Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. It's eighteen eighty nine. Missouri newspaper editor
Speaker 1: Chris Rutt and his friend Charles Underwood have created the
Speaker 1: world's first pancake ready mix, but they need a scheme
Speaker 1: to sell it. Rutt has seen a minstrel show that
Speaker 1: featured the popular song Old Aunt Jemima. Inspired by the character,
Speaker 1: who was often portrayed by a white man in black
Speaker 1: face and drag, he decides to name their new breakfast
Speaker 1: concoction Aunt Jemima and attached her stereotypical mammy image, a
Speaker 1: genial and submissive black woman who worked as a nanny
Speaker 1: or housekeeper for white families to the product. But the
Speaker 1: two fail in marketing the business and they sell the
Speaker 1: company to the RT. Davis Milling Company. In eight RT
Speaker 1: Davis Company not only fine tunes the pancake recipe, but
Speaker 1: also the Antjemima marketing ploy. The company decides to turn
Speaker 1: Aunt Jemima into a real black woman, and they put
Speaker 1: former slave Nancy Green on display at the eight three
Speaker 1: World Exposition in Chicago, where she sings songs, cook's pancakes,
Speaker 1: and tells euphemistic stories about the old South Fast Board
Speaker 1: more than one years to today, many iterations of an
Speaker 1: Jemima and tons of boxes of pancake mix have been sold,
Speaker 1: and vestiges of the company's racist roots remain. And so
Speaker 1: does black face, as is evident from the news. Black face,
Speaker 1: the centuries old practice of using makeup to transform into
Speaker 1: a caricature of a black person, usually with googly white eyes,
Speaker 1: ink colored skin, and big red lips, is still alive
Speaker 1: and well college students across the world, where costumes and
Speaker 1: black face at Halloween parties, performers appear on stage in
Speaker 1: television in black face. Businesses and homes still proudly display
Speaker 1: the iconography and racist memorabilia without addressing their complicated history,
Speaker 1: because that complicated history stretches so back into our cultural history.
Speaker 1: It's not a surprise that some people are still strolling
Speaker 1: into shindigs and black face. But the reason that current
Speaker 1: instances of black face blow up in the news and
Speaker 1: in social media conversation, like, for example, the old photo
Speaker 1: of Rapper Drake in black face that surfaced, is because
Speaker 1: the practice has long been deemed harmful to the popular
Speaker 1: perception of black people. Take abolitionist Frederick Douglas's comments on
Speaker 1: musical performers wearing black face called minstrels. He wrote in
Speaker 1: the newspaper The North Star in eighteen forty eight that
Speaker 1: there quote the filthy scum of white society who have
Speaker 1: stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature,
Speaker 1: in which to make money and pander to the corrupt
Speaker 1: taste of their white fellow citizens. Black people have been
Speaker 1: paraded for the enjoyment of white people and imitated by
Speaker 1: white actors for centuries. In the book Black Like You,
Speaker 1: black Face, white Face, Insult and Imitation in American popular culture,
Speaker 1: journalist and cultural commentator John Strasbaugh argues that these seeds
Speaker 1: of black face were planted quote with the first organized
Speaker 1: contacts between Europeans and Africans. But black face as we
Speaker 1: know it today, a cultural practice meant to mock, exoticize, disparage, pity,
Speaker 1: and generalize African American people in culture, can be traced
Speaker 1: back to nineteenth century theater. Let's talk about minstrel shows.
Speaker 1: These shows started out as performances by white male minstrels,
Speaker 1: traveling musicians who wore black face and caricatured slaves. The
Speaker 1: shows were basically an absurd blend of stereotyping, racism, and capitalism.
Speaker 1: At its finest, minstrel's parodied black song and dance, burned
Speaker 1: cork to blacken their faces, and acted like fools on stage,
Speaker 1: touring the United States and sometimes Britain to amuse white audiences.
Speaker 1: Most black face minstrel cy was performed by non blacks,
Speaker 1: but black people did perform in these shows. Two Billy Cursands,
Speaker 1: the composer of the song Old Aunt Jemima, was a
Speaker 1: black comedian known for his black face minstrel cy. At first,
Speaker 1: minstrels performed solo, perpetuating stereotypical narratives like that of the mammy,
Speaker 1: the uneducated world slave, and the clumsily sophisticated black man.
Speaker 1: By the mid eighteen hundreds, the prevalence of minstrel shows
Speaker 1: had grown so tremendously that minstrel ensembles were popping up everywhere,
Speaker 1: and a show formula had developed. There were jokes, ballads,
Speaker 1: one act plays, dancing, burlesque, and a bunch of other
Speaker 1: acts that generally make a show entertaining. Minstrel shows were
Speaker 1: a hit for years to come. They even gained traction
Speaker 1: in the last decades of the nineteenth century after emancipation
Speaker 1: and in cities where white people didn't interact much with
Speaker 1: black people. Famous performers like Al Jolson, Shirley Temple, Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 1: and Judy Garland contributed to the popularity of black face
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen hundreds, and amateur minstrel shows persisted
Speaker 1: in small local venues until the mid nineteen hundreds, But
Speaker 1: by the late eighteen hundreds, minstrel shows were dwindling of
Speaker 1: vaudeville performances and movies were on the rise, and eventually
Speaker 1: the Civil Rights earra rendered black face minstrel see unacceptable,
Speaker 1: but the disparaging portrayals, belittling stereotypes and prejudices toward black
Speaker 1: people that the shows imparted were already deeply entrenched in
Speaker 1: the American cultural consciousness. Black Face minstrel see perpetuated messages
Speaker 1: that black people are buffoonish, dimwitted, exotic, and enigmatic, among
Speaker 1: other negative characterizations. Studies show that media portrayals can affect
Speaker 1: the way people perceive blacks in real life, and that
Speaker 1: stereotypes can affect the way people interact with others, and
Speaker 1: there's strong evidence that implicit bias the tendency for people
Speaker 1: to attribute certain characteristics to different demographics based on stereotypes
Speaker 1: can affect how people treat blacks. For instance, metro areas
Speaker 1: with greater average implicit bias have more racial disparities in
Speaker 1: police shootings. To this day, the perception of blackmails as
Speaker 1: aggressive in criminal remains and is used to justify the
Speaker 1: use of violence against them, as research and time have
Speaker 1: shown their long lasting implications of assigning negative stereotypes to
Speaker 1: black people. So when the Internet erupts in an uproar
Speaker 1: against a person wearing black face, the problem is not
Speaker 1: political correctness, and it's not generational sensitivity. Black Face's legacy
Speaker 1: is one of white suprevacy and exploitation of black identity,
Speaker 1: and the weight and consequences of that history cannot be
Speaker 1: divorced from it, no matter how great someone might think
Speaker 1: their costume is. As Strasbaugh put it, the problem, of course,
Speaker 1: is that so few of us know our history. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Eve's Jeff Cote and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Playing. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: historical topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.
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