I’m struck by how many local news Web memes center on low-grade minstrelsy.
The classic entertainment trope of the happy minstrel refuses to die. For generations, the biggest form of American entertainment was the minstrel show, in which actors (both white and black) made themselves up with exaggerated and blackened features, spoke in a comic dialect, and played the fool. In the minstrel show version of America, black people were full of personality but ultimately harmless simpletons. They loped and jived and ate watermelon and possessed a childlike naïveté about the world. In the minstrel version of America, blacks gleefully traded the misery and poverty of their everyday lives for the opportunity to sing and dance and make white folks smile with a catch phrase or a lively “coon song.”
In the 1890s, former slave George W. Johnson recorded “The Whistling Coon,” and it became one of the first best-selling singles by an African-American the United States. Contemporary audiences thought the inhumane lyric (“He’s a limpy, happy, chuckle-headed huckleberry nig/…With a cranium like a big baboon”) was hilarious, but they also probably saw it as a harmless goof. Here’s another standard minstrel show from the radio days. If anything, it’s milder than what Americans would have paid to see in the years after Reconstruction. Although contemporary audiences thought they were merely laughing at funny characters, it’s pretty obvious to our ears that they were participating in a dehumanizing exercise:
