Hey Hey It’s Racism!
Me sing all day, me sing all night
Me have no care, me sleep is light
Me tink, no what tomorrow bring
Me happy, so me sing.
‘The Bonja Song’ (c. 1820) (Nederveen Pieterse 1995:133)
This song is typical of the Minstrel show, a genre originating in the nineteenth
century in the United States. The minstrel, a white performer, painted his face
black and performed song and dance routines that parodied African-descended
peoples. As the above song demonstrates in its broken-up ‘negroe’ dialect (1),
the Black subject is infantilised by a seeming carefree/ness and eagerness
to sing, no doubt for the white master’s satisfaction. The spectre of the minstrel,
or ‘blackface’, as minstrelsy has come to be known, is steeped in race politics,
and so a genealogy seems necessary given the level of ignorance in multicultural
Australia, c. 2009, about what this racist throwback signifies.
In his illuminating study, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western
Popular Culture, Jan Nederveen Pieterse traces how this racist trope was inhered
with meaning:
On the “Middle Passage” slaves were encouraged to dance and sing
for the sake of their physical as well as moral condition.
‘Dancing the slaves’ was the usual term, and it often involved the
use of the whip. In plantation society, entertainment served as a
means of reducing friction. Were cheerful slaves not happy slaves?
… Performing thus was an essential part of slave existence.
(Nederveen Pieterse 1995:132)
And so, from the slave boats to the prison camps that were plantations,
‘dancing the slaves’, or more accurately, terrorising individuals to perform
in the face of real time violence, represents the beginnings of this story
about race, white supremacy and popular culture. Nederveen Pieterse maps
how the ‘blackface’ figure emerged as a white imitation of so-called
performative ‘black’ culture. He writes:
The minstrel was in the North of the American Republic what the
slave entertainer who performed in his master’s house, in church,
at fairs, horse-races, dances and so on was in the South. In the
North the stage replaced these venues, and whites in black-face
replaced the performing black slave – as they did after slavery had
been abolished in the Northern states. Thus the Minstrel tradition
had its origin in a kind of imitation of slavery, with imitation blacks,
for Northerners who had to manage without slaves or slavery.
(1995:132)
Significantly, the Minstrel show became popular precisely at the time when
slavery was being challenged by slave resistance and abolitionist activism (2)
(Nederveen Pieterse 1995:132). This temporal conjunction grounds minstrelsy
firmly in a racist frame, as race historians have argued that ‘a fully fledged
racialised ideology did not appear amongst the slave-holding classes (and
their supporters in Europe) until slavery was seriously challenged by the
Abolitionists’ (Hall 2002: 242). Thus, the minstrel emerges in the nineteenth
century as a tool of culture in this ‘propaganda war with the abolitionists’
(Frederickson (3) quoted in Hall 2002:243), to infantilise (‘Old Massa to us
darkies am good’), to animalise (‘coon’ songs), and ultimately to demonise
and demean African- descended peoples. (4)
‘In the beginning, there was an Uncle Tom’
(Bogle 1997: 13).
Into the new century, the appearance of ‘blackface’ in the very first reels of
US film ensured that this trope continued to inflect mainstream US culture.
Donald Bogle, who has scrutinised African American screen characterisations,
argues that early film merely reproduced the racist stereotypes that ‘had existed
since the days of slavery and were already popularised in American life and
arts’ (1997:13). Bogle tells how in 1903, a mechanic-turned-movie-director
named Edwin S. Porter produced a twelve-minute motion picture calling it
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bogle registers this as the ‘American movies’ first black
character’, the great paradox being that Tom was not black at all. He was a
‘nameless, slightly overweight white actor made up in blackface’ (1997:13).
