By Laila El Mugammar, Maggie Lehman, and Maxime Tam
WHAT IS BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY?
Blackface minstrelsy is an attempt to impersonate another race and present it as a form of entertainment. It involves individuals (most often people who identify as white) who paint their faces black and perform a series of musical and dance numbers that “ventriloquize” blackness. These performances are comic theatricalization of degrading and demeaning stereotypes invented by white people that is meant to denigrate and erase the history and experiences of Black people.
Developed during the early nineteenth century and gaining immense popularity all the way through the mid-twentieth century, blackface minstrelsy in North America emerged as a “conduit of white assertion and a buffer against black protest” (Douglas 27). On the one hand, early minstrel shows allowed white people a platform to express their dissatisfaction with a rapidly changing economy that further alienated and disenfranchised the working class working in industrial factories, but on the other, it also gave whites, of all classes, an opportunity to suppress abolitionist movements attempts to end chattel slavery in the US South (31). The rise and success of blackface minstrelsy suggests that white Americans were afraid of what would happen to their white privilege and power should Black people achieve equal opportunity and fair treatment. Blackface minstrelsy ultimately fueled pro-slavery politics and anti-Black sentiments that ridiculed the idea of Black freedom and citizenship.
It is important to understand that while blackface minstrelsy is commonly associated with the United States and the US South, Canada has a long history of promoting and performing, engaging and watching blackface minstrelsy. Calixa Lavallée, the composer of our Canadian national anthem, spent many years of his career as a composer and musical director for a travelling minstrel performance group, the New Orleans Minstrels (Thompson 23). Consider what it means to have Lavallée as a representative figure of/for Canada with his participation and contribution in minstrel shows, especially as we delve deeper into the history and current relevance of blackface minstrelsy not only in Canada on a broader scale, but also in the City of Guelph.
BLACKFACE MINSTREL SHOWS IN GUELPH AND WELLINGTON COUNTY
Blackface minstrelsy served an important social function in the lives of Guelphites: it was a form of entertainment, and like most media, it reaffirmed existing disparities and systems of oppression. The Ontario Agricultural College hosted a number of minstrel shows. One, which took place in March of 1912, is described in the OAC Review as taking the audience back to the “Dear Old South.” It boasted “Southern jokes and songs […] rendered in first class style” and a sketch entitled “Befo’ de War” (Miller 321). The December 1943 OAC Review delineates a minstrel show in which the chorus sang “Old Black Joe” and “Darktown Strutters Ball.” They also sang “Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy and perhaps the most famous song born of blackface minstrelsy. The Kiwanis Club of Guelph, which was founded in 1921 and professes to be “working for the betterment of our community and our world,” held annual minstrel shows in the auditorium of Guelph Collegiate and Vocational School. An advert for the 1961 minstrel is shown below:
Pictured above is the Guelph Jazz Band (circa 1927) standing on the steps of City Hall in blackface. Blackness was and is an absented presence in Guelph, and the mythology of Canada as an egalitarian refuge for Black people escaping the horrors of slavery is an obstacle to confronting a legacy of anti-Black racism. The erasure of Canada’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade allowed us to shamelessly indulge in this form of anti-Black entertainment and deny its relevance to our own relationship with blacks in Canada, past and present. Minstrelsy was a cultural import, and this lack of responsibility for its origins ensured no Canadian individual or group needed to be accountable for enjoying it. Blackness and Black people being “always elsewhere” created fertile soil for blackface minstrelsy to flourish in Guelph.
THE RELEVANCE OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY TODAY
Guelph is like many other cities within southwestern Ontario that have erased or forgotten their long tradition of hosting and performing blackface minstrel shows. However, the legacies of blackface minstrelsy in Ontario are constantly rupturing our present-day amnesia. In recent years, there have been many examples that shed light on how this popular form of entertainment continues to influence (and damage) understandings of race and race relations today. For example, a CBC News report from January 4, 2018, entitled “London police officer apologizes for blackface incident,” describes an apology letter written by a London police officer, who was photographed in neck coils, tribal clothing and brown face makeup for a Halloween event. While not a police officer at the time the photographs were taken, the London Police understood the implications of the officer’s participation in degrading and demeaning representations of black people as affirming a widely held belief of racial bias in police shootings and crime rates.
To further emphasize the relevance of minstrelsy in contemporary society, Philip S.S. Howard argues in “Blackface in Canada” that although “there appears, in some ways, to have been a resurgence of these [minstrel] acts in the last 10-15 years, it cannot trill be said that blackface ever entirely lost popularity here in the interim.” In his conclusion, Howard argues that while contemporary incidents of blackface “spark intense debate,” there are many attempts “to justify it as harmless fun, and in some cases suggesting that those who are offended by it are ‘too sensitive’ or bound by unwarranted ‘political correctness.'” However, contemporary blackface continues to draw on the tropes and traditions of the minstrel show, reiterating stereotypes of Black inferiority and ideas of white racial supremacy that are more ingrained — and dangerous — than we realize.