The Juxtaposition of the "Black" Body's Power

Blackface Minstrelsy seemed to have such opposing purposes in the 19^th century. On the one hand, it solved a problem for white society by its portrayal of slaves but simultaneously created them as well.

Using blackface minstrelsy, whites could portray slaves as they wished and as was comfortable for them. They could overly sexualize them, depict them as content as they toiled their lives away in fields so the whites that profited from their work could live in ease, and ridicule them through malapropisms.

It seemed pretty ironic to me that by reducing blacks to sexual beings onstage, they actually created a fascination with miscegenation because the audience had an appreciation of black male sexuality. And to combat that sexuality, they used malapropisms, which the minstrels then used to weave a more sexual subtext. Furthermore, songs such as “Jumbo Jum,” which describe exactly how “easy” a slave is to seduce (which I found deeply disturbing), all fed into this skewed view of black sexuality. According to the song, all a man has to do is look at a black woman and already she’s “reeling” from desire and drops to the floor in “a state of agony.” And even more disturbing is that white men were encouraged not only to fantasize about such encounters with black women, but also to indulge their desires.

The flip side of the minstrel show is that they are exaggerated imitations of black men and women. They were masks the dancers painted on for the span of the show and then took off again. Whites portrayed embellished versions (if they can be called that at all) of the role of blacks in the society of the time. Can anyone really believe such an extreme misrepresentation of blacks in America even during the 1800s? As Lott says, “If all doers are mere masqueraders, minstrels are no different from anyone else; their falseness is the only reality there is.”