"Surprisingly, it was not controversial," says a University of Richmond professor who taught courses called "American Blackface" and "Blackface in Post-Soul Literature and Culture."

“I honestly do not recall it being uncomfortable, mostly because I guess we were taking it seriously. We weren’t looking at if as, ‘Hey, isn’t this funny?’”

I'm reading "Where blackface is concerned, outrage is appropriate, says UR professor," by Michael Paul Williams in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He's quoting Bertram Ashe, who teaches English and American Studies.

Ashe said the history of blackface dates far back to about the 1830s and extended well into the 20th century. He described it as “a weird obsession with blackness that grows out of that master-slave relationship.”

“What folks don’t know is it was primarily a Northern entertainment,” he said. For Northerners who had never set foot in the South, it was a way for white audiences “to imagine what they thought black life was in Southern spaces,” he said.

“It’s a portal. It’s a space through which [white people] can behave and act in a way that is not like ordinary middle-class whites behave,” Ashe said. “It appears to be irresistible to a certain type of person who cannot keep themselves from blackening their skin and imagining a type of black persona.”

I found that article because I was looking for discussion connecting the Northam story to Spike Lee's movie “Bamboozled.” The movie is mentioned in the article, but not in any significant way. I haven't seen this movie (and it's not available for streaming at Amazon (I'd have to buy the DVD — and it's $89.99)), but I've seen the trailer and read descriptions, like this from The New Yorker:

Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is the sole black programming executive at a TV network. Wanting to prove his bosses’ obliviousness, he proposes a monstrous absurdity—a “Saturday Night Live”-style minstrel show, featuring black actors, in blackface, reprising vile stereotypes. To Pierre’s horror, the show is picked up and becomes a hit, restoring those stereotypes to popular culture... The exuberant performances of the show’s stars—a comedian (Tommy Davidson) and a tap dancer (Savion Glover)... —bring out Lee’s potent theatrical paradox. The pleasure of mocking stereotypes risks perpetuating them, which is why comedy... is, in Lee’s view, a high and serious calling.

But this was not a popular movie, so I think white people did not take advantage of what seems like  permission to laugh at a minstrel show. And that was 20 years ago.



Blackface is a serious subject. Spike Lee made a movie about it, but it seems hard to watch because it's set up to cause us to laugh like racists and then feel horribly ashamed of ourselves. That's an interesting idea, artistically, but since we can see the trap, we can avoid it, by not watching. We're not lured in, so we don't have the experience of confronting our own corrupt heart. The professor's course sounds excellent, and it does seem to be a subject we could educate ourselves about. "What folks don’t know is it was primarily a Northern entertainment." We don't know what's inconvenient to know.