While doing PhD archival research on Canada\u2019s black beauty culture at McGill University, and Canada\u2019s history of blackface as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-2018) at the University of Toronto, I consistently stumbled upon ads and\/or editorials about blackface spanning the 1860s to 1950s. I also learned that blackface existed outside traditional theatre, at athletic clubs, rotary clubs, high schools, summer camps, public parks, private businesses, and even churches.<\/p>\n
This five-year research led me to conclude that there is no simple answer as to why blackface persists today. But what makes Canadian blackface unique is that, unlike in the U.S., it is rarely framed as a \u2018Canadian\u2019 pastime but instead is isolated to a few students and\/or teachers<\/a> making \u2018innocent\u2019 mistakes.<\/p>\n In 2009, when a group of white University of Toronto students<\/a> put on blackface makeup that mimicked the Jamaican bobsled team during a Halloween party, detractors were cast as \u2018overreacting\u2019 to an apparent attempt to pay homage to the movie Cool Runnings<\/em>, based on the Jamaican national bobsled team\u2019s debut at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. A couple years later, a similar blackface \u2018homage\u2019 to Jamaica at the University of Montreal landed Canada on CNN<\/a>. If then-McGill law student Anthony Morgan (who is Black and of Jamaican descent) had not walked past the frosh week event, posting a video to YouTube showing the white students in fake dreadlocks and darkened faces with Jamaican accents, the incident likely would have been ignored. But it also begs the question: how many events like this one never make it into the public realm at all?<\/p>\n From coast to coast, blackface continues to happen because there is a pervasive lack of understanding about the genre\u2019s history \u2013 not just as an American tradition, but as a Canadian one, as well.<\/p>\n Historically, blackface begins as a form of performance known as \u201cblackface minstrelsy,\u201d which traces its origins to the theatres of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s. By the 1850s, professional American and British minstrel acts (i.e. three-part shows) performed on stages in western, central, and eastern Canada.<\/p>\n These troops called it \u2018blackface\u2019 because the performance included a blend of popular music, dance, and comedy, all aimed at mimicking African Americans both on the southern plantation (\u2018Jim Crow\u2019) and in the industrialized north (\u2018Zip Coon\u2019). Performers wore what was known as \u201cburnt-cork\u201d facial makeup \u2013 a mixture of charred and crushed champagne corks and water or petroleum jelly. At its core, the minstrel show was about maintaining both a real and imagined line between who belonged and did not belong to the national identity.<\/p>\n Putting on blackface, according to William Mahar, author of Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture<\/em> (1999), allowed professional and amateur white entertainers to shield themselves from any direct personal and psychological identification with the material they were performing. Black people were thus disembodied and dis-identified from these moments of national storytelling, although, paradoxically, they became the basis for a distinctly American brand of entertainment. It is the reason why, since the 19th<\/sup> century, popular culture has been synonymous with African American culture, i.e., jazz to blues to hip-hop.<\/p>\n In Toronto, when the Royal Lyceum<\/a>, the city\u2019s first purpose-built theatre, opened in September, 1849, it became the primary venue for the performance of blackface minstrelsy. Located behind a row of buildings on the south side of Adelaide Street West between Bay and York Streets, the Royal Lyceum burnt down in 1874. By then, the new Grand Opera House<\/a>, located at 9-15 Adelaide Street West, near Yonge Street, and the Royal Opera House, became the theatres of record for professional blackface in the city.<\/p>\n At the turn of the twentieth century, Toronto established itself as one of the leading stops on the American circuits because its audiences preferred American entertainers, minstrel shows and actors over British troops. Audiences for these shows comprised the city\u2019s Anglo elite, whose members sat on the same boards, attended the same schools and worshipped in the same churches. Hence, blackface in Toronto, from the latter part of the 19th<\/sup> century through to the 1950s, was the domain of an Anglo cultural (but not necessarily economic) elite class.