Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype
Historian Dale Cockrell once noted that poor and working-class whites who felt “squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm. Minstrelsy, comedic performances of “blackness” by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up, cannot be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core. By distorting the features and culture of African Americans — including their looks, language, dance, deportment, and character — white Americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis. “The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify.” — Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic The pervasiveness of stereotypical images like these made the civil rights efforts of African Americans even more difficult. The black people represented here...