Minstrelsy and the Construction of Race in America

by Jason H. Lee

Minstrelsy emerged in the early 1800’s as the first distinctly American form of popular culture. While its content served to entertain audiences, it also worked to provide a means with which common Americans could learn about and understand the events occurring in their large and constantly evolving country. One of the main topics of interest that minstrelsy took up was race. In his work Blacking Up, Robert Toll argues that the content of minstrel songs worked to reinforce the racial ideology of white superiority—a system where "whiteness" allowed for full citizenship rights to the American body politic, while "blackness" and "yellowness" implied inferiority and exclusion. A thorough examination of minstrel material from the second half of the 19th century, a period which witnessed rising levels of immigration into the U.S. as well as the demise of the formal system of second class citizenship for blacks (slavery), confirms Toll’s claim. The numerous ways in which both black Americans and Asian immigrants were portrayed as inferior to whites, within this material, clearly reveals minstrelsy’s attempts to confirm the ideology of white superiority.

From the outset, minstrelsy unequivocally branded black Americans as inferiors. Its content provided assurances of white common people’s identity by emphasizing the "peculiarities" and inferiority of black individuals. These assurances, it seems, could not have come at a better time for the white community, whose official confirmation of black inferiority—institutionalized slavery—vanished with the victory of the Union forces during the Civil War. The "Negro peculiarities" highlighted in popular culture and in minstrel songs allowed for white audiences to laugh in relief at the idiotic, backward behavior of black characters on stage whose "blackness" represented a set of inherent traits that would never allow blacks to rise above their second-rate place in society. Physical appearance, manners of speech, and cultural practices were all caricaturized to stress "difference" and lowliness. Grotesque exaggerations became reality as audiences desperately sought any type of proof that whiteness was superior to blackness.

Toll explains how the physical appearance of black Americans portrayed in minstrelsy served as the most obvious of all signs of purported black inferiority. The bulging eyeballs, flat, wide noses, gaping mouths with long, dangling lower lips, and gigantic feet with elongated, flapping heels used by minstrel performers created an almost sub-human image of the black man or woman. Indeed, white audiences laughed and shrank back from the "peculiar" body features of blacks and identified these features as superficial markers of primitiveness and savagery. In the minstrel song "Oh! Wake Up In De Morning," performer William Whitlock exploits the image of the black body by describing the broad feet, black face, and big mouths of the show’s characters. Two stanzas of the song go:

"And Sal she had a lubly moufe/Twould reach de poles from norfe to soufe/And when it oped from ear to ear/You’d jump about a foot from fear/Oh! Wake up--- While Sal was dancing in a reel/A nigger stept upon her heel/She turned around to gib a grin/Open’d her mouth and her head fell in/Oh! Wake up---"

The message here is clear: black people looked primitive and un-human, suggesting that this strange physical appearance marked a deeper emotional and intellectual primitiveness as well. Even the dialect used by the minstrel performer--characterized by a broken and perverted type of English--portrays the black individual as simple and idiotic.

Besides picturing blacks as physically different and inferior, minstrels set them off culturally. Black characters adhered strongly to superstition; compulsively loved music, dance, and food; and possessed a "silly" belief in animal fables. Thus, blackness came to represent a biologically inescapable tendency for African Americans to lack self-control, to seek only pleasure, and to possess the mental maturity of a child. This image contrasted greatly with the image of whiteness, which symbolized the "good" republican values of self-control, discipline, rationality, and hard work. One example of minstrelsy’s portrayal of blacks as compulsively loving food and merriment is songster Dan Lewis’ tune "Moses cart Dem Melon Down." In this song, the main character sings jubilantly about the arrival of a cart of watermelons, a fruit that black Americans supposedly could not resist.

The colored people holla and some of them shout, Moses gwine to cart dem mellon down! Den/Hitch up the cart cause I must go, Moses Gwine to cart dem mellon down! De/ Now my bretheren I bid you farewell, Moses gwine to cart dem mellon down… Mo-ses! Come along! Mo-ses gwine to cart dem mel-lon down!/Mo-ses! Come along! Mo-ses! Mo-ses gwine to cart dem mel-lon down!

