“It was shocking,” write Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen in Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop (W.W. Norton), “that in a city bursting with parade enthusiasts and curious tourists, a pair of European women who stayed less than an hour were the only white faces in the crowd other than ours.” The passage appears in a description of the Zulu parade at New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, one of the few contemporary events at which African-Americans wear blackface as a matter of course. The authors are trying to convey the manic strangeness of carnival. At the same time, though, they highlight their whiteness—and, paradoxically, their attempt to adopt blackness. In that sense, they’ve put on a kind of literary blackface.
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That’s not to criticize Taylor and Austen, both of whom have strong Chicago ties (Taylor is a senior editor at Chicago Review Press, Austen has written features for the Reader). On the contrary, their mild stumble here serves mainly to throw into relief how sure-footed, thoughtful, and perceptive they remain through most of Darkest America—no mean feat when you consider that black minstrelsy, the practice of blacks donning black greasepaint and/or performing routines associated with minstrel shows, is one of the most charged topics in American pop-cultural history.
Such explanations have been staples of a long-standing antiminstrelsy discourse among black artists that includes polemics by Richard Wright and Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled. Taylor and Austen respect that discourse, but mostly reject its conclusions. Black minstrelsy, they argue convincingly, can’t be explained in terms of self-deception or coercion alone. Nobody forced Paul Robeson to record “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” a minstrel-style song that advises blacks to keep laboring, have faith, and “accept your destiny.”
It’s viscerally jarring to learn that, in notes to a white benefactor, Hurston occasionally called herself “your little pickaninny.” Still, that bit of personal black minstrelsy is just a variation on the problem that confronts any minority artist working in a racist society. From well before Bert Williams to the present, black music, theater, literature, and comedy have been a glorious, seemingly limitless aesthetic treasure. And yet those riches have been produced in—and are to a degree dependent on—the marginalization resulting from segregation and oppression. To celebrate Mardi Gras or Hurston or even Paul Robeson is to celebrate the fruits of racism.
