14 May 2024. Climate | ‘Blackface’
The climate question and having kids // The toxic history of minstrelsy and ‘the return of the repressed’ [#570]
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1: The climate question and having kids
One of the side effects of climate change may be that some people are deciding not to have children as a result of it. There’s been some weak qualitative signals to this effect, although it’s difficult to assess.1 People don’t have children for lots of reasons, and fertility levels are flat or falling in the majority of countries in the world. From a research point of you, people not doing things is also harder to measure than people doing things.
All the same, three books have just come out that discuss this question, and they are reviewed by Anna Louie Sussman in The New Republic. The books are: Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question, by Jade Sasser; The Conceivable Future, by Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli; and Lessons for Survival by Emily Raboteau.
Jade Sasser is an academic at the University of California, and she seems to have written her book after experiencing a wildfire in the state, packing in a rush as a fire approached. She was already researching the intersection of climate and research, but the moment prompted questions:
What would I do if I had children to take care of? Would my worry and fear overwhelm me? How would I parent through this crisis?
A lot of the discussion in this area is conditional, about the future life of a potential child if the climate change worsens. These discussions are ecological, about the carbon footprint of the child, or philosophical, about the morality of the parents’ decision to bring them into a world of worsening weather. Sussman’s review positions these three books differently:
Instead of probing questions about consumption or lifestyle, they focus on communities, frequently communities of color, that are already experiencing the effects of climate change, often as just one of multiple overlapping crises that shape ideas about and approaches to parenting.
Social and environmental injustice, in other words, are new elements that influence existing relationships between reproduction, gender and power. It’s a long review, and I’m going to try here only to identify a few highlights.
Sasser, who is a black woman, already had doubts about having children in a world where racism already shapes basic choices. She’s surprised by the absence of race and equality from the discussion of what she called “the kid question”:
Much of the research about climate emotions—a lot of it focused on ‘eco-anxiety’—focuses on the experiences of young, white, middle-class people... In one of the few polls that did break down its respondents by race, Sasser noticed, Black and Hispanic young people were one and a half to two times more likely to say that climate change was a reason they weren’t having children.
Sasser ran her own survey, of two and a half thousand people aged between 22 and 35, of whom half were white and half were of colour. They had to have completed high school and believe that climate change was real:
respondents of color were significantly more likely than white respondents to report optimism and hope with respect to climate change, and significantly less likely to report feeling angry, resentful, powerless, or numb. But they were far more likely to choose one particular negative emotion: traumatized.
The majority of respondents said that climate change would not influence the number of kids they had. But of those who said they would have more kids were it not for climate change, twice as many were people of colour.
Sasser has three hypotheses about this, explored in more depth in the article:
One is that people of color already feel unsafe in the United States, having suffered the cumulative harms of racism and colonialism... Second, surveys show people of color are more concerned about climate change, per se. And third, this level of concern appears higher partly because of the contrast with the attitudes of white people.
White people report “greater faith in institutions and society to protect them”, and are therefore less “reproductively anxious”
.Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli founded an organisation called Conceivable Future a decade ago. It was designed to host a series of informal conversations about children and climate change. There are dangers in this.
For although neither woman has discussed their reproductive views in public,
press coverage of their activism so frequently bore headlines something like “Meet The Women Who’re Choosing Not to Start Families Because of Climate Change”.
In practice, their gatherings start with an open-ended question:
How is climate change shaping your reproductive life?
The intention is to help people to process their emotions about climate change in the company of others, and, potentially, to frame action:
We do not use our reproductive capacities as political ends,” they write. “Rather, those capacities are an entry point to understanding our experiences, building relationships, and gearing up for greater action. (Their emphasis)
Because if the conversation comes down to the politics of reproductive capacity, it has also become a simplistic binary conversation about gender. At the same time,
Ferorelli and Kallman highlight an often overlooked aspect of the climate-change reproduction question, namely, the way that heat, toxins, and other damage we’ve visited on our surroundings now impair our reproductive health.
Sperm counts are falling in response to endocrine-disrupting chemicals; spikes in air pollution can lead to sudden pregnancy loss; stillbirths increase in hotter weather.
Emily Raboteau’s book is sub-titled “Mothering Against The Apocalypse”, and it seems to be a set of linked essays. (I thought I recognised her name and I was right. I wrote about an essay hers about birds, John Audubon and Harlem here three years ago).
Seeking guidance on how to live and parent in the face of multiple crises, she embarks on a series of journeys, venturing into a borderless land of reproductive resilience. Her peregrinations take her on a tour of the future that many climate-conscious parents fear: broiling urban neighborhoods with too much blacktop and too few trees.
What she finds is models of resilience in the face of hardship: “they move her with small acts of generosity and empathy”. This is a pointer to our response to the climate crisis, as Sussman observes:
Community and creativity, all three books conclude, are crucial to facing the climate catastrophe. Raboteau finds them in the creative spirit of the climate art projects she visits around New York City... “Art is exactly what we need, and so much more of it,” Sasser writes, noting that art and political activism are not so distinct... Ferorelli and Kallman advise the reader to “see yourself in beloved community” and use the most vivid parts of imagination to picture a better world.
2: The toxic history of minstrelsy and ‘the return of the repressed’ (part 1)
I recorded David Harewood’s 2023 BBC documentary about the history of blackface entertainment and what was known, euphemistically, as ‘minstrelsy’. I had postponed watching it. I knew it was going to be a tough hour.
