Modern-day minstrelry.

there's a semi-famous quote abt eddie cantor (sadly i can't remember who said it): a white journalist or critic nervously asking a black jazz musician if he didn't think, despite the minstrel thing, that cantor wz pretty talented, and the black jazz musician saying (in stroppy effect): "we're not all complete idiots, you know — cantor is a genius"

Most stand-up comics today still base their acts on making fun of other races, albeit in a more "ironic" manner than would have been acceptable 100 years ago.

What your questions seem to presuppose, is that as the years pass we will continue to progress in terms of cultural literacy and tolerance. I'm not so sure. While at present it sounds implausible, a return to openly mocking "sand niggers" and "towel heads" could happen in a generation. A blink of the eye for a historian.

Appreciating the artistry of something offensive can be easily construed as sympathy for the message. For example, many would say if you laugh at a sexist joke you are endorsing mysoginy. Or if you were to say that you appreciated the classical images of the Nazis as well as Hitler's oratory style, but found the party's actions and the man's words inhuman -- your latter sentiment is going to be suspect.

I think out of fear, some writers (historians, music writers, fiction writers, etc) shield their 'unsavory' personal interests by pursuing them through the eyes of the people/characters involved at the time that the offensive material is being produced. Take Lords of Chaos and the subsequent book about white-supremicist music for example: the journalist that wrote about these subjects had a personal interest and connection to both topics -- yet until his personal beliefs were revealed, his sympathies with the aesthetics of black metal and oi were respected by most reviewers because of their "objective" presentation. He had, at least temporarily, created a necessary distance between himself and his subjects for his pursuit of those subjects to be acceptable.

Although it seems people are more forgiving when you have a case where the artist's means justify the ends (can't think of a better example off the top of my head although I'm sure there is one - Mark Twain using the racist language of his times is forgiven when the resulting adventure story can supposedly be teased apart from the offensive components), the only 'valid' reactions to material that is inherently offensive (by today's standards) is to either laugh at it as a product of its misguided times or to mock people's lack of 'enlightenment.'

Going back to TV, All In The Family is appreciated because it is so dated politically. And thanks to the magic of Irony, we have many modern day Archie Bunkers (everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Howard Stern have cashed in on this concept) still able to flourish despite the evolving social mores.

While there are exceptions (e.g. DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation is routinely examined for its cinematographic breakthroughs despite its incredibly racist content), since the advent of Modernity (or Post-Modernity or whatever it is we are in right now), it has become increasingly unacceptable to take offensive works "seriously."

As it should be disgustingly clear to my fellow Americans, acknowledging that there may be some merit to one's 'enemies' is increasingly considered to be an act that is at once dangerous, stupid, and irrelevant. Academics and censors (be they politically correct or politically reactionary) have their enemies too...

While I don't want to derail this thread by talking about Huck Finn too much, I just want to retort by saying it is NOT AT ALL CLEAR that Huck Finn is an attack on racism. While there are passages in which racist attitudes are satirized (such as when an explosion kills a black man, and a woman's response is "thank goodness no one was hurt."), and Huck does choose to help his friend Jim escape in the end, Jim himself is a caricature of a black man taken straight out of the minstrelry which was so popular at the time of Twain's writing. Whole passages were taken from blackface routines with Huck as the interlocutor and Jim as Bones:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/minstrl.html

Additionally, Twain does not moralize Huck's decision in the end as "doing the right thing," nor does he condemn him for his contradictory nature (I've rarely encountered a character who lied as often, as creatively, or as mendaciously as Huck Finn)- a contradictory nature that Clemens shared. The writer may have been outspoken on the folly of whites thinking that they were not as capable of savagery as blacks, but he also said in his autobiography that he believed minstrelry was an accurate immatation (not caricature) of black speech patterns and behaviors.