<\/p>\n For ethnic immigrant whites, \u2018blacking up\u2019 and then \u2018wiping off\u2019 the burnt cork mask performed a different function. It enabled them to move from immigrant \u2018other\u2019 to full citizen. Stated otherwise, by mimicking African Americans, ethnic immigrants could assimilate into the broader culture while simultaneously removing their \u2018otherness\u2019 at the same time. If the dominant culture viewed Black people as the target for jokes and ridicule, newly arrived immigrants, whether they held such beliefs or not, followed suit.<\/p>\n Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson, is the perfect example of this phenomenon. In The Jazz Singer<\/em> (1926), for instance, Michael Rogin, the late-Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley explains that when Jakie Rabinowitz becomes<\/em> Jack Robin in blackface singing \u2018My Mammy\u2019 to his immigrant Jewish mother, it provided America proof that in the period of mass European immigration, its melting-pot culture was accessible to everyone. Except African Americans, that is.<\/p>\n Similarly, in Montreal, which has an historical Jewish community that parallels that of New York, the Montreal\u2019s Jewish Public Library<\/a> archives contain an extensive collection of photos and playbills from\u00a0blackface\u00a0minstrel shows put on by the\u00a0Young Men\u2019s Hebrew Association (YMHA).\u00a0Blackface, in other words, is as fundamental to North American culture as immigration, popular culture and race\/ethnicity.<\/p>\n Sure, blackface is about racism. But it also speaks to \u2018something else\u2019 \u2014 a collective amnesia about the lived experiences of Black people in Western culture, and to the tensions between belonging to and alienation from, the nation. Whether intended or not, blackface was — and still is — used strategically in public and private clubs, institutions, and theatres to exclude Black people from full participation. Trevor Noah\u2019s \u201cUse Leo Deblin’s \u2018Ask-A-Black\u2019 Service<\/a>\u201d on the Daily Show<\/em>, while a joke, speaks to the lack of diversity and understanding about the Black experience in boardrooms, and in many instances, classrooms.<\/p>\n Contemporary blackface, then, is actually a misnomer. What we are witnessing on university campuses or at community events is a form of neo-minstrelsy that must be framed in terms of a racialized socio-cultural politics, not just as racist acts.<\/p>\n McGill critical race scholar Philip S. S. Howard, who has started researching contemporary blackface incidents<\/a> on university campuses, argues that it is, in its visual form, reminiscent of historical blackface minstrelsy as a form of sartorial performance. But, he writes, contemporary blackface also \u201cdraws upon the ways that blackness is conceived on in dominant Canadian discourse today \u2013 most notably as foreign.\u201d Hence, the \u2018Jamaicanization\u2019 of blackness in the contemporary context, Howard argues, reveals the ways in which blackness is now framed in Canada.<\/p>\n While I agree with him, we still need to contend with the obvious question: why has blackface never gone away? Every time I mention my work to someone over the age of 50, they recount a story about themselves or a family member taking part in a blackface performance as a youth, not stories of their children\u2019s contemporary blackface performances.<\/p>\n In other words, contemporary blackface is really a continuation of a centuries-long practice of domination over Black people that requires us to think beyond race. Instead, whenever the next blackface incident occurs \u2013 and given that Halloween is approaching, it could be very soon \u2013 the conversation needs to move toward an understanding of the entanglements of racism, classism, and white supremacy today, as well as blackface\u2019s origins over 180 years ago.<\/p>\n Bashir Mohamed, an activist with Black Lives Matter in Edmonton, has been tweeting<\/a> historical images of blackface in Alberta, an act that connects the past with the present. The more we do this, the sooner we will begin to unify the two competing narratives of belonging\/exclusion that explain why blackface continues.<\/p>\n photos courtesy of the Toronto Archives<\/em><\/p>\n Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Industries, Ryerson University. <\/em>She is currently writing her second book, <\/em>Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Cultural Politics of Branding, which will be published by Coach House Books in 2020. <\/em>Follow her on Twitter at @DrCherylT<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/10\/f1231_it0522-mccormick-minstrels-600x438.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n