Whiting Up

Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

Marvin McAllister

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781469618807, 9780807835081
• eBook ISBN: 9780807869062
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video “Dangerous.” In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of “whiting up,” in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial identities.

Not to be confused with racial “passing” or derogatory notions of “acting white,” whiting up is a deliberate performance strategy designed to challenge America’s racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to black bodies — creating unexpected intercultural alliances even as it sharply critiques racial stereotypes. Along with conventional theater, McAllister considers a variety of other live performance modes, including weekly promenading rituals, antebellum cakewalks, solo performance, and standup comedy. For over three centuries, whiting up as allowed African American artists to appropriate white cultural production, fashion new black identities through these “white” forms, and advance our collective ability to locate ourselves in others.

Chapter 1 Liberatory Whiteness

Early Whiteface Minstrels, Enslaved and Free

On Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons in the early nineteenth century, major thoroughfares such as Broadway in New York City or Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina, overflowed with impeccably dressed and remarkably audacious African Americans out for a leisurely stroll. In a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post, one concerned citizen reported on this social ritual: “These people were all well drest, and very much better than the whites. The men almost without exception, wore broadcloth coats, very many of them boots, fashionable Cossack pantaloons, and white hats; watches and canes. The latter article was observed to be flourished with inimitable grace, to the annoyance of all the passengers.”¹ “These people” refers to stylish Negro promenaders who, alongside white citizens, participated in a common leisure pursuit that was less expensive than attending the theater and less morally compromised than consuming spirits at the local beer or pleasure garden. As this open letter intimates, well-heeled Negroes often dominated these crowded public spaces and were the indisputable stars of this social performance; in fact, this concerned citizen counted nearly 1,500 black bodies on this particular afternoon. Throughout the 1820s, whiteface minstrelsy, the Afro-Diasporic practice of assuming and performing white privilege, was taking New York by storm, and for some, the swank and swaggering black fashionistas were more annoyances than attractions. The cane-wielding colored gentry was commanding city streets with elitist attitudes and physically terrorizing decent citizens.

In a July 1822 editorial titled “Blacks,” Manual Mordecai Noah, editor of New York’s National Advocate, further exposed the Negro insolence displayed during these public promenades:

We are among those who are for giving every protection of person, property, and civil and religious rights to the blacks; but it is not to be denied, that in this city they are becoming intolerable.

On Sunday, a strapping black was about chastising a genteel well behaved young white man, because he took the wall of him; and in their walks in Broadway, there is no enduring their insolence. A lady passing by St. Paul’s Church, was met by 3 sable colored women, tricked out in the height of the fashion; one of them gave way for the other lady, while another exclaimed, loud enough to be heard by the passers-by—“Louisa, why did you give the wall to that white woman.”²

Noah’s editorial confirms that a struggle over urban space was being waged between white citizens and excessively fashionable “Blacks.” “Giving the wall” meant a pedestrian allowed another passerby to walk closer to the buildings on a street, while the giver, in turn, moved out to the street. Custom dictated that Negroes, enslaved or free, “give the wall” to a white person, but in 1822, the racial hierarchy was under siege. Noah respected the rights of Afro–New Yorkers, but like many whites, he believed their stylish impudence had gone too far and needed to be contained.

New Yorkers were witnessing what political scientist and anthropologist James Scott would call a collision of public and private transcripts. According to Scott’s theories on cultural resistance, subaltern groups often develop a critique of the dominant culture offstage, away from public, onstage transcripts, which are primarily defined and monitored by masters or colonizers. To prepare and perform their offstage commentaries on public life, subalterns typically borrow gestures, practices, speech patterns, and other cultural material from the dominant group.³ But in the 1800s, fashionable Negroes in New York City and Charleston were not satisfied with performing private transcripts offstage or backstage. These early whiting up artists brought their kid gloves, broadcloth coats, parasols, and prodigious attitudes onto the main stages of Broadway and Meeting Street.

