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After all the discussion of the blackface in this week's Mad Men, it struck me that another Caucasian cable TV character had put on the greasepaint recently. It wasn't a Mad Men-style slice of minstrelsy, though. In the Aug. 24 episode of Weeds, a white character actually tried to pass for black.
Briefly, Celia Hodes—Elizabeth Perkins' perpetually ill-tempered and ill-fated counterpoint to Mary-Louise Parker's successful drug dealer Nancy Botwin—had stolen the weed that her ex-husband and ex-lover hoped to use to relaunch their careers as legal purveyors of medical marijuana. To get their drugs back, they planted the idea that Celia was being chased by a black cop, knowing that this would immediately cause her to panic and turn to them for help, dope in hand. Only—twist!—the black cop was actually her white ex-husband, Dean, in makeup and a leather jacket that Huggy Bear would've been proud to wear.
As always seems to be the case with Weeds, the story line was complicated and weird. The guys played on Celia's racist fears—she has bullied and physically abused her ex-husband over a long period, but she freaked out as soon as she thought he was a black guy. But Weeds' writers didn't stop there, Dean couldn't just exploit Celia's racism—he got a thrill out of passing for black, and once Celia was fooled, he couldn't let it go. He wanted to go out and get laid, revealing his own stereotyped views of black manhood—Dean is the quintessential nerd in his own skin, but with a bit more melanin and a bad wig, he saw himself as a chick magnet. (As he said with a nod to Tropic Thunder, "Robert Downey Jr. opened that door.")
In its five seasons, Weeds has played with race in discomforting ways. In the first three seasons, Nancy—the ultimate sheltered middle-class white woman—was schooled in the drug business by African-Americans with little patience for her ignorance, while more recently she has found herself mixed up with Mexican narco cartels. Much of the time, the interactions are awkward—excruciating, even. The conversations aren't necessarily realistic—they're about supplying and distributing drugs, which is a pretty narrow field of experience—but they do feel real somehow.
It used to be that we shelled out for cable TV for the sex and the swearing. Given recent plot developments on Mad Men and Weeds, is it possible that we go there now to hear talk about race?
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I wrote a piece in yesterday's New York Times about Sophie Tucker, whose earliest recordings, some almost a century old, have been released for the first time in decades on a new CD. I describe Tucker's rise from the burlesque and variety stage circuit to vaudeville stardom and note her origins as a "coon shouter"—a performer of blackface songs.
In Salon, Sady Doyle has written a response to my Times article titled "Can a feminist hero do blackface?" Doyle says some generous things about my piece. She also writes: "Rosen begins his piece with a list of Tucker's nicknames, but leaves one out: ‘Queen of the Coon Shouters.' Her fame came through minstrelsy." Later, Doyle concludes that "without letting Tucker off the hook," the singer's eventual abandonment of blackface performance and "move towards authenticity" makes her "worthy of lasting consideration."
Strictly speaking, Doyle is wrong on the facts: Sophie Tucker's fame didn't "come through minstrelsy." Her stardom arrived only after she stopped wearing burnt cork, sometime around 1909. (Also, for the record, an earlier draft of my Times piece included the mention of a different Tucker nickname: "A Revelation in Coonology." It was removed by my Times editors for space considerations.) More important, despite my obvious enthusiasm for Tucker's music, I'm totally uninterested in the notion of her heroism, feminist or otherwise.
What really troubles me about Doyle's post is this question of whether Sophie Tucker is "worthy of consideration." Are we to conclude that had Tucker not stopped performing coon songs, she would be unworthy of consideration? What about an entertainer like Al Jolson, one of the greatest and most influential singers of the 20th century, whose landmark performances took place behind the blackface mask? What, for that matter, about Bert Williams, the first African-American pop star, who smeared burnt cork on his own brown skin? Are they beyond the bounds of acceptability?
It is crudely ahistorical to condemn—or to speak of "letting off the hook"—an individual singer for performing racial burlesque in 1908. Blackface minstrelsy was the pre-eminent form of entertainment in the United States for most of the 19th-century and remained wildly popular for at least the first few decades of the 20th. (And as Mad Men fans learned last night from Roger Sterling's rendition of "My Old Kentucky Home," minstrelsy stuck around long after actors stopped blacking-up in Hollywood movies.) A growing scholarly literature has shown that minstrelsy was complex—a show business institution and a socio-cultural phenomenon far bigger and more complicated than any one practitioner. Yes, blackface comedy was racist and appalling, and people should never stop saying so. It is also a key to cracking the code of American culture.
It's especially important to understanding popular music, whose history—from Stephen Foster to Tucker to Bing Crosby to Janis Joplin to Mick Jagger to Eminem and on and on ad infinitum—is enmeshed with blackface tradition. For years, minstrelsy was such a hot-button topic that scholars dared not touch it. This is one reason why important musicians like Tucker have received little serious attention in the last many decades.
Now, we are realizing that minstrelsy wasn't just a sin, it was a musical seedbed. In the Times piece, I point out that the rowdily comic coon shouting mode was transformed, by performers like Tucker, into a new kind of vocal style—that minstrelsy begat pop music modernity. What's more, minstrelsy wasn't just blackface: Tin Pan Alley songwriters were equal opportunity offenders, churning out Irish sendups, Jewish "Yid" songs, Italian "wop" tunes, and other ethnic dialect lampoons. This music, by contemporary standards, is offensive; Doyle may wish to plug her ears. Those interested in history, not "heroes," will want—are compelled—to listen.
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