Color blind

WHO does John Strausbaugh think he is? This is a serious question. Strausbaugh is a white writer whose provocatively titled “Black Like You” challenges the assumption that white racism and little else was responsible for the enduring popularity of minstrelsy and blackface. Fair enough. But in any discussion of a phenomenon so thoroughly connected to the evolution (or devolution) of blackness in America, the identity of the writer matters.

What’s problematic about “Black Like You” is not that Strausbaugh is white; white people pen thoughtful books about black history all the time. It’s that he’s unaware of, or in denial about, how much whites controlled and disseminated black images, and still do. Strausbaugh wants to have his analysis both ways: Blackface is racist and marginalizing, and it’s proof of America’s best democratic impulses because it mixed cultures with abandon to create a brave new art. He wants to impose a postmodernist view on a period phenomenon that, despite having survived into the 21st century in the form of, among other things, gangsta rap, is still defined by the vicious, oppressive attitudes of the early 1800s. Most disturbing, Strausbaugh wants to speak with equal authority not just to the white folks who created blackface but to the black folks who have suffered its effects. This is a delicate proposition, and it requires great skill, circumspection and constant self-examination on the part of a white author. Strausbaugh doesn’t quite pass the test.

Well aware of the toxic nature of the subject, Strausbaugh presents “Black Like You” as a breezy conflation of American history, social theory, essay, anecdote, criticism and pop-culture analysis; he stomps his way through terrain most contemporary white authors fear to tread. The good news is that his belief that a legacy of blackface still holds sway over much of the American popular imagination is encouraging in this age of let’s-move-on racial denial. His core argument is that instead of dismissing blackface as an embarrassing, isolated chapter in our history (something we tend to do with slavery, despite the fact that it went on for 250 years), we should give the phenomenon its due. We should more closely examine the discomfiting, almost pornographic intersection of black and white that was minstrelsy’s essence. This is a worthy challenge.

The bad news is that Strausbaugh reveals so much racial denial and ignorance of his own (“ignunce,” he’s fond of calling it) that his book ends up falling well short of the radical rereading he intends. Rather than a bold treatise on blackface that’s scholarly and street level -- a good hook, you have to admit -- we get a garden-variety case of a white man purporting to honor blacks while asserting his privilege where convenient, struggling on the page to work out issues of race and dominance not just for himself but also for America at large. “Black Like You” is eye-opening, just not in the way Strausbaugh has in mind.

What’s frustrating is that the author is no fool. His book is full of research -- on both blackface and the entire American social fabric -- that disturbs a certain romantic view the country has of its formative years. (Mark Twain, he reminds us, was a huge fan of minstrel shows.) His thesis is logical enough: Minstrelsy and blackface were expressions not simply of racism but of feelings far more complex. Beyond the fear and repulsion of the Other lay attraction, admiration, even envy. Describing a white audience of mostly young men at a minstrel show in 1830s New York, Strausbaugh posits that they’re “hopelessly confused. They’re obviously fascinated with Blackness, admire Black music and dance, but they’re simultaneously dismissive and insulting. Are they sincerely imitating Blacks, or just poking fun? Are they attracted or repulsed? ... In a word: Yes.”

The notion of ambiguity here is accurate, if not exactly revelatory. The problem, though, is that Strausbaugh uses such observations to conclude that black performance is a kind of power and minstrelsy is therefore not as disabling as we might think. He wants to envision the United States as a great big “smelting pot” of traditions in which blackface is a key ingredient -- a “mutt” culture that is diverse America’s greatest attribute. Blacks themselves, the author likes to point out, eventually performed on the minstrel circuit, and a few, like Bert Williams, became famous. To Strausbaugh, this is proof of equal participation in a singularly American game of exaggeration and insult that at various times also targeted Jews, Italians, Poles, Native Americans and Irishmen. Everybody makes fun of everybody. Get over it.

It is here that Strausbaugh leaves off being a historian and becomes dangerously naive. To minimize the vulgarity of blackface as “making fun” is uninformed at best and racially arrogant at worst. No matter how popular minstrelsy was or how many black people performed it, it was a creation by and for whites. It was their social order, or wished-for social order, projected onto burned cork, big lips and dialect. That blacks participated in minstrelsy didn’t mean they sanctioned it, any more than the limited phenomenon of black slaves joining Confederate armies meant they sanctioned slavery. As Strausbaugh admits, the black embrace of minstrelsy was more practical than actual -- it’s what got them paid.

The puzzlement is that Strausbaugh appears to understand such complexities. Throughout the book, he paints a larger portrait of minstrelsy that ultimately contradicts his point of view. He describes in detail the systematic oppression of blacks, from the rise of Andrew Jackson to the violent racial estrangement that filled the social vacuum created by slavery’s end and Reconstruction’s failure. In one chapter, he even offers a nuanced take on that most misunderstood of black issues, ebonics. Still, he insists on seeing blackface as a ground of reconciliation that, improbably, fueled real kinship and equality. In a discussion of Hollywood, he cites the partnership of an often-blackfaced Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. “The affection between the kid and her Black costars may have been stagey and condescending,” he writes, “but in their own naive way the films portrayed an image of racial harmony -- an ideal of Whites and Blacks meeting amicably through the medium of popular culture -- that was not such a terrible message to be sending movie audiences in their segregated theaters in the 1930s.”

Amicably? Who is Strausbaugh kidding? More to the point, whom is he trying to convince? In her book “homegrown,” bell hooks recalls a white college classmate describing how much she’d loved her black maid growing up. “But how did she feel?” hooks asks the classmate. “Did she love you?” The biggest flaw of “Black Like You” is the almost total absence of a black response to a subject that absolutely demands it -- in the end, the “you” is not plural. It’s telling that Strausbaugh dismisses many black auteurs and critics, from Spike Lee to Donald Bogle, as overly sensitive, touchy or “dicty.” He grumbles about multiculturalism and Afrocentrism being the inverse of racism: a common conservative plaint. But politics are only a symptom of the root issue of racial exclusion. Minstrelsy made that exclusion obvious, Strausbaugh tells us, though what he doesn’t say (even as he demonstrates it) is that whites are loath to see themselves as part of such a problem now.

Of course, seeing it depends on who you are. The dread and anger I feel every time I encounter what Strausbaugh calls “negrobilia” -- mammy cookie jars, pickaninnies and other emblems of blackface sold as harmless antiques -- could fill a book. Too bad such sensibilities didn’t make it into “Black Like You.” *