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Book Review: 'Black Like You' Explores Minstrel History Paul Crespo
"Black Like You": Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture
Inspired by a visit to a cabaret show at a gay club in lower Manhattan in 2004, where the white drag queen performer (Shirley Q. Liquor) wore blackface make-up, journalist John Strausbaugh decided to write a history of blackface entertainment.
In our modern, politically correct world, few know anything about an era when both white and black men smeared their faces with burnt cork and crudely caricatured blacks to amuse primarily white audiences. Many would prefer it stay that way.
But Strausbaugh believes that in order to understand how we feel about race today, we need to know our history. While originally intending to write a popular history, Strausbaugh gradually saw his research turn toward deeper issues of race in American culture. At first blush (pun unintended), blackface entertainment seems an unlikely venue to explore controversial racial issues in 21st century America, but "Black Like You" highlights that blackface performances, today reviled as racist outrage, were once pervasive across the country.
But, what could blackface minstrel shows of the 19th century, and their later 20th century versions such as vaudeville, actually teach us? Weren't those shows simply examples of our horrible, racist past - best left forgotten? Outside the Shirley Q. Liquor show, protesters from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, and transgendered communities certainly felt that way, denouncing the act as a "racist, classist, misogynist attack."
The show, which the previous year had been forced to close under similar pressure in Chelsea and been banned in Boston, features routines using poor black stereotypes with references to K-mart, illegitimate children, welfare, and malt liquor. But Strausbaugh says that "we can't have only the culture we approve of." We need to know what our culture actually is and has been. While the "politically correct want to regulate what we think by regulating what we say," that doesn't work.
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Simply scrubbing our history of its now unacceptable past only creates a "hidden history" of "forbidden knowledge." At his book signings in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. 80 percent of the audiences were young blacks hoping to learn more about this forbidden history.
As he waited to enter the Shirley Q. Liquor show, Strausbaugh overheard one of the few black patrons running the protester gauntlet say to her partner: "they said this show is racist," while her partner quickly replied: "Why don't we make up our own minds?"
Unfortunately, we never learn what they decided, but Strausbaugh argues maybe these are all signs that "we're loosening up a bit" about race.
Written in a compassionate tone, with lively prose, Strausbaugh examines the origins of the early minstrel shows, and along the way describes the tremendous effect blackface has had on popular American culture for nearly two centuries; influencing rock, rap and hip hop music, Broadway theater, Hollywood film, TV, cartoons, advertising, and even "gangsta lit."
Surprisingly, "many black artists, including the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the great vaudevillian Bert Williams performed in blackface even while subverting its demeaning meaning."
"Black Like You" shows how the minstrel music of the 1820s and 30s, like later rock & roll, allowed ghetto white boys like Thomas Dartmouth "T.D." Rice, the blackface singer of "Jump Jim Crow," to laugh at black culture they barely understood while using it as a form of rebellion. Though hard for us to fathom today, at that time this simple ditty was an international sensation throughout the English-speaking world. T.D. Rice was the "Elvis" of his day and Jump Jim Crow was its "Hound Dog."
In writing "Black Like You," Strausbaugh first tried to remove offensive language from the lyrics of these minstrel songs, but realized that this also removed most of its meaning, so he had to describe his findings in the language of the day, even when those terms are effectively banned in polite company today. Meanwhile, Strausbaugh argues, rap and hip hop are the new minstrels - with references to "pimps" and "ho's" being as demeaning as any minstrel show.
And as Strausbaugh notes, "virtually all other forms of ethnic or identity jokes, while often frowned upon, are permissible. But White people joking about black people is automatically treated as hate speech." Inside the Shirley Q. Liquor act, the same overweight drag queen appeared as trailer park diva Betty Butterfield, who satirized Southern white women as "drunken, drug-addled, TV-addicted mess of shallow Christianity and self-pitying confusion." Apparently no one, including the author, was offended by this parody.
With the appearance of Shirley Q. Liquor though, Strausbaugh was both repulsed and intrigued by what he saw, explaining that while it shocked and revolted him, it also was "funny, extremely daring satire." That was the paradox. Did these shows simply reinforce demeaning black stereotypes for a mostly white, male crowd, or did they also mock racist attitudes? Were these performances simply insults, or could they also be something else?
Strausbaugh argues that at times those entertainers seemingly mocking blacks were also displaying subtle sympathy, or even admiration for them.
Characters like Jim Crow and Zip Coon first became popular in New York slums during the 1820s, when poor Irish-Americans, a group that had long identified with, and in many ways even shared, the African-American experience (including forms of slavery), began fighting to differentiate themselves from their black neighbors. Strausbaugh points out that minstrel music was the "soundtrack for this period of turmoil and transition."
Strausbaugh also aptly describes a rough and tumble country where ethnic insults and mockery were part of a uniquely American initiation ritual.
He deals with scholarly theories in a thoughtful, engaging and balanced way. He critiques both multiculturalists and Eurocentric traditionalists for their one-dimensional views of "authentic" American culture, emphasizing that Americans have long had a unique ability to "mix it up" as shown by the pervasiveness of black popular culture.
Strausbaugh's conclusion: "American culture is neither absolutely black nor white, nor other, but a mongrel" where Blacks and Whites "mock and mimic one another, are by turns attracted to and repulsed by one another, sometimes love and sometimes hate one another," and "all this will continue as long as America is America."
While somewhat esoteric at times for the average reader, it should become required reading in many college courses. Paul Crespo is a Miami-based writer and Hispanic talk show host with WQBA (Univision Radio). A frequent contributor to NewsMax.com, he also teaches politics at the University of Miami. He may be reached directly via www.paulcrespo.com.
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