In an effort to help forestall the donning of racist Halloween costumes, Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. took the time last week to explain the painful history of blackface and minstrel shows. He was joined in that effort by none other than CUNY Professor Eric Lott, whose writing and thinking have been absolutely critical to our understanding of racial fantasy in American culture for decades, from 1993’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, to Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, which we published this fall.
Have a look at Wood and Lott’s breakdown of the ways in which the mindlessly offensive racial costuming we see each Halloween is rooted in the history and politics of slavery:
In her 1993 review of the “terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely” Love and Theft, author and critic Margo Jefferson expressed the hope that Lott would pursue the threads of this American racial identity crisis into the twentieth century. With Black Mirror, that’s exactly what he’s done. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Lott explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital—including and above all blackface—to reproduce white cultural dominance, threatening in the process to betray the racial hegemony that generated those institutions and that they exist in order to maintain.
In the following passage excerpted from the book’s Preface, Lott explains how Black Mirror continues and expands on the work he did with Love and Theft.
Black Mirror seeks to plumb the contradictions and some of the consequences of U.S. racism’s theaters of fantasy—classic American literature, Hollywood film, pop musical artistry, and venturesome social commentary among them—across the long twentieth century, culminating in a moment of black moral power in the grip of institutionalized black death.
A series of dreams, you might say, where nothing comes up to the top and everything stays down where it’s wounded, as Bob Dylan once sang: dreams my book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class set out to explore in a different but hardly unrelated moment and format. I sought in that book to do a number of things at once. I wanted to offer close analysis of a various and still-influential U.S. entertainment form, to speculate on the vagaries of popular antebellum racial feeling arising from and visible in it, and to provide an account of plebeian racial politics in the decades before the Civil War. At the heart of the book was a theory of white appropriations of African American cultural materials for sport and profit, appropriations that sometimes produced unintended cultural and historical results. In September 2001, on 9/11 in fact, Dylan released an album that appropriated the title of my book, a tribute of sorts to its themes, just as I had riffed on the title of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel for mine. Dylan’s “Love and Theft”—the only one of his many albums whose title is in quotation marks—contributes its share to thinking about racialized cross-cultural borrowing, as I describe in Chapter 8. Black Mirror extends and expands the story of white America’s way with black symbolic and cultural capital, its uses as inspiration and as raw material (though it is anything but) and most importantly as a modality of self-recognition, in music and performative force, narrative depiction and visual representation, social occasion and subject position. U.S. dominant cultural makers have taken up African America in various forms of interracial embrace with variable and uncertain results, often as a way to reproduce themselves and their own hegemony, occasionally with liberating consequences, all of it a blue tangle of impacted self-regard: a kind of black mirror. Fantasies of white plenitude dance with misrecognition in the looking-glass culture industries, which have based themselves substantially on the skin trade.
Having pursued the affective life of whiteness in nineteenth-century America by looking at one of its principal cultural forms, I turn here to some of the cultural institutions that subsequently erected the screens and templates of black mirroring, the mechanics, dispositions, and effects of the dominant culture’s looking at itself always through a fantasized black Other. If Du Bois’s “double consciousness” captured the way African Americans are made to see themselves through the eyes of white dominance, black mirroring is its dialectically related but asymmetrical inverse, the very medium of white luxury and privilege. Hence Fiedler’s stirring (if imperfect) analyses long ago of the aching white desire for cross-racial love to coexist with the caste system, or Langston Hughes’s biting nod to the frisson of dinner table white shame (“ ‘I’m so ashamed of being white’ ”). “Mirror mirror on the wall / Can you see my face at all?” sings Merrill Garbus in tUnE-yArDs’s “Powa,” a screaming demand for female recognition that extends to black power in the white-Narcissus wellspring I am studying (and in which tUnE-yArDs self-consciously know they swim).
One intellectual achievement of the last two decades has been to displace—somewhat—the sterile middlebrow moralism and handwringing that used to rule the study of race and culture (though here and there a David Brooks will rear his goofy head: I speak among other things of his New York Times epistolary column in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s epistolary Between the World and Me, Brooks addressing Coates as Coates in his book addresses his son, Brooks’s column an exemplary instance of willful mirroring—mimicking Coates’s work in order to refuse its summons). Nowadays the unequal terms of racial power in the United States have become so starkly visible that a bracing anger has raised the stakes. This circumstance, salutary as it is, doesn’t encourage a full attention to the rather wayward dimensions of the hysterical and sometimes downright bizarre cultural forms white America has produced to explain itself to itself over the last century. Over the course of twentieth-century liberalism, cultural shapes arose in which Caucasoid self-definition depended ever more fiercely—and weirdly—on its dialectical other. The race-liberal cross-dressing of Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn) and John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me), race-curious Hollywood noir and Elvis impersonation, white-ethnic blackface badinage (Frank Sinatra) and corrosive irony (Steely Dan), and rock ’n’ roll bootlegging and pimp gaming (Dylan, Joni Mitchell) are spaces of fantasy that require a whole new kind of “reflection theory” to account for the speculations they enact through racialized mirror-gazing. Mirrors don’t reflect; they reverse and distort for starters, and what you offer up to them is precisely what swerves away (per John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). Black Mirror takes up a slightly idiosyncratic but highly influential vein of cultural production and iconography in order to explore the condensations and displacements, disavowals and ruthless demands of white affect in the throes of racial capitalism—very, very far from the fairest one of all.
The great Greil Marcus writes of Black Mirror that it “made worlds I thought I knew look unexplored: more interesting, more cryptic, more threatening, more alive.” Cryptic, threatening, and alive enough on their own, that is; take care your costumes don’t compound the fantasy.
