Blackface
Based on Wikipedia: Blackface
In 1828, a white comic actor named Thomas D. Rice watched a Black stableman in Louisville, Kentucky—or maybe Cincinnati, or maybe Pittsburgh, the story varies—perform a peculiar shuffling dance while singing a tune. Rice stole it. He smeared his face with burnt cork, dressed in rags, and took the stage as "Daddy Jim Crow," launching a performance phenomenon that would poison American culture for over a century and eventually give its name to the entire system of racial segregation that followed the Civil War.
That's the dark irony at the heart of blackface: a practice built on theft and mockery became so culturally dominant that it shaped how the entire world would first encounter Black American music, dance, and expression. The distorted lens came before the real thing for most audiences.
What Blackface Actually Was
At its most basic, blackface was white performers using burned cork, shoe polish, or theatrical greasepaint to darken their skin and exaggerate their features—particularly their lips—to portray caricatures of Black people on stage. A performance manual from 1901 instructed actors to "leave the lips just as they are, they will appear red to the audience. Comedians leave a wide white space all around the lips. It makes the mouth appear larger."
The makeup was only part of the costume. Performers typically added woolly wigs, white gloves, tattered clothing or absurdly fancy tailcoats, depending on which stereotype they were playing. And there were specific stereotypes, recurring characters with names that became cultural shorthand for racist assumptions.
"Jim Crow" was the rural, enslaved buffoon—lazy, superstitious, and foolish. "Zip Coon" was his urban opposite: a free Black man with pretensions to sophistication, dressed in exaggerated finery, mangling language in his failed attempts to seem educated. The "happy-go-lucky darky on the plantation" suggested that enslaved people were content with their bondage. These weren't just characters. They were arguments—visual and comedic arguments that Black people were inferior, ridiculous, and properly subordinate to whites.
Origins: One Practice or Many?
Scholars disagree about when blackface actually began, and that disagreement reveals something important about how we understand racism itself.
Some historians take a long view, tracing the practice back to medieval European mystery plays where performers used coal dust and bitumen to portray demons, devils, and damned souls. The association of darkness with evil and corruption predated American slavery by centuries. In English Renaissance theater, white actors routinely played Black characters—most famously in Shakespeare's Othello, first performed around 1604. Anne of Denmark, queen consort of King James I, even appeared in blackface makeup for a court masque in 1605.
But other scholars argue this misses the point. Yes, Europeans darkened their skin on stage for centuries. But the specific practice of blackface—the exaggerated lips, the stereotyped behaviors, the musical and comedic traditions that grew around it—was something distinctly American that emerged in the early 1800s. The journalist John Strausbaugh points out that Othello didn't involve performers emulating "such supposed innate qualities of Blackness as inherent musicality, natural athleticism" or the other stereotypes that became central to American blackface.
This second view sees blackface as emerging from a specific American context: class warfare among white people. As historian Dale Cockrell argued, poor and working-class whites who felt "squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy" as a way of expressing their frustrations. By mocking Black people, white workers could claim a status above them even when they had little else.
The Minstrel Show: America's First Popular Entertainment
Whatever its deeper origins, blackface exploded into American popular culture through the minstrel show.
In the 1830s and early 1840s, blackface performers worked solo or in pairs, performing comic songs and energetic dances in relatively disreputable venues. Thomas Rice's "Jump Jim Crow" number was a sensation—a song and dance routine he claimed to have copied from that stableman, complete with a shuffling hop:
First on de heel tap, den on the toe
Every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.
I wheel about and turn about an do just so,
And every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.
The real transformation came in 1843, when Dan Emmett and his Virginia Minstrels staged the first full-length minstrel show in New York City—an entire evening's entertainment composed entirely of blackface performance. The format they established became standard: musicians sitting in a semicircle, a tambourine player on one end, a bones player on the other, with a "Mr. Interlocutor" in the middle trading jokes with the end men.
By the 1850s, minstrel shows had become, astonishingly, America's dominant form of popular entertainment. They translated opera and classical music into popular terms. They launched hit songs. They toured internationally. And they did all of this while presenting a grotesque parody of Black life as authentic.
Black Performers in Blackface
Here's where the story gets more complicated, and more painful.
By the 1840s, there were all-Black minstrel troupes touring the country—performing in blackface, using the same exaggerated makeup and stereotyped characters as their white counterparts. Some of the most successful minstrel performers, composers, and playwrights were Black: Bert Williams, who became one of the highest-paid performers in America; Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote songs that shaped American popular music.
Why would Black performers participate in their own mockery? The answers are complicated and not entirely comfortable. For one thing, minstrelsy was where the money and the audience were. It was, for decades, the only path to mainstream success for Black entertainers. Some performers tried to subvert the form from within, inserting genuine artistry and humanity into a degrading framework. Others simply did what they had to do to survive and succeed in an industry that offered no alternatives.
The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe wrote about what he called "thingification"—the process by which stereotypes simplify human beings into objects. "The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify," he observed. The Martinican poet Aimé Césaire made a related point: colonizers needed to turn the colonized into barbarians to justify their own sense of civilizing mission. Blackface was this process made literal and theatrical—and even Black performers were sometimes conscripted into performing their own dehumanization.
From Stage to Screen
As the traditional minstrel show declined in the 1890s, blackface didn't disappear—it adapted. It became a fixture of vaudeville. It dominated early cinema.
