Blacks on Stage: Are We Still Replicating Stereotypes from the Legacy of Minstrelsy

Abstract

This is an analysis of early African American Theater (AAT) and the origins of stereotyping the performance of blackness in the larger history of American Theater canon known as minstrelsy. In such an analysis of AAT, there are several questions to consider. At its impetus, through to its hey day and then its demise, was minstrelsy the manifestation of cultural domination; or, the celebration of an authentic peoples’ culture?

The stigma of Blackface was one of the stylized symbols of both minstrelsy and blackness that became calcified in the cultural consciousness of America. In these performances of race, “blackface” was used by white entertainers to demystify, clown and degrade “blackness”.

I contend that both forms of American minstrelsy—early whites in blackface and then later, African Americans, themselves, (forced to don burnt cork to gain entre to the American stage) were, simply, an example of early American cultural imperialism. Minstrelsy, as the first American Musical theater, became the process through which a people’s authentic artistic production was co-opted and comodified for poplar consumption in a capitalistic marketplace—in this case fastening black culture to racist uses. 

 While White blackface minstrelsy was as much “administered and determined” for racist uses in popular culture, it was continuously created and reinvigorated by authentic black contributions to its repertoire of music, song and dance, (Lott, 6) “Minstrelsy was an arena in which the efficient expropriation of the cultural commodity “blackness” occurred.” (Lott, 6)