, once we claim were all in good fun, function as part of the mythmaking apparatus of white supremacy.
As most of us know at this point a photo surfaced last week from the 1984 med-school yearbook page of Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, that shows two men, one in black face and one dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Northam apologized for the photo, but then backed away from his own apology. He called the photo “clearly racist and offensive,” but now says he can’t be sure he is one of the two men pictured, though he did don shoe polish on his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume, a position he continues to hold.
Virginia’s Democratic Attorney General Mark R. Herring admitted yesterday that too had donned blackface — as part of a costume. (Herring is second in line of ascension behind Lieutenant Gov. Justin E. Fairfax, who is facing sexual assault charges.)
Members of both parties have called for Northam’s resignation (along with that of Fairfax and possibly Herring), which seems fair — and a perfectly risk-free approach to take. Northam would leave office in shame, and the rest of us would get to move along in our own little bubbles in which we continue to claim that racism is a problem of individuals and not something systemic, not something that has damaged our culture and politics and continues to do so.
Blackface has a long history. Grace Elizabeth Hale, in her book Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940, writes that black images — ranging from the fictional Aunt Jemima and the black mammy figure to blackface and minstrelsy — were part of the commodification of blackness by southern whites seeking a form of nostalgia for a lost past. The mammy figure was an important element in re-establishing the white home in the south, and in creating a southern white middle class. “Mammies,” Hale writes, “became important signifiers of membership” in this class, “root(ing) the new southern world within the paternalistic race relations of the antebellum South” (100–101). “Racial identity within the culture of segregation depended in more ways than one upon the symbolic power of the mammy — being white meant having black help” (102–103).
Blackface is connected to the “mammy” in that it also helped delineate racial identity, especially in the marketplace. Aunt Jemima was an extension of the mammy, one of many “fetishized objects of entertainment” that was a part of a broader “commercialization of (blacks’) racist representation” that “could be turned into white profit” (150).
Hale writes that the blackfaced minstrel performer first appears in the 1840s in a “mask of burnt cork and later face paint.” This
allowed white men to cross the racial divide and play with images of blackness for the entertainment of first a norther white male working-class audience and later a broader white market of men and women, middle- and working-class people from across the nation. African Americans came to symbolize not just slavery, the opposite of white freedom, but also the more rural, premodern innocence whites had left behind. Minstrelsy entertained not just through ridicule but through nostalgia.
It was, she says referring to scholar Eric Lott’s work, an “encapsulation of both white desire for and fear and loathing of African Americans” (153). Ultimately, she adds, minstrelsy and blackface made “representations of blackness a commodity,” contributing to the “creation of a self-consciously white working class” and later a “more self-consciously white American identity” (153–154).
Northam’s offense, therefore, is not just a personal one, but a cultural one, the appearance of the offending photo made possible by not just Virginia culture but by American culture.
I’m not looking to excuse the photo, which should have been viewed as deeply offensive even back during the Reagan years, when it was rather easy to find examples of whites smeared in blackface for fun and profit (Gene Wilder in Silverstreak, Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places, the execrable film Soul Man are just three that come to mind from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s). My goal is to place it within a larger discussion that will allow us to address the underlying toxins that infect our politics and culture.
The use of racist imagery has been and remains central to American politics, especially on the right, whether they are subtle nods to race (Ronald Reagan’s defense of states’ rights in the Mississippi county where three civil rights workers were assassinated in the 1960s) or more overt pleas (the Willie Horton ad, Jessie Helm’s anti-affirmative action ad, Trump conflating MS13 with all immigrants). We bemoan these ugly efforts, but they succeed — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Helms, and Trump incorporated the racists into their electoral coalitions to win office, demonstrating that implicit and explicit appeals to our worst instincts on race are actually far more acceptable than our current rhetoric might seem to indicate.
This is why I do not want to judge Northam’s yearbook page in a vacuum. It probably is best for Virginia for him to resign, as Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, a Republican, did when 13-year-old photos of him on blackface were discovered.
The danger, as I said, is that we will leave it at that, and we will avoid the reckoning with race that we need. These photos are part of a larger assumption about black and brown lives and black and brown bodies that underpin our racialized policing, our border policies, our housing, education, and tax policies.
I realize now — and should have last year — that this seemingly minor, private moment, this “bit of good fun” contributes to this atmosphere. It is part of the machine of white supremacy. It is not just role-playing, but part of a longer history in which black bodies are reduced to caricature and commodity for the benefit of white America.