How I Became White While Punching de Tar Baby

Abstract

Drawing on critical whiteness studies, I examine a performance I did over 25 years ago in high school, in which I told a story at an awards program. I interpret my performance as later-day blackface minstrelsy—one without blackface, but with a black folktale and with ways of speaking and moving that my audience recognized as “black.” I build up my interpretation in three layers: the first treats my performance as grounded in a rural sensibility and closeness to the land; the second explores how white working folk created a black “other” who embodied what they longed for and despised; and the third recovers the (surprisingly) hopeful early moves of blackface minstrelsy—moves later abandoned, perverted, in the pursuit of money and respectability. In contrast to typical renderings of white racial identity in educational theory and research, the conception developed here assumes that the social production of white identity involves more than race and that a profound ambivalence exists at the core of white racial selves.

Notes

Notes

1 The claim here is not, of course, for any particular resemblance to actual black speech and movement. Instead, I was performing the black stereotype. In its review of the Disney movie Song of the South, upon which my storytelling was based, Ebony pointed to the Uncle Remus character as an “Uncle Tom-Aunt Jemima caricature, complete with... a profusion of ‘dis’ and ‘dat’ talk” (cited in Brasch, 2000, p. 280).

2 See Lott (1995), pp. 4–5, for a more expansive sketch of how blackface minstrelsy has influenced literature, film, and music to the present day. My concern, here and throughout, is with white blackface performance—see Dixon Gottschild (1996) for an account of how, after the Civil War, black entertainers began performing in minstrel shows (often “blackened up”), and how they slowly began humanizing and complicating the minstrel stereotype, as well as began infusing more authentic Africanist practices into the shows.

3 There are, of course, exceptions—see, for example, Apple (2004), Fine (2004), Giroux (1997), and Winans (2005). Leonardo (2002) has argued persuasively that our understanding of whiteness must be informed by critical insights into globalization, if an effective critical pedagogy of whiteness is to be created.

4 I am no expert on Csikszentmihaly’s (1990) work or his concept of flow, but it seems that task is much more important in his description of flow than any sense of other people or audience. What was essential to my experience of these performances was that I noticed, as I began the performance, that I was losing any worry about doing well—especially as doing well or doing badly would affect the audience’s judgment of me—and that, instead, I wanted to serve, to care for, my audience, in the performance.

5 I made up this introduction. The book I used to memorize the story, Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus (Walt Disney Presents, 1974) began: “Way down deep in de brier-patch is de home of Brer Rabbit. He is a smart feller, but he get on de nerves of Brer Bear and Brer Fox” (n.p.). Later quotes from the story are taken from this book.

6 See Brasch (2000, pp. 274–287) for a fascinating account of the making of and response to Song of the South (the Disney quote appears on p. 278). I draw heavily on Brasch here.

7 The one accommodation the Disney studio seems to have made to all the criticism is that it has never released the film on videotape in the United States—it did, however, do so, in 1996, in Europe and Japan. See Brasch (2000, p. 285). For one of many defenses of the film on the Internet, see http://www.songofthesouth.net/home.html.

8 John Dewey (1916/1966) reminds us that Activity begins in an impulsive form; that is, it is blind. It does not know what it is about; that is to say, what are its interactions with other activities. An activity which brings education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the connections which had been imperceptible. (p. 77)

9 I will grant that they may have been and may still be paying the wrong sort of attention—that is, watching how to resist and to survive with dignity and style, rather than listening to critiques of the system.

10 I am simplifying here. Lhamon (1998) argues that the oppositional and mixing aspects of minstrelsy were never lost, but just forced to be much more subtle. And Lott (1995) reminds us that you cannot play at being black without coming into contact with blackness—so mixing is always there, even in mockery.

11 Matthew Jacobson (1998) explores this dynamic brilliantly in his Whiteness of a Different Color, in which he demonstrates that, on one hand, it has always been an advantage to be white in the United States, and on the other hand, there were consequential social hierarchies among different white ethnic groups at least through the early 1900s, as well as prolonged struggles among these groups as to the relative value of different sorts of white people.

12 In his brilliant essay, “Uncle Remus & the Malevolent Rabbit,”Bernard Wolfe (1949) argues that in the figure of Uncle Remus, Harris displays the desperate wish by white Americans to be loved by the same people who they continually seek to destroy. So Harris puts a loving smile on Uncle Remus, but the smile only partially hides the mortal struggle that is being engaged between black and white America in the figures of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Harris listened well enough to black storytellers that Brer Rabbit’s malevolence comes through in the tales—he scalds, burns, tortures, his enemies. Walt Disney had to tone all this down, sanitize and emasculate the angry rabbit.