That said, I do not fall into the camp of people who now claim that Huck Finn is a racist work. I see it primarily as a work of satire, where everyone from slave to slave master is roasted just the same. We could carry on this argument for decades (critics have been and still are just as divided), but instead I suggest we heed Clemen's proclamation about Huck Finn:

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

On the one hand you have obvious caricature (e.g. Freeway), but then you have people who claim that their art is mimicing reality (e.g. Bully which was based on a true story...but seemingly very sensationalistic in terms of acting). There is also this gray area where you get "real people" who seem to be playing up their trashiness. Jerry Springer feels like the equivalent of black people playing blackface.

you can't draw a hard line between accurate fond portrayal and mocking caricature anyway: can't now, couldn't then

which is why minstrelsy should be studied rather than dismissed: as well as part of the prison, it's a coping strategy to deal with the existence of the prison, and the beginnings of the way out of the prison

Twain's book shows Jim to be someone who notices things and who has practical knowledge, and the fact that he's superstitious should surprise only those of us who have gotten our experiences out of books by academics. The book also evinces quite a loathing for the common people, as they're called, in their ignorance and their willingness to act as a mob. Twain's ear for actual speech was good--that's the way Jim talked.

The bigger issue is why someone would worry about all this. Show business is not reality. Representations of gay people, African-Americans, or fat white guys from Queens are just that, representations. You'd be better off just not watching so many representations, maybe. A long time ago, Twain knew this, as did a guy named Flaubert, who cautioned against believing everything you read, against these kind of middle-class ideas about what is, after all, play-acting. Tom vs. Huck. I've been involved for years with the world of academic publishing and I have to tell you that these people are by and large clueless; it's one thing to write history but quite another to get worked up over singers or actors.

Emmett Miller is quite entertaining.

The huck fin passages quoted in the link are fairly ambiguous about Huck's own coming to terms with race as much as anything else, & particularly the first one ends with a very unminstrelish and VERY twainish twist.

"Well, it's all right anyway, Jim, long as you're going to be rich again some time or other."

"Yes; en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'."

I can't recommend Tosches Where Dead Voices Gather enough on the minstrel count, but the frustrating part of the term "modern-day minstrelry" to me is that it abstracts the cultural aspect of "camped-up" portrayal of a people from the historic aspect of social relations of the time -- jim crow south post defeat of radical reconstruction and pre great migration was the high point. Minstrel started in the north before 1800 sure, but it was something very different when it became widespread -- a ghost of the old south, a mimmicry of lost plantation paternalism.

chicxulub you have to understand that people see minstrel sterotypes and they see the flipside of lynchings and segregation, and those particular stereotypes DID underlie that system of segregation and lynchings.

Which is conversely why I dislike "modern-day minstrelry" as a term -- because it seems to equate the conditions of gay people [or etc. or etc.] (who are of course, by no means, free from nasty prejudice against them and etc.) to those of black people in the jim crow south. And because it reduces "minstrelsy" to any set of sterotypes or even simply overrepresentations rather than a particular set with special origins and meaning.

One example: blacks in that era played (and sometimes believed) to the stereotypes because that's how they could get along. gays today playing to the sterotypes find it harder to get along in most of america.

I think you are possibly conflating minstrelry (the actual practice) with Minstrelry (that bugaboo of the late 20th c.), because minstrelry was actually host to a wide range of carcicatures. There were of course those of compliant blacks, Uncle Toms. But there were also sophisticated carcicatures of underworld figures and of course of "uppity" or dandified blacks--who inevitably betrayed their "true" natures by misusing the language or otherwise failing to convincingly inhabit their pretensions. Minstrelry may largely represent the thoughts/fantasies of the white majority as to how blacks should/did behave, but I think those thoughts and fantasies are probably more complicated and troubled than some contemporary formulations.

In other words I think your post may be evidence that the book I mention at the top of this thread has not done its work--that out conception of minstrelry is largely inherited from the sort of "tsk, tsk" approaches taken by the New History, whose need to "explain" minstrelry (or even to apologize for it in some fashion) has overwhelmed any desire to explain what it actually consisted of.

I also think you are slighting minstrelry as a intentional representation, an exaggeration for humorous effect--not a prescription. Turn-of-the-century writers and actors interested in racial pedantry (there were many) would turn to melodrama (such as Thomas Dixon, who wrote the books and plays on which Birth of a Nation was based)--just as Harriet Beecher Stowe had done 50-odd years before.

More thoughts later. Your point about my analogy between blackface and W&G--that making it tends to obscure the differing political realities faced by turn-of-the-century blacks and contemporary gays--is a good one and I'll have to think about it.

