WEBVTT - Why Is Blackface So Controversial? 0:00:02.040 --> 0:00:07.040 Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, 0:00:07.080 --> 0:00:11.399 Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. It's eighteen eighty nine. Missouri newspaper editor 0:00:11.480 --> 0:00:14.320 Chris Rutt and his friend Charles Underwood have created the 0:00:14.360 --> 0:00:17.440 world's first pancake ready mix, but they need a scheme 0:00:17.520 --> 0:00:20.239 to sell it. Rutt has seen a minstrel show that 0:00:20.320 --> 0:00:24.360 featured the popular song Old Aunt Jemima. Inspired by the character, 0:00:24.440 --> 0:00:26.479 who was often portrayed by a white man in black 0:00:26.480 --> 0:00:29.160 face and drag, he decides to name their new breakfast 0:00:29.160 --> 0:00:33.280 concoction Aunt Jemima and attached her stereotypical mammy image, a 0:00:33.560 --> 0:00:35.920 genial and submissive black woman who worked as a nanny 0:00:36.000 --> 0:00:39.479 or housekeeper for white families to the product. But the 0:00:39.520 --> 0:00:41.960 two fail in marketing the business and they sell the 0:00:42.000 --> 0:00:45.680 company to the RT. Davis Milling Company. In eight RT 0:00:45.880 --> 0:00:49.239 Davis Company not only fine tunes the pancake recipe, but 0:00:49.360 --> 0:00:52.800 also the Antjemima marketing ploy. The company decides to turn 0:00:52.840 --> 0:00:55.400 Aunt Jemima into a real black woman, and they put 0:00:55.480 --> 0:00:58.800 former slave Nancy Green on display at the eight three 0:00:58.840 --> 0:01:02.880 World Exposition in Chicago, where she sings songs, cook's pancakes, 0:01:03.000 --> 0:01:06.800 and tells euphemistic stories about the old South Fast Board 0:01:06.840 --> 0:01:09.960 more than one years to today, many iterations of an 0:01:10.000 --> 0:01:12.839 Jemima and tons of boxes of pancake mix have been sold, 0:01:13.200 --> 0:01:16.960 and vestiges of the company's racist roots remain. And so 0:01:17.040 --> 0:01:20.600 does black face, as is evident from the news. Black face, 0:01:20.720 --> 0:01:23.800 the centuries old practice of using makeup to transform into 0:01:23.840 --> 0:01:26.960 a caricature of a black person, usually with googly white eyes, 0:01:27.160 --> 0:01:30.400 ink colored skin, and big red lips, is still alive 0:01:30.440 --> 0:01:34.000 and well college students across the world, where costumes and 0:01:34.000 --> 0:01:37.039 black face at Halloween parties, performers appear on stage in 0:01:37.040 --> 0:01:40.640 television in black face. Businesses and homes still proudly display 0:01:40.680 --> 0:01:44.839 the iconography and racist memorabilia without addressing their complicated history, 0:01:45.920 --> 0:01:49.480 because that complicated history stretches so back into our cultural history. 0:01:49.720 --> 0:01:52.080 It's not a surprise that some people are still strolling 0:01:52.080 --> 0:01:54.800 into shindigs and black face. But the reason that current 0:01:54.840 --> 0:01:56.920 instances of black face blow up in the news and 0:01:56.920 --> 0:01:59.960 in social media conversation, like, for example, the old photo 0:02:00.040 --> 0:02:02.800 of Rapper Drake in black face that surfaced, is because 0:02:02.840 --> 0:02:05.480 the practice has long been deemed harmful to the popular 0:02:05.520 --> 0:02:09.880 perception of black people. Take abolitionist Frederick Douglas's comments on 0:02:10.000 --> 0:02:13.080 musical performers wearing black face called minstrels. He wrote in 0:02:13.080 --> 0:02:15.720 the newspaper The North Star in eighteen forty eight that 0:02:15.800 --> 0:02:19.040 there quote the filthy scum of white society who have 0:02:19.120 --> 0:02:21.519 stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, 0:02:21.840 --> 0:02:24.360 in which to make money and pander to the corrupt 0:02:24.480 --> 0:02:28.480 taste of their white fellow citizens. Black people have been 0:02:28.520 --> 0:02:30.920 paraded for the enjoyment of white people and imitated by 0:02:30.919 --> 0:02:33.760 white actors for centuries. In the book Black Like You, 0:02:34.120 --> 0:02:37.600 black Face, white Face, Insult and Imitation in American popular culture, 0:02:38.040 --> 0:02:41.799 journalist and cultural commentator John Strasbaugh argues that these seeds 0:02:41.840 --> 0:02:44.560 of black face were planted quote with the first organized 0:02:44.600 --> 0:02:48.160 contacts between Europeans and Africans. But black face as we 0:02:48.200 --> 0:02:52.840 know it today, a cultural practice meant to mock, exoticize, disparage, pity, 0:02:53.080 --> 0:02:56.200 and generalize African American people in culture, can be traced 0:02:56.240 --> 0:03:00.359 back to nineteenth century theater. Let's talk about minstrel shows. 