Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

18 With Amusement for Allweapon wounded others on society’s margins: women, for example, whowere largely absent from the audiences and whom cross-dressing malestypically portrayed as “wenches” or other unflattering types. 20Undeniably, the stage persona of blacked-up whites all too often belittledand demeaned African Americans. On this level, black caricatures provideda means by which whites grappled with the anxieties and insecuritiesthat the shifting economy provoked. The new industrial work disciplineemphasized punctuality, regularity, sobriety, sexual abstinence, and orderlyhabits as the means to success. In contrast, the old preindustrial routinesthat allowed for such things as drinking, gambling, and extensive holidayswere turning into prescriptions for failure. Many workers resisted the alteredeconomic guidelines even as they internalized them. The process wasdifficult and stirred considerable tension and unease. Blackface may, fromthis perspective, have allowed whites to displace their conflicted emotionsonto African Americans, identifying them with permissive, lackadaisicalpreindustrial habits that could evoke both nostalgia and scorn. By “actingblack,” whites could momentarily step outside the new work discipline andinto the freewheeling, “natural” disposition that African Americans supposedlyenjoyed. They could invent, as the historian David Roediger hassaid, “a new sense of whiteness by creating a new sense of blackness.” Andthey could remove the cork when they wanted, asking humorously, “Whyis we niggas like a slave ship on de Coast of Africa?” and replying, “Becausewe both make money by taking off the negroes.” Ironically, minstrel showsgrew in popularity at the same time that state and local governments in theNortheast took steps to curtail black celebrations such as Negro ElectionDay, a festive holiday that lasted almost a week. As one white reformer objectedin Lynn, Massachusetts: “Excesses of the negroes gave rise to the vilemanner in which [Negro Election] was observed by some of the lower classof our own complexion.” Behavior that was unacceptable for whites in thestreets could, however, find an outlet onstage. 21Moreover, when blackface performers appropriated elements fromAfrican American culture, they were engaged in a kind of theft. Any semblanceof racial collaboration was, after all, hardly equal. When blacksdanced for eels at the Catherine Street Market, they were not performingas minstrels; many of them were simply, as one student later observed,“slaves dancing for eels.” 22The cultural dynamics of minstrelsy were, nevertheless, considerablymore complex and nuanced than simple racism would allow. In notableways, whites onstage and in the audiences identified with the AfricanAmericans who, like them, lived and worked in the integrated areas of lowerManhattan. A minstrel parody of Shakespeare thus bore the title “Blackand White Niggers,” and Rice sang: “Aldough I’m a black man, De whiteis call’d my broder.” 23 Whites could share with blacks a sense of being vic-