But also the "Zip Coon" steretypes of uppity blacks trying to rise above their station were perhaps in some ways the nastiest becuz they had the strongest effect of reinforcing jim crow. Sure there were outright pedagogic racist melodrama tracts, but which is more important -- when you know yr. being preached at or when your attitudes are common sense that everyone can recognize and laugh at? In other words, racism wasn't just an intentional act of racial provocateurs, but it was part of the culture, something in the air, in the way people thought and lived, fully in the fabric of life.

Some discussion of Bamboozled on this thread would be interesting.

I disagree, and once I find the cite for the book I keep mentioning I can do a better job of convincing everyone.

But re. Miller, if you listen to his skits on the Minstrel Man from Georgia CD, there's not much Tomming in evidence. Chiefly because there is no white presence in these skits whatsoever. Of course the producers of the CD might have deliberately exluded the more potentially offensive skits. But I do think those skits' humor is actually fairly typical of much minstrelry: not a burlesque of white-black interaction, but a burlesque of black culture--that is, blacks interacting with other blacks. Therefore I think your claim that minstrelry is "a mimmicry of lost plantation paternalism" is also a bit dubious. You could argue that a paternalistic attitude permeates the portrayals of blacks, but in terms of the actual nature of the skits, much (not all) minstrelry had little to do with plantations or overt paternalism.

Similarly "social problem" films on homosexuality tend to place gay characters in the context of oppressive (straight) society, whereas burlesques like Will & Grace take place within gay culture for the most part ("gay culture" in that definition incl. the fag-hag types as well).

But many if not most blackface teams were just that--two guys in blackface.

OK, this thread has too much heat and not enough light. I'll do some research at the library over the next few days and see what I can come up with (naturally Sterling if what I come up supports your contentions I will bury it in the stacks behind How to Fix Your Bakelite).

But many if not most blackface teams were just that--two guys in blackface. Such as Jam Up and Honey:

http://www.angelfire.com/tn2/bobloyce/images/jamup.jpg

OK, this thread has too much heat and not enough light. I'll do some research at the library over the next few days and see what I can come up with (naturally Sterling if what I come up supports your contentions I will bury it in the stacks behind How to Fix Your Bakelite).

I don't think the cd's producers excluded the offensive skits by the way, coz "Minstrel Man" is as far as I know a fairly complete record of everything he ever put to wax.

So maybe "mimicry of lost plantation paternalism" is a bit off but my point about ghosts of the old south I stand by -- the stereotypes were based on the social system of the plantation which had since passed from existance, and in some ways took place as a cultural reaffirmation of what could no longer be empirically seen and lived the same way.

As for how "accurate" the portrayal was, I don't doubt, for example, the accent. But as for the actual characters presented look at a good revisionist history of reconstruction like "Been In The Storm So Long" by Litwack and you get a sense of a very different people. Alternately "Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made" by Genovese for antebellum southern history. Neither of those descriptions of black culture of the time (both of which are fairly well considered definitive by historians) seem to reaffirm minstrel stereotypes.

Remember also that the objections to Amos & Andy for example weren't that they existed so much as they were the *only* images available of black people. Which is where the one comparison to W&G or etc. can make sense -- here too we have (or had, coz the sitch is improving a bit) only particular caracatures of a group of people who, for lack of *other* representation, can thus be taken for the whole.

[responding to yr. more recent post: I have no ability to encapsulate "dead voices" becuz it ranges over like hundereds of years of history, stories of individual songs, reflections on race, reflections on philosophy, on the search for the past, etc. its all over the map and incredibly powerful I thought]

Some fellow has put together a collection of all of Miller's sides:

EMMETT MILLER | THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS (VOL. 1 & 2)

Funniest thing I found on Amazon.com today:

Minstrelsy in America: A list by Tribe, Not a fan, just interested

Tomorrow I'll try to train this thread back in the direction of modern-day minstrelry as opposed to the minstrelry of yore.

Bamboozled S/D:

Search - the commercial parodies. Absolut classique
Destroy - You shot it in DV?!?!?! (Someone invariably try to explain this away in the context of the TV shows being video - fine, but in that case, why not use TV-quality cameras then? It's not like SpikeTV isn't a bankable name.)

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031117&s=bolonik

'Minstrelry begat pop music modernity' says Jody Rosen in Slate, following on from her reappraisal of Sophie Tucker.