The first major film adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1903 cast white actors in blackface for all the major Black roles. Even a 1914 version that starred Sam Lucas, a Black actor, in the title role still used a white man in blackface to play Topsy. D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation—the most commercially successful film of the silent era and a landmark of cinematic technique—featured white actors in blackface playing Black characters as villains and rapists, while celebrating the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of white womanhood.
Radio created what scholars call "aural blackface"—white actors voicing Black stereotypes. The most famous example was Amos 'n' Andy, which ran from 1928 to 1960, making it one of the most popular and longest-running programs in American broadcast history. The show's white creators voiced the main characters until it transitioned to television with Black actors, but the stereotyped characterizations remained.
Stephen Foster and the Complication of Art
The minstrel show produced at least one figure who complicates any simple condemnation of the form: Stephen Foster, America's first great popular songwriter.
Foster wrote "Oh! Susanna," "Camptown Races," "Old Folks at Home" (better known as "Swanee River"), "My Old Kentucky Home," and dozens of other songs that became American standards. Many were written for blackface minstrel shows and used dialect spellings. But Foster's later work, while still politically incorrect by modern standards, moved away from ridicule toward something like sentimentality—portraying enslaved people and the South with a romantic melancholy that appealed to audiences of his day.
This doesn't make Foster's work unproblematic. Sentimentalizing slavery is its own kind of erasure. But it illustrates how even racist cultural forms could contain complexity—how artists could work within degrading frameworks while pushing against their worst elements.
The British Connection
Blackface wasn't just an American phenomenon. It spread throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, enjoying particular popularity in Britain.
British actor Charles Mathews toured America in 1822-23 and returned home to add a "Black" characterization to his act, including singing "Possum up a Gum Tree," a song he'd heard enslaved people sing. American minstrel troupes toured Britain to enormous success. The form took root and outlasted its American version—The Black and White Minstrel Show ran on BBC television until 1978, two decades after blackface had become socially unacceptable in the United States.
The global spread of blackface meant that international audiences often encountered their first representations of Black Americans through these caricatures. The distortion preceded the reality.
The Psychology of the Mask
Why did blackface appeal so powerfully to white audiences for so long?
Social commentators have offered various explanations. Some see it as providing an outlet for white people's fears about race—a way of making the unfamiliar safely ridiculous. The scholar Eric Lott, in his influential book Love and Theft, argued that "the black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them."
Others point to the way blackface allowed white performers to express things that were otherwise prohibited. The mask created a space of transgression. Rice's early songs sometimes contained surprisingly confrontational lyrics: "An' I caution all white dandies not to come in my way, / For if dey insult me, dey'll in de gutter lay." Some performances even suggested a kind of solidarity between lower-class whites and Blacks—while parodying Shakespeare, Rice sang, "Aldough I'm a black man, de white is call'd my broder."
This is what Lott means by "love and theft"—the way blackface simultaneously mocked and envied, degraded and desired Black culture. The performers stole Black music, Black dance, Black style, even as they turned it into caricature. And audiences consumed the theft eagerly.
The Long Decline
Blackface's prominence in American entertainment began declining in the 1940s, though it didn't disappear overnight. Amateur minstrel shows continued through the 1950s. Scattered professional performances persisted into the civil rights era of the 1960s. But changing attitudes about race—the long, slow, incomplete process of reckoning with American racism—gradually made the practice unacceptable.
By the late twentieth century, blackface was generally recognized as highly offensive, disrespectful, and racist. When it appears today, it's almost always as provocation, social commentary, or—frequently—as evidence of someone's racial insensitivity surfacing in old photographs or videos.
The Complicated Legacy
What do we make of blackface now?
The stereotypes it created persist. The caricatures—the exaggerated features, the assumptions about laziness and stupidity and natural rhythm—echo through American culture in ways both obvious and subtle. The name "Jim Crow" lived on to describe an entire system of racial segregation, codified into law across the American South and informally enforced throughout the country.
But there's another legacy, equally complicated. Blackface, for all its grotesque distortions, was also the channel through which African American music first reached mainstream audiences. The minstrel show appropriated Black culture—but in doing so, it also, perversely, popularized it. The spirituals, the rhythms, the call-and-response patterns, the blue notes—these entered American popular music through blackface performance, however corrupted.
This doesn't redeem blackface. Nothing redeems it. But it helps explain the strange, uncomfortable truth that American popular music—jazz, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop—emerged from a culture that simultaneously worshipped and degraded Black artistic expression. The theft and the love were always intertwined.
As one scholar put it, blackface's "appropriation, exploitation, and assimilation of African-American culture—as well as the inter-ethnic artistic collaborations that stemmed from it—were but a prologue to the lucrative packaging, marketing, and dissemination of African-American cultural expression" in today's global popular culture. The pattern established in those minstrel shows—white America profiting from Black creativity while stereotyping Black people—never really ended. It just evolved.
Connection to "Jingle Bells"
The reason this history matters to the story of "Jingle Bells" is that the song emerged from this exact cultural moment. James Lord Pierpont, who wrote the tune in the 1850s, was a Confederate sympathizer who wrote minstrel songs. The performance context in which "Jingle Bells" first appeared—and the racial politics embedded in nineteenth-century American popular entertainment—are impossible to separate from the broader phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy.
We tend to think of Christmas carols as timeless and innocent. But they were written by specific people in specific historical moments, carrying the assumptions and prejudices of their times. Understanding blackface helps us understand what those times were actually like—and why even our most cheerful seasonal songs might carry shadows we'd prefer not to see.