0:03:00.880 --> 0:03:04.240 These shows started out as performances by white male minstrels, 0:03:04.280 --> 0:03:08.359 traveling musicians who wore black face and caricatured slaves. The 0:03:08.400 --> 0:03:12.880 shows were basically an absurd blend of stereotyping, racism, and capitalism. 0:03:12.919 --> 0:03:16.680 At its finest, minstrel's parodied black song and dance, burned 0:03:16.680 --> 0:03:19.960 cork to blacken their faces, and acted like fools on stage, 0:03:20.200 --> 0:03:23.880 touring the United States and sometimes Britain to amuse white audiences. 0:03:24.520 --> 0:03:27.440 Most black face minstrel cy was performed by non blacks, 0:03:27.680 --> 0:03:31.560 but black people did perform in these shows. Two Billy Cursands, 0:03:31.639 --> 0:03:34.040 the composer of the song Old Aunt Jemima, was a 0:03:34.040 --> 0:03:37.800 black comedian known for his black face minstrel cy. At first, 0:03:37.920 --> 0:03:42.040 minstrels performed solo, perpetuating stereotypical narratives like that of the mammy, 0:03:42.280 --> 0:03:46.040 the uneducated world slave, and the clumsily sophisticated black man. 0:03:46.480 --> 0:03:49.200 By the mid eighteen hundreds, the prevalence of minstrel shows 0:03:49.200 --> 0:03:52.680 had grown so tremendously that minstrel ensembles were popping up everywhere, 0:03:52.800 --> 0:03:55.960 and a show formula had developed. There were jokes, ballads, 0:03:55.960 --> 0:03:58.480 one act plays, dancing, burlesque, and a bunch of other 0:03:58.520 --> 0:04:02.680 acts that generally make a show entertaining. Minstrel shows were 0:04:02.720 --> 0:04:05.520 a hit for years to come. They even gained traction 0:04:05.560 --> 0:04:08.280 in the last decades of the nineteenth century after emancipation 0:04:08.360 --> 0:04:10.960 and in cities where white people didn't interact much with 0:04:11.040 --> 0:04:15.440 black people. Famous performers like Al Jolson, Shirley Temple, Ronald Reagan, 0:04:15.480 --> 0:04:18.240 and Judy Garland contributed to the popularity of black face 0:04:18.279 --> 0:04:21.560 in the early nineteen hundreds, and amateur minstrel shows persisted 0:04:21.560 --> 0:04:24.719 in small local venues until the mid nineteen hundreds, But 0:04:25.000 --> 0:04:28.400 by the late eighteen hundreds, minstrel shows were dwindling of 0:04:28.480 --> 0:04:32.200 vaudeville performances and movies were on the rise, and eventually 0:04:32.240 --> 0:04:35.440 the Civil Rights earra rendered black face minstrel see unacceptable, 0:04:35.920 --> 0:04:40.040 but the disparaging portrayals, belittling stereotypes and prejudices toward black 0:04:40.080 --> 0:04:42.960 people that the shows imparted were already deeply entrenched in 0:04:42.960 --> 0:04:47.520 the American cultural consciousness. Black Face minstrel see perpetuated messages 0:04:47.560 --> 0:04:51.880 that black people are buffoonish, dimwitted, exotic, and enigmatic, among 0:04:51.920 --> 0:04:56.080 other negative characterizations. Studies show that media portrayals can affect 0:04:56.080 --> 0:04:58.400 the way people perceive blacks in real life, and that 0:04:58.480 --> 0:05:01.520 stereotypes can affect the way people interact with others, and 0:05:01.640 --> 0:05:05.000 there's strong evidence that implicit bias the tendency for people 0:05:05.040 --> 0:05:08.840 to attribute certain characteristics to different demographics based on stereotypes 0:05:09.080 --> 0:05:12.640 can affect how people treat blacks. For instance, metro areas 0:05:12.640 --> 0:05:15.880 with greater average implicit bias have more racial disparities in 0:05:15.920 --> 0:05:18.960 police shootings. To this day, the perception of blackmails as 0:05:19.000 --> 0:05:21.520 aggressive in criminal remains and is used to justify the 0:05:21.600 --> 0:05:24.360 use of violence against them, as research and time have 0:05:24.440 --> 0:05:27.720 shown their long lasting implications of assigning negative stereotypes to 0:05:27.760 --> 0:05:30.800 black people. So when the Internet erupts in an uproar 0:05:30.839 --> 0:05:33.240 against a person wearing black face, the problem is not 0:05:33.320 --> 0:05:37.640 political correctness, and it's not generational sensitivity. Black Face's legacy 0:05:37.720 --> 0:05:40.720 is one of white suprevacy and exploitation of black identity, 0:05:41.040 --> 0:05:43.279 and the weight and consequences of that history cannot be 0:05:43.320 --> 0:05:45.720 divorced from it, no matter how great someone might think 0:05:45.760 --> 0:05:49.400 their costume is. As Strasbaugh put it, the problem, of course, 0:05:49.640 --> 0:05:56.839 is that so few of us know our history. Today's 0:05:56.839 --> 0:05:59.040 episode was written by Eve's Jeff Cote and produced by 0:05:59.040 --> 0:06:01.240 Tyler Playing. For more on this and lots of other 0:06:01.320 --> 0:06:15.719 historical topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com. 0:06:15.279 --> 0:06:15.320 M