“ When Imitation is used as Racial Propaganda ” or “ Unconscious Subliminal Messaging through Obtuse Entertainment ”

Whether or not the myth of “Jump Jim Crow” is true, the outcome as Robert Christgau points out has reverberated through generations of American Culture and helped source early American racism. Through ‘black face’ and minstrelsy we find the art of imitation used to exploit the identity of other human beings, the early white Euro-American using the theatre to take away human qualities of the Afro-American race through deriding depictions. The affect that ‘black face’ had was astounding; something that today seems so outlandishly cruel, back then “ the craze would dominate American show business until the end of the nineteenth century ” (20). Although racism was very prominent and existed until the civil rights movements in the 1960’s these overtly racist performances seemed to invoke in the audience a true representation of the Afro-American culture. The inability to identify such hatred in these performances against Black Americans seems to be masked in the performance. When something is performed it is distanced from reality, from the world we live in. In the minds of the audience, there is a belief that the dramatic stage and the everyday stage of life are two opposite worlds. By veiling the connection under the guise of ‘theatrical performance’ the common Euro-American Viewer was able to enjoy the performance without feeling any guilt. 'Black face' was for many of the Northern Euro-American Viewers a novelty, because they were not exposed to the same slavery down south; the performances were a way for them to find out about the ‘Other’ for the first time. Freudian effects of such dramatic displays are astounding. On one level you have a white appropriation of a black farm hand caught “ doing a grotesquely gimpy dance ”, that is in turn played by a white man, in front of a majority white audience. The layered effect of masking and performing unveils the powerful subconscious effect. In representing the Other, ‘Black Face’/Minstrel performances force a hegemonic social identity for Afro-American slaves and settlers. By putting on the ‘Black Face’, putting on a mask that signifies a race not your own, and then enacting in a bias performance presented to a patron audience, severly distorts the truth of the matter; it produces an affect that gives a false illusion of someone, someone who isn’t even there to validate or reject your mimetic representation of them. The liberation of Black America in the 1960’s may have given Blacks individual freedom, but ‘Black Face’ took away their freedom of identity. ‘Black Face’ performance is a representative metaphor for racism, it speaks for the Other before the Others speak for themselves, represents the other before the Other represents himself/herself. Philosopher Frantz Fanon explains in Black Skin, White Mask that “ a Negro is driven to discover the meaning of black identity. White civilization and European culture have forced an existential deviation on the Negro... what is often called the black soul is white man's artifact ” (pg. 14 Fannon). “Jump Jim Crow” is a prime example of white man’s artifact, a fabrication of white perception that eternalizes hatred, fear, and prejudice. The appropriation of “ Jump Jim Crow” by Dartmouth “Daddy” is a symbolic metonym for ‘Black Face’ in general: A mythic story about the roots of imitative performance about the false representation of Afro-Americans.