Minstrel Show
Minstrel show, or minstrelsy Blackface (named after designated as blackface, black - painted face of a clown ), is a minstrel, representing Black in the White in the form of stereotypes. The central figure was usually a clown with black-colored face, woolen hair and a banjo. The blackface minstrelsy was very popular in the northern United States, 1840-1870, especially among industrial workers.
Minstrel shows were white people who often did not know any blacks from their daily lives, many stereotypes of blacks in idealized form. They are represented as constantly cheerful, singing and naive slaves who love their owners, despite working hard. Here, a romanticized idea of the daily life of the slaves will be staged on the plantations. Many stereotypes were also received in other national narratives and the songs. Were particularly popular, for example, My Old Kentucky Home by Stephen Foster and Dixie.
From 1860, blacks were hired for the show of the traveling minstrels. Some jazz and blues musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, WC Handy, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith financed the beginning of her career, having appeared in minstrel shows.
Social Historical explanations
In the thesis DuBois ' that whiteness ( whiteness ) constitutes a " gain " for white North American industrial workers against black workers, the psychoanalytic explanation David Roedigers based on the blackface minstrelsy. After the DuBois white workers respect was " publicly paid ... because they were white. They had together with the whites of other classes have free access to public events and parks ... The police were recruited from their ranks ... Through their votes public officials have been ordered, although had little effect on their economic situation, but much to their treatment by the authorities ... ". According to Roediger industrial workers were subjected to an intense discipline and control in the northern United States. The resulting anger was not directed at the cause of their misery, but especially by the blackface minstrelsy on the blacks. In blackface minstrelsy played psychologically white workers lost their unbridled self. So they could " make her natural self to the public and to reject the same time" ( Roediger ). As DuBois referred Roediger pleasure in this game as the " gain " of white workers for their whiteness. Thus, whiteness was constructed by the separation from the blacks in blackface minstrelsy.
Unlike Roediger, Alexander Saxton sees in blackface minstrelsy, which he attributes to the same position, the civil unrest in New York for the lynching led in 1863 to the Black, a form of class politics: "Through its stylized form, they propagated metaphorically an alliance between urban workers and the interests of the plantation owners in the South. " the white working reproduced naively the perspective of the white slave owner. Blackface minstrelsy thus serve the purposes of the Democratic Party and canopies at the same time the contradiction between the rich southern aristocrats and the " struggling workers in the north ." Andrew Hartman describes Roedigers thesis as follows: " Thus, blackface minstrelsy was Saxton for more than just a psychological gain, but the mass cultural equivalent of the white egalitarianism of the Jackson Democrats. "