This week, Social Democrats TD Eoin Hayes became embroiled in controversy when it emerged that he had worn blackface to a party. That is to say, in 2009 when he was a student, he put dark brown make-up on his hands and face to dress up as Barack Obama at a Halloween party.
When he learned that a news outlet had got hold of the photos – taken when he was president of the students’ union at University College Cork – Hayes offered an unreserved apology. “What I did was completely inappropriate and a huge mistake. I condemn racism in all its forms and do not condone that behaviour under any circumstances,” he said.
The Social Democrats apologised as well, though the incident was very embarrassing for a party whose supporters see it as a sorely needed voice for social justice in Irish politics. Party leader Holly Cairns rightly remarked that “blackface is a form of racism”. She is correct – but to understand just how offensive it is, you need to know something about its history.
Blackface originated as a form of popular entertainment in the United States in the 1830s when a white man, TD Rice, imitated a black man performing a dance called “jump Jim Crow” that Rice had witnessed among enslaved African Americans. (Jim Crow was the name for the notorious racial segregation laws in the US South that were enacted in the decades after the Civil War). Rice used burnt cork to black up his face and hands and donned outrageous clothes. He made comedy out of ridiculing black people and their culture. It made him world famous.
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Blackface became the first American popular culture with truly national reach. It spread like wildfire. The first blackface minstrel troupe was formed by Dan Emmett in New York City in 1842. Two years later, it performed at the White House. Minstrel shows involved singing, dancing, and comic skits. They were widely celebrated by leading Americans including Mark Twain, who praised them as a democratic and uniquely American art form. If he could have minstrel shows, he proclaimed, he would have “but little further use for the opera”.
But this wasn’t just light entertainment. Denigration of black people was at the heart of blackface minstrelsy. It involved white people poking fun at black people. Indeed, blackface is responsible for promulgating racist stereotypes, including popularising the character of “Sambo” who, while good-natured, is very stupid and possesses limitless appetites. For those who know the history, hearing a sandwich referred to as a “sambo” seems strange.
Many Irish-Americans were involved in blackface minstrelsy as entertainers and as audience members in its epicentre, New York City. For Irish immigrants and their descendants, who faced intense discrimination, putting on blackface was paradoxically a way of solidifying their identities as white. Mocking black people was an assertion of white supremacy, helping ensure that the Irish would fall on the most advantageous side of the American colour line.
Yet blackface was not simply about making fun of black people either. It also reflected a white fascination with black culture, even a desire to be black in the act of racial cross-dressing. Acting black enabled performers and audiences to express emotions that were otherwise repressed.
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Many blackface songs imagined plantation slaves living lazy, idyllic lives close to nature. This was absolutely absurd as a representation of plantation slavery and served as a justification for it. Yet for those who had recently left the countryside for the city – as was true of many Irish immigrants – such songs expressed nostalgia for what they had lost. Similarly, bawdy minstrel performances enabled whites to express sexual desires. However, that they had to dress up as black in order to do so contributed to pervasive stereotypes of black people as oversexualised.
Blackface minstrelsy was not popular just in the United States, but quickly spread to Europe as well. Minstrel shows were a common feature of the Irish entertainment landscape from the mid-19th century well into the 20th. They were also popular across the Irish Sea. In 1895, drawing on her love of minstrel shows, the English illustrator Florence Kate Upton invented the character of the golliwog. “A horrid sight, the blackest gnome”, the golliwog was friendly but childlike. It rapidly became a much-loved children’s doll, but the golliwog reinforced racist stereotypes, conjuring up notions of physical ugliness and intellectual inferiority.
Though minstrel shows became less common as the 20th century progressed, they left a long mark on popular culture. The first film to use recorded sound – The Jazz Singer (1927) – features a protagonist in blackface. A Jewish immigrant, he dresses black to assert his whiteness, just like Irish immigrants before him. The BBC created a long-running television series, The Black and White Minstrel Show, which was on air until 1978. It was much watched in Ireland and its performers advertised an iconic Irish brand, Lyons Tea.
While the minstrel show ultimately ended due to anti-racist protests, such a pervasive popular culture could hardly just disappear. That is why it is unsurprising that so many public figures have been caught having once put on blackface.
Hayes is but one in a long line of such politicians. In 2019, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau admitted that he could not remember how many times he had put on blackface. That same year, photos surfaced of the Virginia governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, having worn blackface some decades before. Then it emerged that the state’s attorney general had also once put on blackface.
Of course, when judging those who have put on blackface, it matters what their intentions were. When Hayes did so, he was undoubtedly not intending to be racist. He claims he did it because he “greatly admired” Obama.
Yet putting on blackface cannot be separated out from that practice’s racist history. It is inextricable from the denigration, ridicule and stereotyping of black people.
Dr Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott professor of US history at Trinity College Dublin
