Audience

For any form of entertainment, the audience plays an important role of defining and directing the content seen as the form endures. For blackface minstrelsy, the audience is as much a collaborator as the performers, the attitudes of the audience made minstrel shows successful for decades, and the social dynamics of the public were the main influences on the content of blackface performers. By examining the audiences of blackface performers, a strong dynamic of racial ambivalence, suppression of empathy and exclusion are revealed.

T.D. Rice became known for a dance he appropriated from an African-American.

Due to overwhelming presence of numbers and distribution of socioeconomic power, the white identity and its interaction with blackface leaps to the foreground of any examination of minstrel audiences. There is a strange paradox among the white attitude evidenced in the minstrel dynamic, whites consume the blackface performance with amusement, curiosity and fascination, yet they look at the original source of that performance material, and the people descendant of that culture, with scorn, fear, or ignorance. The blackface identity serves as a “safe” representation, someone who often wasn’t actually black,  who was contained in the sensibilities and eccentricities of the stage. Through blackface, whites could appreciate African-American art sources without acknowledging them, experience black identity without interacting with it, and assign value to the black populous without eroding the white position of societal dominance.

These jovial plantation scenes were common minstrel tropes.

The image of blackface also served to dull the emotional responses of the audiences that experienced such acts. The complexion generated by blackface is unrealistically dark and the facial features of such a performer are often garishly augmented as well, the blackface shown to an audience is one that no black person would ever have. By glossing over the unique character of a performer’s face in favor of a generic face that lacks realism, the audience is robbed of any ability to emotionally connect to the face they see. The racial implications are fairly obvious: blackface encourages and validates a dearth of care towards black people by portraying them as less than human and lacking complete identities. Going further, it can also be seen that it teaches acceptance of social norms by showing a generic and humorous foil of the audience. In rural Antebellum America, few whites were actually exceedingly prosperous, many were workers or farmers themselves. As those lower class saw the smiling and exaggerated blackface actor “lazing about”, it validated what was becoming devalued labor. When blacks could be part of the audience, they saw subtle jabs at the system suppressing them, and in this way any desire to strike or subvert the undermining of their culture and social status was reduced and deferred. A smiling face that sings and dances without inspiring emotional connection becomes a powerful tool to prevent audiences from feelings and acts as an opiate to the masses to prevent dissent.

A “walk-around” in a minstrel show.

In this atmosphere of enforced acceptance and dichotomous racial relation, divisions between people were emphasized and ingrained. Antebellum-era blackface minstrelsy occurred in the midst of a wave of Irish immigration, these maligned social segments were both the butt of jokes, and their dance forms blended over time as the Irish Jig and African Essence dance intermingled. Each group was turned to a spectacle to justify or overshadow the poor treatment they received. Post-Civil war, portrayals of blacks oscillated between characters longing for the “days past” of slavery, or the “dandy” who served the role of the fool to show the “folly” of an emancipated black integrating into society. These roles splintered both the emancipated black populous and the white public that would have to acknowledge them, maintaining and intensifying already deep-seated dynamics of division. Preventing connection and intensifying divisive ideas and stereotypes among minorities and lower class social segments was an important effect blackface had on audiences.