It is almost impossible to avoid mentioning D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
in the context of racial casting. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that within
Hollywood cinema, Euro-Americans have historically enjoyed the unilateral
prerogative of acting in “blackface”, “redface”, “brownface”, and “yellowface”,
while the reverse has rarely been the case’ (1994:189). They make the point
that political considerations in racial casting were quite overt in the silent era
and in Birth of a Nation, ‘subservient black characters were played by actual
African Americans, while aggressive, threatening Black characters were played
largely by Whites in Blackface’ (Shohat and Stam 1994:189). Further to that,
two of the female characters, Lydia (the mulatto character) and Mammy were
played by white actresses in blackface (Bogle 1997:21). Cultural theorist
Valerie Smith notes that this film is considered by many to be ‘the symbolic,
although not literal, origin of U.S. cinema, [and] is frequently offered up by
film critics and historians as the inaugural moment of African American
cinema as well’ (1997: 1). Perhaps because, as Bogle argues, white
characterisations of Blackness dominated film narratives for the next half
century (1997: 14), ensuring that African American actors, when they finally
made an appearance on screen, were boxed into performing roles defined
by white subjectivities (the ‘tom’, the ‘coon’, the ‘mulatto’ – usually tragic,
the ‘buck’, and the ’mammy’). These gendered racialised subordinate roles
made the cross-over and represent the ‘astonishing persistence of the basic
racial “grammar of representation” … with many variations and modifications
allowing for differences in time, medium and context’ (Hall 2002: 251).
Then in 1927, ‘the first feature-length Hollywood “talkie” film in which spoken
dialogue was used as part of the dramatic action’ (Dirks), Al Jolson, a Jewish
American actor playing a Jewish character in The Jazz Singer, croons
‘My Mammy’ to his Yiddish mother in ‘blackface’.(5) Contemplating the
black-faced Jolson and the countless others who went before and came after
- Fred Astaire in Swing Time (1936), Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes
in Arms (1939), Bing Crosby in Dixie (1943), Joan Crawford in The Torch
Song (1953), and most recently Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder (2008),
to name but a few – it is not hard to begin to see why the minstrel visage,
‘the caricature of a caricature – has become the most enduring of black
caricatures ‘(Nederveen Pieterse 1995: 135).
If we are to understand racial politics and inequality in non-
phenotypic, nonessentialised terms, then we must attempt to
comprehend the meanings of race against the canvas of space, time,
and history.
(Hanchard 2001: 281)
In reprising the historical specificity of the ‘blackface’, I aim to re-establish
the racial terrain within which this figure operates and indeed takes its meaning.
Race is constitutive of the ‘blackface’ performance: that is, it cannot be read,
understood, ‘enjoyed’ or indeed enacted without its historical import being taken
into account. So when the ‘blackface’ skit mimicking the Jackson Five was played
out on an Australian commercial TV station in October 2009, the blogosphere
went viral with an overwhelming majority of posters defending the performers
from culturally diverse backgrounds in the face of an international cringe.(6)
The cultural lag between US race sensitivities and the Australian laissez-faire
attitude to all things racial could not have been more stark.
In The Australian, the conservative national broadsheet’s online blog,
‘Astounded’ asks, ‘How far can this political correctness, false hand wringing
and crocodile tears go?’; Cheeza demands, ‘Get over it, it was ment (sic) to be
funny, stop taking the world so seriously and laugh for the sake of laughting
(sic) not everything has a hidden agenda’; Alien believes ‘We should all loosen
up a bit. In fact I am of the opinion that we should have a program on so called
“racist” jokes so that we all understand that they are just that JOKES’; then
there’s Smudge who thinks that, ‘Whilst the politically correct seem to have
found the skit offensive you can bet that the vast majority of the audience
viewed it with humour – remember the prime audience is the working class
Australian not the PC intellectuals & ethnic minorities’; and Ian who feels
the need to channel Chopper (the celebrity ex-crim) with: Lighten the f***
up Australia! People are way to (sic) sensitive these days. So what even if it
was racist. Get over it’; and Emily wants to know, ‘since when is painting your
face racism?’ (The Australian 2009).
