Page 72 - 1619 Project Curriculum

The 1619 Project

the world.’ ’’ This child might have There was, perhaps, not a white for it’s as glamorous a blackness What a panicked clairvoyant!

been William Henry Lane, whose audience in America, particularly as this country has ever mass-pro- The fear of black culture — or

was more than a

stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, in the South, that would not have duced and devoured. ‘‘black culture’’ —

t

very energetic fash-

Lane was persuasive enough that resented, in a The proliferation of black music fear of black people themselves. I

Barnum could pass him off as a ion, the insult of being asked to across the planet — the prolifera- was an anxiety over white obsoles-

white person in blackface. He look at the majestic singing of a tion, in so many senses, of being cence. Kennard’s anxiety over black

ceased being a real black boy in real Negro. black — constitutes a magnificent influence sounds as ambivalent as

order to become Barnum’s min- The modern conundrum of the joke on American racism. It also Lorde’s, when, all the way from her

strel Pinocchio. black performer’s seeming respect- confirms the attraction that some- native New Zealand, she tsk-ed rap

After the Civil War, black per- able, among black people, began, in one like Rice had to that black man culture’s extravagance on ‘‘Royals,’’

formers had taken up minstrelsy, too, part, as a problem of white black- grooming the horse. But some- her hit from 2013, while recogniz-

corking themselves, for both white face minstrels’ disrespectful black- thing about that desire warps and ing, both in the song’s hip-hop pro-

and black audiences — with a straight ness. Frederick Douglass wrote that perverts its source, lampoons and duction and its appetite for a partic-

face or a wink, depending on who they were ‘‘the filthy scum of white cheapens it even in adoration. Lov- ular sort of blackness, that maybe

was looking. Black troupes invented society.’’ It’s that scum that’s given ing black culture has never meant she’s too far gone:

important new dances with blue-rib- us pause over everybody from Bert loving black people, too. Loving
bon names (the buck-and-wing, the Williams and Bill ‘‘Bojangles’’ Robin- black culture risks loving the life Every song’s like gold teeth,

Virginia essence, the stop-time). But son to Flavor Flav and Kanye West. Is out of it. Grey Goose, trippin’ in the

these were unhappy innovations. their blackness an act? Is the act under And yet doesn’t that attraction bathroom
Custom obligated black performers white control? Just this year, Harold make sense? This is the music of a Bloodstains, ball gowns,

to fulfill an audience’s expectations, E. Doley Jr., an affluent black Repub- people who have survived, who not trashin’ the hotel room

expectations that white performers lican in his 70s, was quoted in The only won't stop but also can’t be We don’t care, we’re driving

had established. A black minstrel was Times lamenting West and his align- stopped. Music by a people whose Cadillacs in our dreams

impersonating the impersonation of ment with Donald Trump as a ‘‘bad major innovations — jazz, funk, hip- But everybody’s like Cristal,
himself. Think, for a moment, about and embarrassing minstrel show’’ hop — have been about progress, Maybach, diamonds on your

the talent required to pull that off . that ‘‘served to only drive black peo- about the future, about getting as timepiece

T

According to Henry . Sampson’s ple away from the G.O.P.’’ far away from nostalgia as time will Jet planes, islands, tigers on
book, ‘‘Blacks in Blackface,’’ there But it’s from that scum that a allow, music that’s thought deeply a gold leash

were no sets or eff ects, so the black robust, post-minstrel black Ameri- about the allure of outer space and We don’t care, we aren’t

blackface minstrel show was ‘‘a can theater sprung as a new, black robotics, music whose promise and caught up in your love affair

developer of ability because the art- audience hungered for actual, possibility, whose rawness, humor

ist was placed on his own.’’ How’s uncorked black people. Without that and carnality call out to everybody Beneath Kennard’s warnings

that for being twice as good? Yet scum, I’m not sure we get an event — to other black people, to kids in must have lurked an awareness
that no-frills excellence could cur- as shatteringly epochal as the reign working class England and mid- that his white brethren had already

dle into an entirely other, utterly of Motown Records. Motown was dle-class Indonesia. If freedom's fallen under this spell of blackness,

degrading double consciousness, a full-scale integration of Western, ringing, who on Earth wouldn't also that nothing would stop its spread to

one that predates, predicts and prob- classical orchestral ideas (strings, want to rock the bell? teenage girls in 21st-century Auck-

ably informs W. B. DuBois’s more horns, woodwinds) with the instincts land, that the men who ‘‘infest our

E.

self-consciously dignified rendering. of both the black church (rhythm In 1845, J. K. Kennard, a critic for promenades and our concert halls

American popular culture was sections, gospel harmonies, hand the newspaper The Knickerbocker, like a colony of beetles’’ (as a contem-
doomed to cycles not only of claps) and juke joint Saturday nights hyperventilated about the black- porary of Kennard’s put it) weren’t

questioned ownership, challenged (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). ening of America. Except he was black people at all but white people

authenticity, dubious propriety and Pure yet ‘‘noisy.’’ Black men in Arma- talking about blackface minstrels just like him — beetles and, eventu-

legitimate cultural self-preserva- ni. Black women in ball gowns. Sta- doing the blackening. Nonetheless, ally, Beatles. Our first most original

tion but also to the prison of black bles of black writers, producers and Kennard could see things for what art form arose from our original sin,

respectability, which, with brutal musicians. Backup singers solving they were: and some white people have always

irony, could itself entail a kind of social equations with geometric cho- been worried that the primacy of

appropriation. It meant comport- reography. And just in time for the ‘‘Who are our true rulers? black music would be a kind of kar-

ment in a manner that seemed less hegemony of the American teenager. The negro poets, to be sure! mic punishment for that sin. The

black and more white. It meant the Even now it feels like an assault Do they not set the fashion, work has been to free this country

appearance of refinement and pol- on the music made a hundred years and give laws to the public from paranoia’s bondage, to truly
ish. It meant the cognitive disso- before it. Motown specialized taste? Let one of them, in the embrace the amplitude of integra-

nance of, say, Nat King Cole’s being in love songs. But its stars, those swamps of Carolina, compose tion. I don’t know how we’re doing.

very black and sounding — to white songs and their performance of a new song, and it no sooner Last spring, ‘‘Old Town Road,’’

America, anyway, with his friction- them were declarations of war on reaches the ear of a white ama- a silly, drowsy ditty by the Atlanta

less baritone and diction as crisp as the insults of the past and present. teur, than it is written down, songwriter Lil Nas X, was essen-

a hospital corner — suitably white. The scratchy piccolo at the start amended, (that is, almost tially banished from country radio.

He was perfect for radio, yet when of a Four Tops hit was, in its way, spoilt,) printed, and then put Lil Nas sounds black, as does the

t. Respectability wasn’t
he got a TV show of his own, it was a raised fis upon a course of rapid dissem- trap beat he’s droning over. But

abruptly canceled, his brown skin a problem with Motown; respect- ination, to cease only with the there’s definitely a twang to him

being too much for even the black ability was its point. How radically utmost bounds of Anglo-Sax- that goes with the opening bars of

and white of a 1955 television set. optimistic a feat of antiminstrelsy, ondom, perhaps of the world.’’ faint banjo and Lil Nas’s lil’ cowboy
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