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Minstrelsy In America

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With the arrival of minstrelsy in the U.S., a new brand of entertainment infiltrated the stages and screens of antebellum America. As the theatre and film industry caught on to the concept of blackface, Black actors at the time were faced with a dilemma: perpetuate the racial stereotypes that lingered in the smears of cork oil, or be denied the few roles available to Black performers at the time. In this paper, I argue that this choice, while seemingly simple to today 's audience, was further complicated by the social climate of the time as financial and political barriers to success influenced the Black actor to become complicit in their own oppression. Although Black actors benefited financially by performing in blackface, the unpredicted …show more content…

Those characterizations of Uncle Tom did not come from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom 's Cabin. They in fact came from the images shown in minstrelsy. In Beecher’s book Uncle Tom was somewhat intelligent, however not educated, and was an example of Christian morality. On stage in the minstrel show he became the sniveling black man who was really a coward and was ignorant and somewhat witty in his connection to the all of the slave masters. So that image came totally from minstrelsy, and if we could go down the line and we can surely note other ways in which those images pervaded the society at that time, those were the images, that was the sense of what black people were like” …show more content…

Lucas’s success in Uncle Tom’s Cabin paved the way for many black actors and actresses such as Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, and Billie Thomas. In 1940, Hattie McDaniel, was the first Black American to win an Oscar for her supporting role as Scarlett O 'Hara 's house servant, Mammy, in Gone with the Wind. Through the mid-1940s, McDaniel appeared in more films, playing roles that members of the post-war progressive black community were beginning to note as insulting. McDaniel had been attacked by the media for taking parts that perpetuated a negative depictions of blacks. She was judged harshly for playing servants and slaves who were seemingly content to retain their role as such. President Walter White, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pleaded with black actors to stop accepting such stereotypical roles, because he believed they degraded the black community. He also asked multiple movie studios to start writing roles that show blacks as being able to achieve far more than cooking and cleaning for white people (Cripps, 179). McDaniel responded by asserting her right to accept whatever roles she chose. She also said that characters just like Mammy proved themselves as more than just measuring up to their

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Over time, Vaudeville replaced minstrelsy, but it reinforced the “racism of the larger society, and to perform onstage black artists had to incorporate much racist imagery”(45). The author pays close attention to this struggle and describes how influential characters such as Bert Williams and George Walker begin to dominate black vaudeville. She pens this description of their work: “ [they] sought to entertain, but also saw the popular stage as an arena where they could push against stereotypes” (4). Williams and Hogan “brought a black political agenda to their stage productions”(3). Sotiropoulos challenges the stereotypes of the minstrel mask and brings the black community to a positive light for

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The South’s Secession The south seceding was a big turning point in history. It marked a new chapter, and not a very good one. The south seceded with a number of “grievances”. These “grievances” included a number of disagreements on major issues.

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The general argument made by Peter Catapano in his work, “Performing Race on the Great Divide”, is that minstrelsy has been a significant topic that’s been examined upon by many intellectuals. More specifically, Catapano argues that minstrelsy has influenced the field of race and entertainment. He writes, “popular music, theater, and popular advertising images were particularly destructive to their notion of uplift and respectability of a race that was suffering under an assault of odious stereotypes.” In this passage, Catapano is suggesting that there were stereotypes about African-American culture in music and shows back in the older days. In conclusion, Catapano’s belief is that even though the great divide raised a challenge between the

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Mammy is one of the stereotype how white men look at to African American women. Mammy was pictured as fat, middle-aged, funny. Mammy 's most successful commercial expression is Aunt Jemima. ‘In 1889, Charles Rutt, a Missouri newspaper editor, and Charles G. Underwood, a mill owner, developed the idea of a self-rising flour that only needed water. He called it Aunt Jemima 's recipe.

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788 Words | 4 Pages

DBQ Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1851-1852. The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a white abolitionist who believed in the anti-slavery movement. Her name was Harriet Beecher Stowe. From when Harriet Beecher Stowe was in her twenties she became familiar with stories about slaves and runaways passing through the area. She had hoped it would convince the South and the North that slavery was wrong, but sadly more people supported slavery then against.

