I thought Charles Townsend’s “Negro Minstrels” was pretty hysterical. Though, I would have called it: “How-to Create your Very Own Minstrel Show.” “Negro Minstrels” was not hysterical in the sense that blackface minstrel shows were hysterical and not at all offensive, but hysterical because these were, potentially, guidelines for people who might like to create their own minstrel show—with just three [white] men who are good singers and able to imitate “the negro dialect” and a few other men who can do some other stuff, plus costumes, props, burnt cork, and such—even YOU can have your very own minstrel show. It’s funny to imagine men gathered around this how-to, just puttin’ together a little minstrel show. Anyway.
On a more serious note, I really enjoyed the chapter from Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America. The discussion of how minstrelsy gave a flailing white society something to grasp in order to attempt to find some understanding—artificial, inappropriate, thoughtless, racist though it were. Toll says that minstrels attempted to “create vivid stage characters, recognizable and amusing types” so they just caricatured whatever “other” they could, and in regards to which marginalized group they chose to caricature, they did not discriminate (93). However, on p. 93 Toll argues that while the minstrels embedded these stereotypes through their caricatured performance of women and people of non-white ethnicities the minstrels only intended to entertain, he called attention to the fact that white men needed to maintain their “superior” status (88). Is the distinction between their intent to entertain and their desire to maintain their status a matter of consciousness? As in, they were consciously seeking to entertain, but did not realize their need to entertain was based in their insecurity? It seems unbelievable that white people felt so threatened by the abolition of slavery and the growth of ethnic diversity that they resorted to creating caricatures of nonwhite ethnicities which were taken at face value by audiences, in order to continually reassert their superiority/ensure subordination.
Mahar’s contrasting discussion of the nonracial contents of blackface comedy/theatre is equally interesting, I think. This idea that minstrelsy wasn’t simply “‘caricatures’ and ‘racist attititudes’” is definitely worth exploring, but I think it’s equally problematic, because, at the end of the day, it’s like—okay, so then why did they need to burnt cork their faces black? Saying that blackface seemed to provide a mask “which allowed deep expression…” (185) seems like a pretty shallow defense to me. I fail to see how “the minstrel comic’s use of the blackface mask reflect[s] the fundamental ambivalence about race that characterizes American culture” (186). It just seems more likely that this was a vehicle that allowed white men to constantly reaffirm their status as superior beings. I also wondered about Mahar’s assertion that blackface used stereotypes/caricatures because they were the “best vehicles for criticizing the differences between what society promised and what it actually delivered” (208)…I mean, who is “society” in this scenario, and what is it that wasn’t delivered? Am I completely overlooking something here?
