Wearing the Mask
‘DarkestAmerica
By KEVIN YOUNG
Published:November 16, 2012
‘Darkest
By KEVIN YOUNG
Published:
(Page 2 of 3)
But “Darkest America” runs into real trouble when it turns to Williams’s partner, George Walker. Known to do a remarkable cakewalk, Walker did not appear in blackface; he played the dandy as part of the team that first billed itself, signifying on the white minstrelsy “delineators” before them, as “The Two Real Coons.” While Williams chose to wear blackface when it wasn’t absolutely required,Walker Walker
DARKESTAMERICA
Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop
By Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
Illustrated. 364 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
The issue soon becomes something the authors call “the alchemy of audience.” Why do routines that black audiences enjoyed in “race films” for their eyes only, like Mantan Moreland’s, become, in an all-white context, deeply troubling to that same audience? But the book’s treatment of the alchemy of audience is too brief. In chapters discussing everything from Louis Jordan to the ’70s sitcom “Good Times,” Taylor and Austen never quite realize this fruitful phrase’s full impact. Doing so would have enriched and even problematized their work, perhaps prompting them to bring in more of the blues, barely mentioned, and the music’s tragicomic irony. (Instead the book labels irony a whites-only arena, with blacks “more sly and playful than ironic.”) We do get great discussions of the controversial “Amos ’n’ Andy”; black singers recording “songs of Southern nostalgia, a mainstay of the minstrel tradition”; Ben Vereen’s performing in blackface at Ronald Reagan’s inaugural; and Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled,” which they persuasively contend is his best film. The authors clearly enjoy provocation — minstrelsy is liberating! stereotypes can be fun! — but they know that some things, like Disney’s “Song of the South,” just ain’t redeemable. What they mean to praise are the vast skills of black performers like Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx or even Lincoln Perry, better known as his character Stepin Fetchit, who innovated within racist conventions.
Yet “Darkest America” doesn’t sufficiently explore the importance of context and continuity, omitting and selectively quoting as it accuses others of doing. In an otherwise lively discussion of Bill Cosby, minstrelsy’s chief opposition from the 1960s to the 1980s in his routines and on-screen, the book never mentions his transformative 1970s comedies alongside Sidney Poitier. “Uptown Saturday Night,” “A Piece of the Action,” “Let’s Do It Again”: all reacted to the violent blaxploitation films before them, upending what the authors call Cosby and Poitier’s images as “Super Negroes.” Including those comedies might have led to a proper discussion, in the context of hip-hop, of Ice Cube’s turning away from overdone gangsta films and to “ghetto comedies” like “Friday” — not as a form of minstrelsy but rather an embrace of a black folk tradition inherited from Cosby. “DarkestAmerica
With that tradition not fully described, there’s a deeper book not quite present here. The chapters on television in particular begin to feel like pale imitations of such older studies in American cinema and television as Donald Bogle’s provocatively titled “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks” or Marlon Riggs’s documentaries “Color Adjustment” and “Ethnic Notions,” both of which should be required viewing.
STORY BY:
But “Darkest America” runs into real trouble when it turns to Williams’s partner, George Walker. Known to do a remarkable cakewalk, Walker did not appear in blackface; he played the dandy as part of the team that first billed itself, signifying on the white minstrelsy “delineators” before them, as “The Two Real Coons.” While Williams chose to wear blackface when it wasn’t absolutely required,
DARKEST
Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop
By Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
Illustrated. 364 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
The issue soon becomes something the authors call “the alchemy of audience.” Why do routines that black audiences enjoyed in “race films” for their eyes only, like Mantan Moreland’s, become, in an all-white context, deeply troubling to that same audience? But the book’s treatment of the alchemy of audience is too brief. In chapters discussing everything from Louis Jordan to the ’70s sitcom “Good Times,” Taylor and Austen never quite realize this fruitful phrase’s full impact. Doing so would have enriched and even problematized their work, perhaps prompting them to bring in more of the blues, barely mentioned, and the music’s tragicomic irony. (Instead the book labels irony a whites-only arena, with blacks “more sly and playful than ironic.”) We do get great discussions of the controversial “Amos ’n’ Andy”; black singers recording “songs of Southern nostalgia, a mainstay of the minstrel tradition”; Ben Vereen’s performing in blackface at Ronald Reagan’s inaugural; and Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled,” which they persuasively contend is his best film. The authors clearly enjoy provocation — minstrelsy is liberating! stereotypes can be fun! — but they know that some things, like Disney’s “Song of the South,” just ain’t redeemable. What they mean to praise are the vast skills of black performers like Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx or even Lincoln Perry, better known as his character Stepin Fetchit, who innovated within racist conventions.
Yet “Darkest America” doesn’t sufficiently explore the importance of context and continuity, omitting and selectively quoting as it accuses others of doing. In an otherwise lively discussion of Bill Cosby, minstrelsy’s chief opposition from the 1960s to the 1980s in his routines and on-screen, the book never mentions his transformative 1970s comedies alongside Sidney Poitier. “Uptown Saturday Night,” “A Piece of the Action,” “Let’s Do It Again”: all reacted to the violent blaxploitation films before them, upending what the authors call Cosby and Poitier’s images as “Super Negroes.” Including those comedies might have led to a proper discussion, in the context of hip-hop, of Ice Cube’s turning away from overdone gangsta films and to “ghetto comedies” like “Friday” — not as a form of minstrelsy but rather an embrace of a black folk tradition inherited from Cosby. “Darkest
With that tradition not fully described, there’s a deeper book not quite present here. The chapters on television in particular begin to feel like pale imitations of such older studies in American cinema and television as Donald Bogle’s provocatively titled “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks” or Marlon Riggs’s documentaries “Color Adjustment” and “Ethnic Notions,” both of which should be required viewing.
STORY BY:
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YOUNG
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SPECIAL THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING CONTRIBUTORS:
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