The commentary at The Sydney Morning Herald’s online blog is tidily summed
up by Nathan: ‘It would seem 90% plus of readers who have commented do
not think it was racist at all’ (The Sydney Morning Herald).’ Uncannily, posters
at the Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph expressed sentiments not unlike
those found in readers at The Australian and The Herald. Stef wants those who
found the performance offensive to ‘get a grip it was a skit and if your (sic) to
(sic) thin skinned to see that you need an injection of sense of humour’; May
of Sydney, perhaps more aggressively screams, ‘GET OVER IT’ (her capitals);
Shell of QLD: ‘stop this madness…..’; Londo of NSW, ‘for goodness sake, can
nobody take a joke anymore ??? POLITICAL CORRECTNESS has gone too far……
Ligten (sic) up everyone. IT WAS A JOKE…’; Amanda Charnock worries that
‘Australia is becoming so bloody serious and ludicrously politically correct’;
and Wake Up wants us to wake up to the fact that ‘This a warning on the
Human Rights Charter. You will be told what to do and what to say by people
who have no connection to this country!’; Val of Melbourne also thinks ‘People
need to lighten up and get their sense of humour back’; and Bert of Sydney
asks: ‘Where has the Australian Knock about humor (sic) gone…; and finally,
a dissenting voice in the blogging wilderness, Stewart of Sydney offers, ‘This
is not about being PC, its about respecting people.’
Perhaps most telling is, ‘Sick of this subject’ who confirms what many of us
already know: ‘Here we go again with this racism crap.’ However, it is Sean
of Goulburn who gets to the heart of the rhetorical mazes deployed when having
to ‘state racial views without opening yourself to the charge of racism by
considering all sides of an issue’. Here Sean of Goulburn takes the
‘Yes and no, but…’ approach (Bonilla-Silva 2001: 154):
Fair Dinkum. We are not the States. The so called “black face” doesn’t
carry the same connotation here as it does in the U.S. When the act
came on I thought nothing more than it was a send up of the
Jackson 5. Harry Connick, rightly so, felt uncomfortable because
of his countries history with the oppression and slavery of African
Americans. He was entitled to voice his disapproval as well.
However, the act should be seen in the context it was meant to be.
A piss take, not a racial slur. Next they will tell us Red Faces has to
be renamed because weve (sic) offended the Native American Indians.
(The Daily Telegraph)
This selection of comments demonstrate how dialogue around race is fraught
with glib lines like ‘lighten up’ (ironic in context of the subject of ‘blackface’)
and ‘get over it’ (as if the legacy of slavery and the effects of apartheid
segregation don’t have material effects into the present). These responses,
like that old familiar turn of phrase ‘political correctness’, are intended to shut
down dialogue. It is not hard to imagine that had it not been for guest judge
Harry Connick Jr’s condemnation of the ’Red Faces’ skit and his insistence on
an on-air apology, the episode would barely have attracted a national focus,
let alone international attention. The demand that humour be quarantined is
particularly prevalent in the respondents’ comments, as if jokes and ‘Aussie
humour’ should somehow be exempt from the right to racial respect.
What exactly is funny about mocking people of colour? And why on earth
would anyone mobilise a trope so deeply mired in racial suffering and exclusion
for a cheap laugh on a slow Saturday night? No matter what ‘variation’ culturally
diverse locals may apply to the skit, the trope of ‘blackface’ is not Australian
humour. This figure has a specific context, and that context is slavery, violence,
invisibility and erasure. That this racist parody is ported to other places does
not mean it loses its register of meanings.
The question that needs to be asked is why do performers and social satirists
need to resort to racist cosmetology in 2009 to get a laugh, or indeed in the
case of John Safran in his ABC TV series Race Relations, to get an insight into
what it is like to be Black in America? Why can’t we hear what African Americans
have been saying (and are saying) about racism and ‘post-racial’ America?
Why does it still take a white Jewish subject in ‘blackface’ to offer a predominantly
white audience a ‘humorous’ lesson about race? What is the utility of such a
performance? Might it be that Safran’s ‘blackface’ is fundamentally for
entertainment value, just as other white and non-white performers have done
in the many incarnations of this contested figure. And like many a white minstrel
before, singing and dancing are part of the racial repertoire that Safran calls up
in his attempts to mimic the idioms of African American culture, or more
accurately, his white imitation of black culture.
In the face of criticism, the ‘blackface’ performers of the skit Hey Hey It’s Saturday
used their culturally diverse backgrounds (Indian, Lebanese, Greek, Sri Lankan,
and Italian) to deflect charges of racism. Dr Suresh DeSilva, the spokesperson
for the group claimed that their multicultural backgrounds distanced them from
being racists, stating, ‘If we had our time again we would wear different make-up
and wigs and of course we regret we did it’ (The Daily Telegraph). Safran uses
his Jewish identity in the same way. Subtly (and not so subtly) invoking one’s
ethno-religious background as a rhetorical shield to deflect questions around the
ethics of performing ‘blackface’ is a refusal to recognise that racism is about power
and to understand how racism works. In so doing, Safran’s act fails miserably to
deliver a meaningful insight into anything, other than reproducing the
same old routine.
