With the recent controversies surrounding examples of blackface in shows like Come Fly With Me and Little Britain, opinions on blackface are cropping up everywhere on my timeline. From angry-middle aged men who are determined to ‘defend history,’ to rugby lads claiming that censoring blackface is also curtailing their right to freedom of expression (spoilers, it is not), it seems you cannot go a day on social media without getting into a debate. It is clear to me, however, that many of the opinions I am hearing come from a place of deep ignorance and little knowledge of the history of blackface. So, here is my two cents. For the necessary context, I am a recent History graduate and the bulk of my final year was spent researching and writing on the topic of blackface as part of my dissertation. I am not trying to claim myself as an expert on the topic – for that you would be looking at Eric Lott, a fantastic scholar on the subject – but I like to think I have a decent knowledge basis on this.

During my year of research, which focussed on dismantling and analysing blackface tropes from the stage to early cinema to modern film, the conclusions I was making all boiled down to one main thing. Sex. It is a strange link to make but stick with me.

But before we get into that, let me provide some much-needed historical context. While blackface has been around since before the early nineteenth century, the trope was popularised by American performer Thomas D. Rice, who in 1830 blacked up to perform as his character, ‘Jumping Jim Crow’ – you might recognise the name. Rice and Jim Crow were catapulted to nationwide fame, and blackface minstrelsy became the United States’ most popular form of entertainment, claiming to be based on the authentic behaviours of black people, until the early 20th century with the dawn of cinema.

Blackface performers were comedic performers – at least the kind of racist stereotyping that passed for comedy at the time. To white Americans, there was something inherently funny about blackness. Al Jolson, widely remembered for starring in the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, in which he wore blackface, often recalled an alleged saying that a black stage attendant had said to him; 

‘Boss, if yo’ skin am black, they always laugh.’ But it was not just the shade of performers’ skin that got the audience going though – along with makeup, they also wore woolly wigs, painted on unnatural wide smiles, dressed in comically oversized clothing, and spoke in a ‘blackface dialect’, an over-simplified, grammatically incorrect, exaggerated version of English.

They performed songs and skits, usually based on gross-generalisations or complete falsehoods about African Americans, particularly the enslaved. The earlier trope associated with the blackface minstrel – the black man as ‘buffoon’ – emerged in tangent with their incorrect speech and their apparent incapability to self-govern. So, a skit under this category might consist of two slaves having a conversation about how much they loved their master, and how they were too stupid to do anything without his guidance (you know, apart from build up an entire continent, culture, language, ancient civilisation etcetera). Another similar skit might capitalise on the idea of black people as both stupid and lazy – an uncomfortable example you will find on YouTube is that of Cotton Watts, often regarded as the last blackface minstrel, who performed one joke that centred around him not being able to get a job.

In the other, more curious category, however, you have the skits and songs about sex. According to Eric Lott, ‘an aura of illicit sexuality (vulgarity) shadowed the most chaste of minstrel shows.’ Where instruments and other inanimate objects became an extension of the black body in a so-called ‘masturbation fantasy,’ as he puts it (see poster). One minstrel song talks of a black man’s elephant trunk, an obvious symbol for his penis, while another talks of how an enslaved black women swallowed her master’s coat and hat, and later an entire tailor with her vaginal throat. Sexual insatiability was also implied through food consumption – black women were depicted as having a ferocious hunger, with one song telling the story of a woman who ate ‘six milk punches, half a dozen eggs…six mince pies and twelve juleps’ to satisfy her cravings.

Later on, DW Griffith’s infamous 1915 feature film, The Birth of a Nation, which has gone down in history as a technical masterpiece of cinema with an abhorrently racist and white supremacist legacy, would popularise a more dangerous stereotype – the ‘black rapist’ – through a white actor in blackface (Griffith alleged that he used blackface instead of actual black actors because he could not find any). Gus, the film’s ‘rapist,’ is a black man with an uncontrollable sexuality – he expresses his desire to marry and have sex with a white virgin, Flora, who subsequently commits suicide while trying to escape him, preferring death than the touch of a black man. While his story centres around tragedy and his own murder as a result, he is still seen as a comically inferior character, often set in direct comparison to the strong, white supremacist heroes of the story, as an uneducated, animalistic figure. Less remembered is Griffith’s depiction of black women in The Birth of a Nation, through the ‘mulatto’ (of mixed racial heritage) maid, Lydia. While she is not to be a deadly rapist like Gus, her sexuality is presented as dangerously all-encompassing, as she uses her body to manipulate easily-coerced white men, causing their ultimate downfall – because, you know, it is not like white men could actually be blamed for their own actions. So why this interest in the sexual aspects of the black body? And why did it so often manifest as ‘comedy’?