As white audiences laughed at the sight of a black-faced performer dancing and singing gleefully over a cart of watermelons they became re-assured of their superiority to the "African race" in all ways possible. J.H. Woods’ song "Close Dem Windows" also highlights the un-controllable urge of blacks to drop whatever tasks they were working on in order to dance, sing, eat, and party. Black characters exclaim:

De col-ored ball takes place to-night. Close dem windows, And/De gals will walk for de hoe cakes. Close dem windows, And/Oh! We will dance and we will sing. Close dem windows, And all de girls we will in-vite, We’ll have a hap-py time on de inside. And/slap-jacks we will sure-ly bake, We’ll have a hap-py time on de inside. Dar’s/we will make dat fid-dle ring, We’ll have a hap-py time on de inside.

Simple minded, irresponsible, and childlike, black Americans posed no threat to white societal dominance.

Black folk traditions and superstitions, which included talking animals, represented another supposed distinction between the foolish gullibility of black Americans and the rational intelligence of white Americans. The black-faced character in the Virginia Minstrels’ "Old King Crow" tells the story of his altercation with a talking crow:

I went out in de old corn field,/Something holler hulloa Joe,/I look’d up in de old oak tree,/And dar he sot dat Old King Crow./Old King Crow./Say I old crow get out ob dat,/Before I shoot you wid my hoe,/He nuffin said ubt spread his wing,/Den away he flew dat Old King Crow.

Toll explains that for several black Americans educated in the history of African folk tradition and aware of the double meanings that oftentimes hid within animal lore, there might have been something else behind songs such as "Old King Crow" other than the simple story of a black man talking to a bird. In fact, many times, superstitious stories used in minstrelsy employed indirection and guile to voice protest or attack adversaries, and featured victories for the weak over the strong. To the white audience that consumed the entertainment produced at minstrel theaters, however, songs containing animal lore and superstitious traditions merely reinforced their images of blacks as weak minded and foolish.

Minstrelsy explained that if any black Americans decided to try to "become white" through the adoption of white values, dress, or manners, he was destined to fail as his natural inferiority would never allow him to rise from his lower place in the racial hierarchy. In the song "De Color’d Fancy Ball" the minstrel performer sings, dresses, and prances in an attempt to emulate white culture. He dances the waltz and even tries to speak some French, demonstrating his "sophistication." Although this song represented minstrelsy’s attack on northern black dandies, it also represented the more fundamental white criticism of black attempts to transcend their blackness. Caught up in the moment of dance and merriment, the minstrel character nonsensically exclaims:

Chas-sez croi—sez prom-ber—nade Oh de joys ob dan-------cing! Chas-sez croi—sez prom-ber—nade Oh de joys ob dan-------cing! Chas-sez croi—sez prom-ber—nade Oh de joys ob dan-------cing!

This description confirms Toll’s explanation that in every way minstrels emphasized, blacks fell far short of white standards. No matter how hard they tried, minstrelsy guaranteed its audience that black Americans would never be able to penetrate into the realm of whiteness—they would never be able to receive full citizenship within the true American body politic.

The threat that free blacks presented to whiteness and white domination of society was not the only threat that arose during the second half of the 19th century. New waves of immigration occurred during this period and as a result, Asians (mostly Chinese) began to settle rapidly in the western states of the U.S. They were exotic and they represented a threat. They were different; "yellow", alien, a pollutant. Their rising numbers threatened to dilute the whiteness and purity of American identity and culture. Thus minstrel song performers, in an attempt to help white audiences understand the growing ethnic diversity of the nation, targeted Asians for some of their worst verbal assaults. Performers and audiences needed to make sure that the new Asian immigrants fell smoothly into place below whites in the racial hierarchy. Thus, although originally harsh on the drinking habits and Catholicism of the Irish (also part of the new wave of immigration), minstrels soon relaxed their stance on this group. They also treated German immigrants fairly decently, never really reverting to grossly negative caricatures. As Toll explains, the Irish and the Germans were fellow white men, whom white Americans could much more easily accept than they could native-born blacks or newly arrived Chinese.

Rather quickly, Asians began taking over many of the jobs that otherwise would have gone to white workers. They became miners, grocers, merchants, launders, and cigar makers. Thus, as their numbers rose, so did the severity of the economic and cultural threat that they represented, leading to such anxiety and fear over the future of the "White Man" as expressed in Brett Harte’s poem "The Latest Chinese Outrage." Harte asks:

Shall we stand here as idle, and let Asia pour/Her barbaric hordes on this civilised shore?/Has the White Man no country? Are we left in the lurch?

