A History of Black Folk on Twitter: Mark Anthony Neal @ TEDxDuke

From 'Go Down Moses' to the death of Manning Marable, what is the relationship between Black folk and social media?

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'The Boondocks': Carrying On the Tradition of Subversive Black Comedy

Some may be offended by the self-loathing ruminations of The Boondocks’ “Uncle Ruckus” or the Chappelle's Show,’s “blind black Klansman”, but those comedic depicitions have deep roots in America's long tradition of black humor.

Write Black at You
'The Boondocks': Carrying On the Tradition of Subversive Black Comedy
by Ronald Laird

Earlier this summer when one of my friends defiantly proclaimed that she doesn’t like The Boondocks cartoon because it’s too “minstrel-like”, I almost told her how Spike Lee-ish her statement was. Instead, I held my tongue, took a deep breath, and said that although The Boondocks (as well as much of American ensemble comedy) may indeed have a structural indebtedness to minstrelsy, it follows in the tradition of the best subversive comedy.

Historically speaking, the American minstrel show began with Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels in 1843. Though there were earlier white performers that entertained audiences in blackface, Emmett and his crew were the first to dress all of its performers in blackface and as abolitionist sentiment gained steam in some parts of America, the minstrel show with its primary themes being depictions of enslaved blacks being happy and contented with their lot in life, became a popular way to maintain the status quo in the minds of many Americans. Over time these shows developed a catalog of stock characters to do their bidding. Though individual minstrel shows could point to dozens of different characters, they were all derived from seven stock characters: the Tom, the Coon, the Mulatto, the Mammy, the Buck, the Wench and the Pickaninny.

As these characters became more deeply embedded in the American psyche, the first attempt at comically subverting them on a national stage began with black entertainers Bert Williams and George Walker. Though Williams and Walker were steeped in minstrel tradition—having performed with minstrel shows early in their careers—they felt contempt for the stereotypical roles they played, and as their careers progressed, Walker and Williams began to move away from the minstrel stereotypes by introducing African themes and characters into American shows.

Read the Full Review @ Popmatters.com

Blame It On The Minstrels?

Was Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s performance of “Blame It” at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards evidence of the rich traditions of the Black Trickster or yet another example of contemporary “black-face” minstrelsy.

Blame It On the Minstrels?
by Mark Anthony Neal

One of the high points of the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards Show, was Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s performance of their Grammy Award winning single “Blame It.” The duo were joined by guitarist Slash and legendary rapper Doug E. Fresh (and Foxx’s sister Diondra Dixon), in one of the Grammy’s more effective mash-up performances of the night. Introduced by Foxx’s The Soloist co-star Robert Downey Jr. “Blame It,” seemingly electrified the crowd—George Clinton raising his hands being among the more memorable images in the crowd. Yet my own enjoyment of the performance was tainted by the little “bourgeois Negro” in my head that viewed the performance—particularly T-Pain in his white tuxedo and long white wig—as little more than further evidence that contemporary black popular culture nothing but a minstrel show.

Of course that little bourgeois Negro in my head is not simply the product of my imagination but the product of a contemporary cultural discourse that continues to police representations of blackness in the public sphere, be it the film Precious, the music of Lil Wayne or countless reality shows that feature black cast members. As I’ve argued myself in a different context, some forms of contemporary black popular culture function as “digitized” blackface. Lacking the cork that some early 20th Century performers like Bert Williams and whites such as Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson had to don in order to authenticate their performances of “Negroes,” nevertheless these contemporary examples are produced with a eye towards a white consumer public that is rarely disturbed by the notion that the blackness they see on the screen is nothing but a performance.

Function though is not intent and too often the cultural gatekeepers of the “race” fail (including myself) to make that distinction, often reproducing the same troubling readings of black culture that we often attribute to white audiences, where class, gender, and ethnicity (can we think of “niggers” as some iteration of an ethnic enclave within Black America?) become the default positions for normalcy, instead of race.

This is a point that Louis Chude-Sokei argues in his book The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy and the African-Diaspora. Writing about criticisms directed at black-face performer Bert Williams, Chude-Sokei observes, “there is no allowance here for the subtleties of his performance and its possibilities for multiple readings; indeed the idea that any subtlety could exist would have struck [critics] as being inconceivable.” (19) Chude-Sokei prefers to read Williams and many black minstrel performers within the context of trickster figures like The Signifying Monkey (Esu Elegbara) noting that in the post-Emancipation era the black trickster becomes a figure of “exile, of endless translation and an endless deferral of meaning.” (109) In light of Chude-Sokei’s observations, what often disturbs me most about the current discourses around black popular culture is that they too often foreclose the possibilities that there are other meanings to be derived from black popular culture other than those that are most palpable within America’s racist history.

