The Minstrel Shows were the
greatest American popular musical phenomenon of the nineteenth century. The
Minstrel Shows created a true fusion of European and African music, so that
European music was changed decisively in America. For example, the reason why southern
American dance fiddling doesn’t sound like Scottish or Irish fiddling, even
though most of the tunes are so descended, is that
they were played and transformed by African American fiddlers during the slave
era, when dance fiddling was considered menial.
Eileen Southern shows that,
especially late in the century and into the twentieth, many Minstrel Show
performers were actually black men in black face.
Proposition: Being against the Minstrel Shows and suppressing
knowledge of their history is an expression of white supremacy. To the extent
that there is a political correctness movement that works to make Minstrel Show
music and motifs forbidden, the political correctness movement is white supremacist,
or unwittingly in league with white supremacy. It says that it is not OK for
white people to imitate black people.
Through the Minstrel Shows, people
whose descent was European-only could identify with black culture, which, at odds
with their white privilege, they loved and admired. It’s a mixture, of course:
some Minstrel Show material is in fact demeaning to black people. But on the
whole, the shows don’t insult black culture; they love black culture. This is
dangerous ground, of course: black culture in the Minstrel Shows is largely a
white creation. But not entirely so, because the music, the rhythm, and much of
the narrative are really African. Both in the Minstrel Shows and adjacent to them
in the spirituals and prison work gang songs, black culture offers musical art
through which white culture can love and empathize with black culture, can put
on a black face and try to feel black. The Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn, is exactly at this
juncture of the appropriation of black cultural characteristics by white
culture, proving that white culture is always already black, or wants to be.
Sure, the performance of black music by white people is
appropriative, but to allow only people of African descent to perform black
music is white supremacist in the way that routing a freeway through a city
intentionally to divide black and white neighborhoods is white supremacist. It
prevents cultural commerce between black and white people.
In saying that we want to be black, we aren’t denying the
huge unfair benefit we receive from our white privilege, which is undeniable.
We also are not denying how racist we white people are at our very core.
Nevertheless, our appropriation of blackness is not only exploitative. Our identification
with blackness is a flat admission that our privilege is unmerited, and that
our heart and destiny are with the unprivileged. We don’t want to be white, but
we also (in our selfish cynicism) don’t want to give away our material wealth.
As white people or any other
kind of people, we do not belong to a chosen race. God does not specially favor
us. We are the same spiritual and moral color as everyone else—unless we think
we’re white, in which case we’re damned. It’s easy to be Isaiah in these times:
God will smite us.
