"The Seeming Counterfeit": Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy

Abstract

THE CURRENT CONSENSUS ON BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY PROBABLY IS summed up best by Frederick Douglass's righteous response in The North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens -a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy's further commodification of an already enslaved, non-citizen people.' From a contemporary vantage point, the minstrel show does seem a transparently racist curiosity, a form of leisure that in inventing and ridiculing the slow-witted-but-irrepressible plantation darky and the foppish northern dandy negro -conveniently rationalized racial oppression. The culture that embraced it, one would assume, was either wholly enchanted by racial travesty or so benighted, like Melville's Captain Delano, that it took such distortions as authentic. I want to

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