Jamie Foxx is an interesting figure in this regard, given that since his debut on In Living Color in the early 1990s, he has shown a particular gift at mimicry. No one, though, has ever mistaken Foxx for Wanda (from In Living Color), Jamie King (from The Jamie Foxx Show) or Ray Charles, yet there is an element of authenticity that some would like to attach to his performance of “Blame It.” This dynamic is one of the burdens that hip-hop, in particular, continues to bear even some of the most visible icon of the genres have long provided evidence that their musical personas are just that.

One of the things that rarely get considered in reading performances like “Blame It,” is what Chudo-Sokei calls the “economy of pleasure in an embrace of one’s own stereotype.” (99) As Chude-Sokei writes, “One can imagine the threatening and liberating appeal of a black minstrel to a black audience. In light of Du Bois’s neo-Victorianism and the middle-class politics of assimilationist nationalism, in the context of a growing hegemony of the black church, this figure is an explicit and sweet threat, much like the pimp or thug or ‘gangsta’ icons in the present day context of black media masquerade.” (99) If we replace “Du Bois’s neo-Victorianism” with Obama-era respectability, Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s performance of “Blame It” not only makes more sense, but seems necessary.

Black Music Month Classics: Songs of the Sad Minstrel

BLACK MUSIC MONTH CLASSICS

Songs of the Sad Minstrel
by Mark Anthony Neal

There’s rarely a moment when John Smith aka Lil’ Jon flashes across the television screen that the “coon” meter lodged deep within my consciousness begins to vibrate. It’s not that Smith’s antics offend me—I’ve long argued that there’s often an untapped complexity attached to even the most lurid of stereotypical racial images, particularly those created by blacks themselves. Indeed Smith is part of a tradition that has produced Stepin’ Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), Butterfly McQueen, Mantan Moreland, or any shuckin’ and jivin’ plantation “darky” that understood that their ability to sing and dance (or break tackles or finish line tapes) went a long way towards self-preservation. If such antics spared you the rod two centuries ago, it can surely earn you seven-figure salaries in this era of global digitized blackness.

Perhaps the truest genius of this tradition—call it blackface minstrelsy, the coon-show, samboisms—was Bert Williams. Almost a full century before hip-hop became sonic blackface, Williams donned the burnt cork and with partner George Walker became the most popular black performers in the United States. The recent release of a collection of recordings that Williams and Walker recorded from 1901-1909, allows us to again revisit the travails of the sad minstrel.

Williams was born in 1874 in the British West Indies of relative privilege. His family later moved to Florida, ultimately settling in Riverside, California, very far removed from the “plantation tales” that Walker and Williams would ultimately perform on Broadway. A natural mimic, Williams began to look for work in the traveling medicine shows (exhibitions where “quacks” sold ointments and the like) and it is there that he met Walker. As Walker wrote in 1906, “My experience with the quack doctors taught me…that white people are always interested in what they call ‘darky’ singing and dancing.”

What particularly caught the attention of Walker and Williams were the numbers of white minstrels, who “blackened up” often billing themselves as “coons”. Unable to compete with these white performers, Williams and Walker came up with a clever marketing scheme—they began to sell themselves as “Two Real Coons”. At their artistic peak in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Williams and Walker could claim to have mounted the first all-black musical on Broadway (1903’s In Dahomey) and an international following as the most popular purveyors of the dance the Cake Walk. After Walker’s death in 1909, Williams became the first black artist featured in the Ziegfeld Follies.

What Williams and Walkers understood then and what so many black performers have come to realize since is that white mainstream interest in blackness is often predicated on their belief that what they are consuming is “authentic”, whether they are capable of discerning black authenticity or not. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s desire for the “real nigger show,” black artists have often found it financially lucrative to give white audiences the “real” that they so desire. Williams and Walker were no different. For example songs like “I Don’t Like the Face You Wear” and “The Phrenologist Coon”, which both appear on Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, were written by Ernest Hogan. It was on the strength of his 1896 hit song (sold as sheet music) “All Coons Look Alike to Me” that Hogan became a popular writer of “coon songs”.



Whereas George Walker was just performing the coon, Bert Williams’s relationship to his characters was much more complicated. As a light-skinned black man, Williams resorted to blackening up to come off as a more convincing “coon.” As Camille F. Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star writes, “The blackface covered and effectively hid the real Williams, protecting him from having to be the persona he portrayed on the stage.” The real Williams often lamented that he couldn’t give his largely white audiences a more complex image of his characters—“the pathos as well as the fun.” This lament along with the lack of offers to do serious dramatic roles, were the pressures that squeezed the ambition and ultimately the life out of Williams, who died in 1922 at age 47.

William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. makes the point that Williams humanized the minstrel stereotype, creating a “significant modification within the acceptable structure of Negro stage characterization.” And this is what perhaps distinguishes Williams and a host others who toiled in America’s burgeoning culture industry of the early 2oth century—a desire to give complexity to the “shiftless darky.”

*Originally Published in January 2005