Historically, white people (specifically men) have always been fascinated by black anatomy. Numerous scientific studies were conducted in the nineteenth century on the black sexuality – one doctor, Charles White, was even reported to have kept several amputated phalluses in jars in order to observe their size, for educational purposes of course. The size of the black penis was often the focus, as the myth of its abnormal enlargement was spread thanks to such investigations – Dr. White reported that even when the black penis was no longer attached to the body, it was still substantially larger than the white penis. Furthermore, scientific studies ‘proved’ that the black man’s libido was similarly enlarged, suggesting that whenever a black male felt sexual urges he would be unable to control these, and would thus, be more likely to assault (white) women – of course, this was completely false. It was not just the male anatomy that scientists were interested in. It was suggested that the black female sex organs were also enlarged; a number of observers noted that black women had much larger and more visible labias than white women. The black sexuality, to nineteenth-century scientists, then, was quite literally more visible and thus more vehement than the white sexuality.

But why was this an issue? Why did white people, upon hearing the speculation about the size and state of African American sexual organs, care so much? Enter the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, that not only freed enslaved African Americans (at least on paper) but also created a new, more anatomically attractive competitor for the white allegedly sexually inferior male. It was not just that white men thought black men would take their women by force – they also worried that white women would be drawn to them, because of their more muscular builds and mythical endowment. The only way for white men to rationalise white women who willingly took black lovers was to demonise them to the same extent – the KKK often condemned and assaulted them, and it was a well-established ‘fact’ that such white women were ‘low-down tramps.’ 

It really boils down to this. White men were afraid that black men would steal their women – or worse, attract them – so they pre-emptively stole the black body from within through the wearing of blackface.

Through depicting black men as comically grotesque in the earlier stereotype of the ‘idiot’ I touched on, white minstrels could make sure that the white women in their audience would be repulsed by the character on stage – especially when contrasted against their real-life counterpart. In this 1910 poster, which shows minstrel performer, Nick Hufford, both as his on-stage and off-stage self, the contrast is obvious; the black character wears garish, over-sized clothing, his lips are painted an unnaturally bright red, and his hair is unkempt – the real Hufford in comparison is dressed in a sleek, fashionable suit, with attractive facial features, and groomed hair. 

What this poster is trying to say to female audiences is, ‘who would you rather be with?’ With this in mind, we can better understand the reasoning behind the comedic skits which centred around the black man’s alleged poor language skills or his laziness or his stupidity – they were all trying to convince white women that black men would be inferior sexual partners.

But, by depicting black men as dangerous rapists, blackface could achieve its goal with even more ease. Looking back at The Birth of a Nation, now when we consider that Flora, the white virgin, commits suicide before even being so much as touched by Gus, we can see what Griffith was trying to do – instill a pre-emptive fear of black men in white women. He was warning them that if they even so much as befriended a black man, they would be at risk of not only sexual assault but death. What sane white women, with all of these allegedly authentic depictions of black men stacked up against her, would willingly choose a sexual relationship outside of her race?

Blackface is one of the most multi-faceted topics in all of history. What I have presented here is just a brief summary (and yes, I realise the irony that this was not actually very brief) of one of its aspects. But to draw this to a conclusion I want to leave you with several facts that are not up for debate:

1. Blackface is racist
2. Any depiction of blackface, no matter what the context, always carries with it this disgusting legacy.

So next time someone posts about how their ‘freedom of speech’ is being censored because they are being called out for their racist jokes, whip out your newfound historical knowledge and drop it on them – or, tag me in the comments, and I’ll take great pleasure in providing an intellectual beat down.

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