This chapter traces whiteface minstrelsy in private, semiprivate, and public spaces in the areas surrounding Charleston, South Carolina, during the colonial and antebellum periods. I contend that early African American whiteface spectacles were less about ridiculing whiteness and more about showcasing black style, forging communal identity, asserting representational freedom, and training American Negroes for emancipation. We begin with private, clandestine “country dances” popular in the Charleston area during the late 1700s and then transition to semiprivate cakewalk performances initially designed by and for the dominant class. These master-financed but slave-dominated parties and cakewalk competitions would lead to liberating Afro-Diasporic reinterpretations of European dance. Finally, I close this conversation on whiteface minstrelsy in South Carolina with a most jarring collision of private and public transcripts instigated by impeccably adorned enslaved and free persons of color promenading through the streets of Charleston. I am interested in what all three whiting up acts signified for the Negro participants, especially how the secretive country dances, cakewalks, and Sunday promenades appropriated yet altered white style, prestige, and privilege. But to appreciate the agency and creativity of these early African American artists, we first need to understand the incredibly complex world of bondage in colonial and antebellum South Carolina.

Slavery was the medium or performance context for the earliest whiteface minstrel acts, and this world was very different depending on one’s position in the racial hierarchy. Writing about the American South from the master’s perspective, historian Eugene Genovese identifies an often contradictory form of paternalism rooted in a system of mutual obligations between slave and master. As they cultivated a seemingly comfortable position atop the region’s racial and class hierarchies, southern masters acknowledged certain duties to their slaves. The most patriarchic owners, especially in cosmopolitan cities like Charleston, treated their property as extensions of themselves and even cultivated specific slave talents. By acknowledging the skills, humanity, and free will of their property, paternalistic masters and mistresses provided enslaved Africans with the wherewithal to forge somewhat independent identities.⁴

In postemancipation interviews collected by the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), former enslaved Africans revealed the impact of these master-defined racial and class hierarchies. They recalled with nostalgia how white folks were especially “proud of dey niggers” and displayed their prized possessions when company arrived. Conditioned by the master’s paternalist self-image, enslaved Africans were encouraged to identify with upper-class whites more than with fellow slaves or lower-class whites. Demonstrating a surprising degree of familial bonding, former enslaved Africans from urban and rural plantations nostalgically referred to their former owners as “my white people” or “my white folks” and took pride in being owned by kind, genteel people, as opposed to “poor white trash” or “white free niggers.”⁵

However, when we take a closer look at the enslaved perspective, a very different slaveholding world emerges. After working carefully and critically through the WPA interviews, historian Mia Bay concluded that the majority of former enslaved Africans did not experience the paternalism imagined by American slave owners. In their most honest and forthright moments, they did not remember themselves as dependent children or prized possessions. Instead, they overwhelmingly recalled how they were treated as beasts to be used and often abused by their masters. In fact, when they were treated well, meaning as human beings, ex-slaves often claimed they were treated “like white people.”⁶ Here we see the impact of racial hierarchy on an enslaved consciousness, as the former bondmen and bondwomen consistently drew powerful connections between whiteness, humanity, and humane treatment. Ultimately, Bay believes that the WPA interviews reveal an enslaved world at odds with the master’s perception of reality, and if American slaves, north or south, urban or rural, did develop any sense of agency or autonomy, they did so despite the paternalistic attitudes of their masters.

As for the acculturation of New World Africans, historian Michael Gomez offers a dualistic model that resonates with James Scott’s theory of private and public transcripts. Consistent with this incredible notion that only white people received or deserved kindness, Gomez argues that enslaved Africans were shaped by a “culture of coercion,” a system of imposed cultural codes and norms dictated by the white “host society.” Yet this coercive acculturative process was balanced by a “culture of volition” in which enslaved communities, often away from the gaze of whites, selected material from the dominant culture and whenever necessary adapted those cultural elements to their specific social settings and needs.⁷ These two varieties of acculturation made it possible for African American social performers to appropriate white privilege, develop culturally distinct identities, and contest Euro-American supremacy.

Colonial South Carolina, where various whiting up acts first emerged, was carved from a North American territory originally inhabited by nearly thirty different Native American nations, with the Catawba, Yemassee, and Santee among the most prominent tribes.⁸ In the 1660s, