17 May 2023. Plastic | ‘Blackface’, part 2.
The rise and rise of the plastic bag. // The Black and White Minstrel Show and everyday British establishment racism. [#571]
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1: The rise and rise of the plastic bag
They’re everywhere now, of course. But there was a time when this wasn’t true. An article in Orion by Rebecca Altman traces the history of how the plastic bag has become ubiquitous in our culture. It wasn’t an accidental process: this is a tale of everyday capitalism at work. Transnational companies, patents, market-making, lobbying, and lawsuits all play their part.
There’s multiple stories in here. Plastics were, effectively a product of World War 2, produced for the war effort. By the 1960s, a Swedish company had patented the single stamp plastic bag. Food buying habits changed, which created a market for a range of plastic packaging. Consumers had to be trained not to kill themselves with plastic bags, and then to treat them as disposable.
(Photo: Plastic bags ((in plastic bags) in a plastic bag store. Paul Keller/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Polyethelene, as it is known in the US—the snappier ‘polythene’ is used in British English—was first developed in the 1930s by chemists at ICI, the British company that was once an innovation leader in the sector.1 It was apparently a byproduct of a different line of research. Industrial production started, I think coincidentally, on 1st September 1939.
The military used polyethylene to insulate then-new radar systems, making them light enough for use in aircraft. Soon after the U.S. Navy helped two U.S. firms, DuPont and Union Carbide, negotiate licenses to commence production stateside, subsidized construction of dedicated factories, and promised to buy the output, effectively introducing polyethylene to the U.S. earlier than might have occurred otherwise.
Germany had its own nascent plastics industry as well, as Altman notes, illustrating this with extracts from Primo Levi’s writings about his incarceration in Auschwitz.
After the war, a huge amount of money poured into the sector—a quarter of a billion dollars was invested in it, a huge amount of money at the time. Early products included the plastic storage, Tupperware, developed by—I hadn’t realised this before—Earl Tupper. Another was the squeeze bottle, although it was initially a novelty product.
By the end of the 1950s, Americans were using a range of plastic bags: “produce bags, trash bags, garment bags”. The latter, featherlight dry-cleaning bags, caused enough deaths by suffocation among unsuspecting children to cause public alarm. The industry swung into action, with a public education programme:
In 1959, Life Magazine cautioned parents about plastic bags with a full-page image of Dr. Leona Baumgartner, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health, shown gasping for breath, a bag over her head, the film taut across her mouth. The Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) pledged to help the public understand “what a plastic bag is for…and what it is not.”
Later an SPI lawyer claimed this “education not legislation” initiative for had “saved plastic bags and the plastic film markets to come.”
In 1950s Europe, a Swedish company, Aktiebolaget Celloplast, had developed the plastic carrier bag printed from a single continuous roll of polythene.
Their bag was produced across Europe, and, eventually, in the United States through Celloplast USA, helmed by Bob “Bagsy” Siegel, the self-identified “grandfather” of the American shopping bag. The company’s international patent position was such that, for more than a decade, it held a “virtual monopoly” on the plastic bag.
The American oil company Mobil bought an Italian company in the early 1970s to try to circumvent this monopoly and pointed its output at the US market, producing red, white and blue bags for the bicentennial. It made skeuomorph plastic bags that looked like the familiar paper bags to overcome consumer resistance—customers didn’t like it when shop assistants had to lick their fingers to separate out the layers of plastic.
Mobil’s bags were flimsy, and this being America they were sued by customers whose groceries had scattered across the car park when the bags tore. But why innovate when there are lawyers? Mobil instead got Celloplast’s US patent overturned in the courts.
By the 1980s, the Flexible Packaging Association—a trade association—created a new initiative to rebrand the product as a “sack”, inventing the “Plastic Grocery Sack Council”. It trained supermarkets in the use of the “sacks”, and tried to encourage consumers to think of plastic as reusable:
“The Plastic Grocery Sack Council says plastic bags can be reused in more than 17 different ways,” read one Los Angeles Times article from 1986, “including as a wrap for frozen foods, a jogger’s windbreaker or a beach bag.” “It’s taken a lot of re-educating to get people to accept plastic,” Celloplast USA’s Siegel said to the New York Times.
Scale reduced production costs, and eventually plastic bags became cheaper than paper bags. You don’t have to educate consumers when they have no choice. Altman references the artist Robin Frohardt,
whose pop-up Plastic Bag Store mimics the modern supermarket, except every SKU has been fashioned from shreds of found plastic bags that Frohardt finessed into the likeness of food (a nod to the historical incursion of plastic into food packaging but now also into food.)
(Image: Robin Frohardt, The Plastic Bag Store.)
Altman is an environmental sociologist, and of course, it is impossible to talk about the ubiquity of plastic bags without talking about the environmental catastrophe that they have become.
Getting people to accept the disposability of polythene was also a long project that started in the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s:
“The future of plastics is in the trash can,” the editor of Modern Packaging, Lloyd Stouffer, argued in the mid-1950s to a group of industry insiders. Stouffer had advocated for the industry “to stop thinking about ‘reuse’ packages and concentrate on single-use.”... Stouffer circled back to these same themes in 1963... “The happy day has arrived,” he concluded, “when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.” By 1987, Mobil’s Schmieder extolled the advantages of trashing, non-biodegradable plastic bags: “Our products,” he told Reuters, “add stability to landfills.”
From the 1980s, though, there was also criticism of this notion that the plastic bag was disposable. Italy proposed a bag ban in 1991. In the USA, Suffolk County also proposed one, was harassed through the courts by the Flexible Packaging Association and retreated—serving as a cautionary tale for any other jurisdiction that thought about following suit. The bag bans did come, but were delayed for a couple of decades.
Of course, this story doesn’t end well: “The annual rate of production now runs into the trillions”.
And it turns out that the idea of “recycling” them is another industry ploy to avoid regulation. Because: recycling plastic bags is a nightmare:
(P)lastic bags are incompatible with the automated sorting machines municipalities use to process all of the recyclables carted to the curb for collection. Bags are in fact the bane of the mechanical sorting process because they gum up the works, even break the machines. Recyclers have even coined the term wishcycling to convey the persistent public act of recycling what isn’t readily redeemable. Bags are the most wishcycled items of all.
And we know the stories: if you try to track allegedly recycled plastic bags, as ABC journalists did in 2023, most are not recycled.
In the end, most bags dodge all human designs for their discard. “Plastic always, always escapes,” says (Max) Liboiron… Once in the wild, bags circulate and congregate with a logic all their own. They drip “like flesh” from the limbs of trees, hook fencing, or drift in the currents offshore. Some sink to the ocean floor.
But that’s another dismal story.
2: ‘The Black White Minstrel Show’ and everyday British establishment racism
On Tuesday, I wrote about the history of ‘blackface’ entertainment, in response to watching a documentary by the British actor David Harewood. He started his inquiry with his childhood experience of watching the British primetime entertainment show ‘The Black and White Minstrels’, a ‘blackface’ show that ran on the BBC for 20 years from 1958. This is Part 2.
In 1961, The Black and White Minstrel Show won the Golden Rose of Montreux for the best light entertainment programme. It’s the European equivalent of an Emmy, broadly. The historian David Olusoga walked David Harewood through documents in the BBC archive that showed that there had been some senior internal discussions about the series quite early on, even if it came from an unlikely source. (These were also discussed in an article by David Hendy of Sussex University published by the BBC in 2022 during its centenary.)
The BBC’s Chief Accountant, Barry Thorne, who had worked in the US, was a white member of the civil rights organisation the NAACP. In 1962 he wrote a memo which was ahead of its time, certainly for an organisation like the then BBC, where he said the programme was “a disgrace and an insult to coloured people.”
If black faces are to be shown, for heaven’s sake let coloured artists be employed and with dignity.
After the murder in Alabama in 1963 of a white postal worker who had marched to protest segregation the BBC programme That Was The Week That Was satirised The Black and White Minstrel Show in a song about Southern racism.
In 1967 the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination sent a petition to the BBC asking for the show to be taken off the air. The reply they got from the BBC’s Director of Public Affairs was that
black-faced minstrels performing a song and dance act have been a traditional form of entertainment in the British Isles for a great many years.
In press interviews through the summer the BBC insisted that the show was not about race, but about ‘tradition’.
The Black and White Minstrel Show. ‘Tradition’, not racism. Image: BBC.
To his credit, Barrie Thorne used this moment to return to the theme in an internal memo to the Chief Assistant to the Director General:
The BBC says that the Black and White Minstrels is "a traditional show enjoyed by millions for what it offers in good-hearted family entertainment"... Many regard the show as Uncle Tom from start to finish, and as such in underlyingly offensive to many no matter what the outward gloss and size of the audience prove to the contrary.
The reply he got combined the patronising and sophistry in equal measure. (It goes with this particular BBC role):
People who are already racially prejudiced are more likely to be exacerbated by the protest itself than the object of the protest. The best advice that could be given to coloured people by their friends would be: "on this issue, we can see your point, by in your own best interests, for Heaven's sake shut up.
In other words: public anger if The Black and White Minstrel Show were to be cancelled for moral or ethical reasons would create a backlash against anti-racist campaigners. Given that this was all happening a year before Enoch Powell’s notorious racist ‘rivers of blood’ speech, and Britain’s frankly racist 1968 Immigration Act, it hardly seems that the racially prejudiced needed any more exacerbating.
The show ran on until 1978 when it was finally not renewed when the BBC reduced its variety programming.2 But even after then the format continued in theatres for another decade.
Harewood was more interested in the effect of mass entertainment minstrelsy on the political and psychological world he grew up in. But just as the 19th century rise of minstrelsy, as I discussed in Part 1, was a kind of “return of the repressed”, so too was the appearance of The Black and White Minstrel Show.
The Windrush arrived in 1948 with the first Caribbean migrants, and migrants continued to arrive through the 1950s. There was discrimination and rhetoric about “integration”. In 1958, when the Minstrel Show first aired, there was a full-scale race riot in Notting Hill.
It wasn’t deliberate: that’s not the way that culture works. All the same, in 1958, a BBC producer, Geroge Inns, had invited George Mitchell, the leader of the very successful George Mitchell Singers, to develop a ‘minstrel show’ format for the BBC. The culture was acting as a kind of escape valve for conservative reactions to social change, so of course it was essential to deny that the show had anything to do with race or racism. But calling it “traditional” tells us an awful lot between the lines.
Eventually, the Black and White Minstrel Show became unsustainable for two reasons. The first was that the presence of black people in Britain became normal. There’s a telling story in a BBC Timeshift documentary from the 2000s about the performers coming out of the stage door during a rehearsal break, still in blackface, and being stared at by black Londoners queuing for the cinema next door.
The second is that one of the side-effects of the civil rights movement was that black performers started to appeal to white audiences both in much larger numbers, and to a significant extent on their own terms. (The ‘Motown effect’.) One of the ‘Minstrels’ tells the story, also in the Timeshift documentary, of rehearsing at the London Palladium for a Royal Variety Performance for which Diana Ross was topping the bill.
They were excited to see her, and some were in the stalls to see her run-through. She wasn’t so excited. When she saw them, she refused to start until they had left the auditorium. And by one account, as they left, she gave a Black Power salute.
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No more: it decided that it should pursue “shareholder value” in the 1990s, and ended up being sold to Akzo Nobel in the 2000s. The dead hand of Jack Welch stretches a long way.
In 1975, the teenaged Lenny Henry was the first black performer to appear on it, in a sketch and song that played off the notion of a ‘white Christmas’. He sayid later he was contractually required to do so.