In response to such questions and fears, the public image of the "Oriental" came to life. Sinful, dishonest, dirty, a heathen, and savage, the "Oriental" represented all that the West was not and threatened to dilute the purity of white American society. Minstrels liberally performed songs that depicted the wicked and degenerate qualities of this Oriental race, hoping to highlight its baseness and thus the inferiority of Asian "yellowness" in comparison to the virtue of whiteness.

Much like they did with black Americans, minstrel songwriters used the language and cultural habits of Asian immigrants to demonstrate the group’s supposed primitiveness and inferiority to white Americans. According to Toll, minstrels portrayed the Chinese as totally alien, concentrating on the strange sound of their language, their odd clothing, and their reported preference for exotic foods. Charles A. Mason’s "Chinese Song" has singers shouting out nonsense lines such as:

Ki, Ki, Ki, Ching, Ching, Ching,/Hung a rung, a chickel neckey/Suppe, fatte hung/Eno Posa keno Posey, keno John,/Chinese manee goode manee from Hong Kong.

This mockery of the way that Chinese immigrants supposedly spoke not only provided material for audiences to laugh at, but also re-assured white Americans that the Oriental did not pose a threat. In fact, pieces such as the "Chinese Song" suggested that the Oriental was little more than a primitive creature, using unsophisticated and cacophonous forms of communication. Other caricaturized cultural habits of Asians fortified this image of the Oriental as primitive and backwards. Bill Rice’s "Chinese Ball" depicts a "typical" Chinese banquet and diet replete with a nauseatingly exotic and disgusting collection of food.

For supper we had red-eyed cats/And boot-legs stuffed with fleas./We had fish boiled in castor oil,/Fried clams and elephant knees,/We had sauer-kraut and pickled meuse,/And oyesters on the half-shell./We had Japanese tea in the key of G,/Which made us feel quite well.

The exoticism of this meal confirmed the Asian’s alien nature, while the grotesque combination of foods described testify to the filthiness, savagery, and natural inferiority of the Asian race.

According to the portrayal of minstrel songs, the baseness and degeneracy of the Oriental almost demanded that white Americans exclude him from access to political and cultural citizenship. By allowing the drug using habits of a heathen society to enter the body politic, American values, democracy, and virtue would all disintegrate. The barbarism of Asians made them a threat unless securely locked into a subordinate societal position where their sinful ways would not have the chance to penetrate into mainstream society. In Harte’s "The Latest Chinese Outrage" a kidnapped white man becomes "orientalized" by his captors:

In his mouth was an opium pipe—which was why/He leered at us so with a drunken-like eye!/They had shaved off his eyebrows, and tacked on a cue,/They had painted his face of a coppery hue,/And rigged him all up in a heathenish suit…

Under these circumstances, where a white man ran the risk of becoming tainted by the Oriental’s ways, it almost made sense to exclude Asians from the body politic. Minstrel song’s portrayals of Asians justified and rationalized the group’s marginalization through the savage, unenlightened, and threatening caricatures that they created around Asian speech, diet, dress, and culture.

Minstrel songs, especially those written in the second half of the 19th century, arose in reaction to rapidly changing conditions within the United States (emancipation, immigration, industrialization, urbanization, etc.) in order to reinforce the nation’s racial ideology of white superiority. In doing so, these songs created images of whiteness, blackness, and yellowness that still persist today. Although the content of these images have changed over time, dropping some caricaturized traits while picking up others, their tendency to highlight "differences" and "peculiarities" still remains the same. From the watermelon-obsessed dancing fool to the street-wise pimp, black Americans still face the stigma of being something other than white, something below white. Similarly, the Oriental no longer smokes opium while eating rats, instead his women have become objects of exotic physical fantasy (i.e. the Dragon Lady). Minstrelsy and popular culture cannot take all the blame for this maintenance of racial stereotypes. Like every other aspect of the show, minstrelsy’s racial content grew out of the intimate interaction between the performers and their vocal patrons. When public opinion shifted, the content of minstrelsy shifted. Race and racial hierarchies have always played a major role in the development of American history and values. Popular culture and minstrel songs represent just another channel through which this national legacy of racial discrimination can manifest itself.