But: I’m old enough to remember the BBC’s Black and White Minstrel Show as peak time weekend entertainment, which had 21 million viewers at its most popular, in a two channel TV world, and somehow continued in the BBC’s schedules until 1978. If you’re younger than I am, or reading this in another country, this peak time entertainment that looked like the photo below, in which blacked-up white men and sometimes lightly-dressed women sang songs and did routines that included songs about the delights of Dixie.
(Source: BBC via alistair.macaulay.com)
A personal note here too: as a child in an all-white primary school class in Edinburgh in the late 1960s I was blacked up for a school show to sing ‘If You Were The Only Girl In the World’ to an unblacked up girl. The Black and White Minstrel Show, in other words, was a completely normalised part of everyday British culture.
David Harewood was the first black actor to play Othello on the London stage, and he is a bit younger than I am, but this was his childhood too, and he wanted to understand why. Early in the programme, the historian David Olusoga, who guides Harewood through some of this history, says:
Of all the things I’ve ever studied as an historian, I thought I was looking at something quite small, and it gets bigger and bigger, and the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper.
I hadn’t expected, when I started writing about the programme, that this would end up as two posts, but it has.
The long history starts with one man, the American performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s. Other performers had blacked up before, but Rice created a character called Jim Crow, who danced and sang. (Some of this history jumps up and hits you in the face.)
(Thomas Dartmouth Rice ‘in character’ as Jim Crow, drawn by Edward Williams Cal. Public Domain.)
In 1833, he took the character to Broadway, and made $7,000 that year—the Governor of New York earned $4,000 in the same year. In 1836 he came to London, then a much more lucrative theatre market than Broadway, and he was a hit here as well.
There are contemporary accounts of his performance, but broadly his Jim Crow character was portrayed as a rural ragamuffin who used the Afro-American vernacular of the times. Here’s part of the lyric of his signature song:
Wheel about and turn about and do jis so
Every time I wheel about and jump Jim Crow.
Rice more or less invented the silly gait and the handwaving gestures we see in blackface down the years, in Al Jolson’s performance in The Jazz Singer, even in Laurence Olivier’s blacked-up Othello in the 1960s.
Success spawned imitators. The Virginia Minstrels played the Adelphi in London in 1843. The Ethiopian Serenaders, who produced a more polished version of this show—calling them “concerts”—played both the White House and, when they toured the UK, to Queen Victoria. By now the format was a full stage show, with four standard characters—Jim Crow, Dandy, Mammy, and Mr Bones—and a standard musical line-up of two banjoes, a tambourine, and bones castanets. The shows included sketches as well as songs.
(The Virginia Minstrels. Public Domain).
As well as the ragamuffin Jim Crow character invented by Rice, the Dandy was lazy, and dresses above his station but in the wrong sorts of clothes, and the Mammy, a cross-dressing black mama, was overweight and cantankerous.
All of these characters were derogatory. David Linton, of London’s Guildhall School of Speech and drama, tells Harewood:
The performance of blackness has, for a long time, been in the control of white people... They’re controlling how black people are perceived in society. A lot of the stereotypes of black people—good dancers, natural rhythm, ‘street’—all of those stereotypes are here.
By the end of the 1840s, minstrelsy was everywhere. There’s a sequence in the documentary where the historian David Olusoga goes through the newspaper notices announcing local entertainments, finding minstrel shows right across England.
The timing of this is not coincidental. 1833, when Dartmouth Rice was on Broadway, is also the year when the British government outlawed slavery. Rice himself said in a speech after a show in Baltimore that he had created Jim Crow as a piece of propaganda to show “the true nature” of black people:
Before I went to England, the British people... were under the impression that negroes were naturally equal to the whites, and their degraded condition was consequent entirely upon our “institutions”, but I effectually proved that negroes are essentially an inferior species of the human family, and they ought to remain slaves.
'Institutions”, here, seems to be a euphemism for slaveholding. Putting all of this together, we can read the rise of minstrelsy as a cultural form in the first half of the 19th century as “a return of the repressed.” In other words, it was the expression of a dominant white culture that was having problems adjusting to the idea that black people should not be slaves, and that the British government was willing to use its naval power to prevent this.
Minstrelsy certainly become embedded in the culture. Olusoga shows Harewood a sequence filmed by the Lumiere brothers in London while they were here in 1899 to show off their new invention. Needing some film to show in the cinema they had set up off Haymarket in central London, they crossed the road to film some working class buskers doing a minstrelsy act in blackface on the streets a few hundred metres away.
Hollywood was not immune either. Harewood didn’t mention that The Jazz Singer—Hollywood’s first talkie, in 1927—has a plot that involves blackface. But the documentary included a sequence from Swing Time in which Astaire blacks up to pay tribute to Bill Robinson, “Bojangles of Harlem.”2 And Bing Crosby blacking up. And Judy Garland.
David Harewood was curious about the end of The Black and White Minstrel Show , but not so curious about the start of it. It first aired in 1958; the blacked up men were members of the George Mitchell Singers, and Mitchell was integral to the launch of the show. There had been radio shows of minstrel songs, which the George Mitchell Singers had been involved in, and in 1957 a BBC TV producer, George Inns, invited Mitchell to develop a minstrel show for TV.
The non-blacked up women were members of another well-known dance troupe, the Television Toppers. Of course, the routines between the blacked up men and white women would have got them lynched in the Deep South at that time if done for real.
In part 2 I’ll look at the part of the story about The Black and White Minstrel Show. In the meantime, here’s a clip from the start of the David Harewood documentary (3 minutes).
j2t#570
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In the New York Times, Ezra Klein says it is his listeners’ most popular query.
This is usually cut from contemporary screenings of the film.