Racial Classification in American Culture and Law into the Twentieth Century
Blackface minstrelsy, in which comedy, drama, and music met on stage, proved to be a remarkably durable and adaptive form of American popular entertainment. As scholar Eric Lott has argued, blackface minstrelsy performed two primary functions in the American cultural economy:
1. It served white Americans' desires to transgress expected racial behaviors and boundaries.
2. It culturally hardened the boundaries of race, imposing an exaggerated vision of blackness on Americans.
Around 100 years after the birth of blackface minstrelsy, a version of it was featured in the very first sound film ever produced, The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson as a Jewish entertainer who used blackface to express his deepest emotions that were stifled in his everyday life, even as his performance of blackness mocked and dehumanized it.
At the same time blackface was shaping the cultural Black/white dichotomy, the laws of American states were doing the same thing. In 1889, Charles Chesnutt, a Black lawyer, activist and writer with very light skin, wrote an essay detailing the absurd amalgamation of laws governing race, noting that the specifics of the laws depended on how best they would maintain the system of white supremacy.
In one section, Chesnutt pointed out that South Carolina — not a state noted for its racial liberalism — had curiously lenient rules for how much “Negro blood” could be present in a person who was still considered white. He mockingly implied that this resulted from a necessity to maintain a numerous enough white population to ensure political dominance over the majority-Black state.
American culture had a powerful role in shaping ideas of race. Jelly Roll Morton, a pioneering pianist in the music that came to be known as jazz, was a creole of color in New Orleans, primarily of European ancestry but not considered white by the state or by white New Orleans society. In an interview with Folklorist Alan Lomax, Morton claimed that all his folks "came directly from the shores of France."
Morton, despite his identification with his European and not African ancestry, drew heavily on African-American folkways in his art and entertainment, using blues, gospel, and ragtime music in the creation of his own. Still, as a lightskinned man, he expressed distance from blackness by sometimes performing in blackface himself. Despite his complicated story, however, American culture flattened out the music he helped to create, jazz, and coded it as Black. And in census records, Morton was listed as Negro, his racial identity flattened out.
This history had a lasting effect on the function and stylings of American entertainment in the mid-twentieth century.