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There was singing, dancing, and comedy. One practice that emerged, however, was the blackening of one's face with burnt cork or shoe polish. These white men would emphasize the shape of their lips and then parodied their speech patterns. These blackfaced characters became a huge success but brought

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491 Words | 2 Pages

Sydnee Winston writes that “The positioning of the mammy as “contented” and “pleased” with her domestic role established an ideal of black woman being “okay” with economic exploitation”. The truth was, they had to act “happy” with how their employers were treating them, because they needed those jobs to

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She did not cause a treat or competition for the slave owner’s wife. Mammy was another figure used to soothe the slave owner’s conscience or rationalize the treatment of slave woman. The reading material was thought provoking because it made me think of the idea of woman as property with no rights. Then, I thought of the idea of property seducing or having the power to seduce their owners. These ideas are the polar opposite and unimaginable.

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“Josiah Henson spent thirty years on a plantation in Maryland, before he escaped slavery and became a Methodist preacher, abolitionist, lecturer, and founder of a cooperative colony of former slaves in Canada. His memoirs, published in 1849, provided abolitionist and author Harriett Beecher Stowe with her model for Uncle Tom. In 1852, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin to show slavery as a cruel and unjust institution. In the first year over 300,000 copies of her book were sold. In 1856, five years before the first shots were fired in the Civil War, over two million copies were sold in the northern United States.

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At first, the act was predominantly done by white people who wore black faces to depict how African-Americans spoke and acted, but eventually, there was a recorded increase in African-Americans themselves who too wore the black faces. The acts included a variety of comic acts, African-American music, comic skits, and dancing (Minstrel Show). However, with the shows’ popularity, it was also quite clear that the acts were highly depicted as racist towards the African Americans. This notion comes about from the fact that the acts portrayed African Americans as lazy, ignorant, and as those who loved music and dancing regardless of any other facet of life. Surprisingly, the history of the minstrel acts has over the time infatuated both black artists in the modern day and a clique of white artists locally referred to as “wiggers” which translates to white artists who want to act as black artists (Blacking Up: Hip-Hop 's Remix of Race and Identity).

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The Minstrel show set the stereotypes for African Americans in the 19th century. With the shows mimicking demeanor and use of black face, the minstrels showed the way they believed African Americans acted. The interlocutor would wink to the audience to establish the mutual understanding that the performers are differentfrom the audience but only because the performers are in the blackface. Acknowledging that the blackfaced white actors are only in black face and are not actually “black” is an important destinction that entertains the white audience and performers. The mintrels would say that the performance was not aimed to discuss the direct connect between the white mintrel performers and the African Americans.

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There is a clear through-line in our nation’s history of blackface. As a detrimental tradition, the practice reflects a collectively low opinion of African-Americans, so much so that it became feasible to reduce an entire group of people to caricatures. When Rondrich describes minstrelsy as the “first truly American band” based on its origin within and its reflection of our past beliefs, I found it a sickeningly accurate statement. It is rather astonishing how music has been used to disseminate racially charged imagery—in this situation, Adorno’s fears of music perpetuating group-thought was startlingly supported. Beyond the racial elements, the growing popularity of blackface minstrelsy reflects how low-quality entertainment (more colloquially,

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In the early announcement about the film in 2007, it evoked resistance from African Americans, since the initial name of the princess was “Maddy” — a word that has “homonymous connections” with “Mammy” (Lester 2010, p.299). “Mammy” is the historical stereotype of black women that was widely accepted in early decades of American animation. “Mammy” is often depicted as a fat woman who can only do domestic work for white people. Specifically, the most well-known image of “Mammy” is Mammy-Two-Shoes in MGM’s Tom and Jerry. She appeared as Tom’s owner who wore a white or blue apron, thick tights and house slippers (Parasecoli, 2010, p. 458).

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When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin because she wanted to stir up an anti-slavery statement. Slavery was already the unpopular choice for Northerners, but Harriet Beecher Stowe made the Northerners even more opposed to slavery. Slavery even became less popular in the Southern states. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin made many Northerners realize how unjust slavery was for the first time, and increased the differences between the North and the South.

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610 Words | 3 Pages

Black women are treated less than because of their ascribed traits, their gender and race, and are often dehumanized and belittled throughout the movie. They are treated like slaves and are seen as easily disposable. There are several moments throughout the film that show the racial, gender, and class inequalities. These moments also show exploitation and opportunity hoarding. The Help also explains historical context of the inequality that occurred during that time period.

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