While the dominant or hegemonic racism in Australia is white racism, there are
many other racisms at work in multi-racial, multicultural Australia. Racism is
not confined to one group. Indeed, you certainly don’t have to be white to
practice, or indeed reproduce racism. Racism is a social relation and is
endemic in our cultures, regardless of where we come from or our level of
formal education. As Shohat and Stam argue, ‘In a systematically racist society,
no one is exempt from a hegemonic racist discourse, including the victims of
racism … racism circulates laterally … [and] since racism is a discourse as well
as a praxis, a member of an oppressed community can adopt an oppressive
discourse’ (1994: 19).
So if we are to understand the performance of ‘blackface’ as a racist parody
that has a register of meanings that remain viscerally real into the present,
then regardless of the ethnicity of the performative equation – brown imitation
of white imitation of black culture – Hey Hey it’s still racism!
Notes
1 ‘Broken speech places the ethnic other outside the American mainstream’
(Denzin 2002 23).
2 In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began his newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston,
proclaiming the cause of immediate abolition. By the middle of the 1830s, riots
directed against abolitionists took place in the North and in the South.
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lincolns/slavery/es_abolition.html)
3 George Frederickson writes ‘there is something startling about the rapidity’
with which various beliefs and ideas about racial difference (primitivism,
licentiousness, cranial inferiority, etc) were ‘brought together and organised in
a rigid polemical pattern, once the defenders of slavery found themselves in a
propaganda war with the abolitionists’ (quoted in Hall, 2002: 243).
4 Nederveen Pieterse argues that the ideological background of ‘Jim Crow’ was
the white backlash against abolitionism, a term linked via song to the
minstrel (1995: 33).
5 The complexity of this racial conundrum is subject to critique, with Dirks
asking in parenthetical brevity, ‘is this act ‘symbolic of [the Jazz Singer’s]
assimilation into the culture, or a way to mask his ethnicity?’
(http://www.filmsite.org/jazz.html ). For an exploration of the racial dialectics
of this, see Shohat and Stam (1994: pp 227-230).
6 For the backstory to the Hey Hey It’s Saturday skit, see
http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/tv/2009/10/15/1255195859145.htmlhttp://
www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26186302-952,00.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/14/sawyer.blackface/index.html
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mediadiary/index.php/australianmedia/comm
ents/hey_hey_thats_racist/
References
Bogle, D. (1997) ‘Black beginnings: From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Birth of a
Nation’ in V. Smith (ed.), Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video
London The Athlone Press.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2001) White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Boulder London Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Denzin, N.K. (2002) Reading Race: Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence
London Sage Publications.
DeSilva, S. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydneyconfidential/
livid-kamahl-has-had-enough-of-hey-hey/story-e6frewz0-1225784508813
Dirks, T. (2009) http://www.filmsite.org/jazz.html Downloaded 26 October
2009.
Hall, S. (2002) ‘The Spectacle of the Other’ in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices London: Sage Publications.
Hanchard, M. (2001) ‘Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics and the African
Diaspora’ in P. Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (1995) White on Black: Images of Africa and Balcks in
Western Popular Culture New Haven and London Yale University Press.
Shohat, E. and R. Stam, (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism
and the Media London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, V. ‘Introduction’ in V. Smith (ed.), Representing Blackness: Issues in Film
and Video London The Athlone Press.
The Australian
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mediadiary/index.php/australianmedia/comm
ents/hey_hey_thats_racist/P25/) Downloaded Oct 14 2009
The Sydney Morning Herald
http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives/your_say/022184.html?page=fullpag
e#comments Downloaded 14 October 2009
The Daily Telegraph
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/livid-kamahlhas-
had-enough-of-hey-hey/story-e6frewz0-1225784508813 Downloaded Oct 14 2009.
*Thanks Rawan for this link to ‘How to tell people they sound racist’