The Theater of Racial Opposites

Received wisdom about the minstrel/blackface tradition has been turned on its head during the past two decades. What was once dismissed as a retrograde and crudely racist genre is now understood to have been a wildly creative, if deeply contradictory performance tradition that provided nineteenth-century whites and African Americans with opportunities to highlight, mock, and exploit national and regional anxieties about race, gender, and class. Indeed, scholars have made a compelling case that blackface minstrelsy energized American popular culture for at least a century and helped make it a dominant influence across the globe.¹

Theater historian Marvin McAllister further complicates our understanding of the performance of race by highlighting "whiting up," a long tradition in which African American actors, musicians, and comics have assumed white racial identities in their performances. McAllister traces the tradition from antebellum slave plantations through the era of minstrelsy to Dave Chappelle's present-day performances. McAllister is keenly sensitive to the historical context in which whiteface artists have worked and how it influenced their performance practices and creative ambitions. Whiteface, he contends, meant something different in antebellum cakewalks, in Bob Cole's turn-of-the-century white tramp skits, in conventional theater productions during the 1940s, and in Richard Pryor's stand-up routines during the 1970s. The tradition, in sum, has a long and complicated history that fully warrants the close attention that he devotes to it.

McAllister argues persuasively that the whiteface tradition has been at least as productive and provocative as its better-known blackface analogue. Having previously published a first-rate history of William Brown and his short-lived African Grove theater company in 1820s New York, McAllister reveals again his eye for performance traditions that offer incisive critiques of racial stereotypes and cultural norms.² Whiting up, according to McAllister, has enabled African Americans to appropriate white artistry and to fashion from it new black identities, with which blacks then test, critique, and play with prevailing racial and gender identities.

Whiting up can be either a literal or a figurative act. In the cakewalk, for example, blacks mimicked and transformed white behaviors without whitening their faces. Similarly, in Richard Pryor's incendiary comedy routines, Pryor employed only body movement and diction to convey his assumed white racial identity. In other settings, such as Bob Cole's skits or some black actors' performances in canonical European plays, black artists used grease paint and other techniques to lighten their complexions and camouflage their racial identities.

Like blackface, whiting up is an impressively elastic tradition capable of varied cultural work. Perhaps most transparently, it is a vehicle for parodying whiteness and white authority. The satirical possibilities of whiteface rendered virtually all white behaviors and shibboleths potential targets. Bob Cole fully exploited this potential of whiteface in A Trip to Coontown (1898), the first major musical written, produced, directed, and performed by blacks. In the role of whiteface hobo Willie Wayside, Cole became a star and even an advertising icon whose visage graced billboards and advertising campaigns. Cole toyed with many of minstrelsy's conventions, including the racial identity of the genre's stock characters. Heretofore, "straight" men in minstrelsy were depicted as uncouth black fools. In Trip to Coontown the "straight" man was a refined, apparently respectable middle-class black man, Jim Flimflammer, played by Billy Johnson. The buffoon of the musical was Cole's white-faced hobo, Willie Wayside. Even so, neither Flimflammer nor Wayside was as simple as their outward appearance or demeanor might suggest. The former was, despite his superficial gentility, a con artist; the latter, a mockery of white superiority, at various times taking on "white trash" or "coon" traits (p. 103). Thus, even as Willie (Cole) mocked white affectations and behaviors, he simultaneously depicted the plasticity of purportedly fixed racial identities. In this manner, Cole took on "the blackface minstrel monster," replacing its crude racial representations with more complicated renderings of the nation...