MInstrel - Minstrelsy 22:07 Blackface minstrelsy was an...

Minstrelsy
22:07
- Blackface minstrelsy was an entertainment tradition that stretched from the 1820’s
through the early 20 th century
- Black face performers who were almost always white before the civil war used
Champaign corks mixed with water to blacken there faces
- they would then perform imitations of black songs, dances and speech
- they performed parodies of opera’s plays, and ethnic caricatures
- minstrelsy was Americas first popular entertainment genre
- blackface minstrelsy has been extremely important in American culture since its
inception
- it could be argued that minstrelsy helped to create American popular culture before the
Civil War
- Minstrelsy also spawned entertainment formats and stereotypes of African-Americans
and immigrants
- Despite these facts, most Americans don’t even know very much about blackface
minstrelsy, and many aren’t aware that it even existed
- It is the best kept secret in American history
- Race Politics and Motivations for Minstrelsy
• From its founding, the United States recognized only white citizens as fully human
and entitled to basic rights
• Black Americans could legally be owned, traded, and treated as human chattle
• This situation was problematic because, of course, black Americans were people too,
and fully human
• From the very beginning, we see the paradox of nation founded on liberty driving its
economy, at lead in part, using slave labor
• People made sense of this paradox in a number of ways, but one of the main was to
use stereotypes
• Black people were portrayed in writings as not only lacking the full humanity of
white people for cultural reasons, but as animals incapable of higher faculties
• Blacks, were portrayed as Hypersexual, Impulsive, Stupid Lazy, Athletic, and
Instinctively musical
• These stereotypes were supported by studies in medicine and anthropology
• Race laws and court rulings were issued based on these studies

• And science remained complicit in reinforcing racial stereotypes through at least the
mis-20
th
century
• Nazi Germany was an extreme example of this
• All this work linking physical characteristics to intelligence and moral character has
since been debunked
• Black Americans were well aware of these stereotypes
• They led to what W.E.B Dubois called “double consciousness,: which means that
black Americans constantly carried two self-images or awareness
• How saw themselves individually and how white society saw them
• While those in power often used stereotypes to justify abuse, black Americans could
also use them as a way to grab what opportunity they had
• Black entertainers and musicians would perform stereotypes of themselves for white
audiences in America
• “Dancing for Eels”
• It was there way of making an income no matter how miniscule the money was
- Origins and Early Development
• We can’t be sure exactly when white entertainers began to imitate these performances
using face paint
• Some trace the practice back to Shakespeare’s Othello. The practice became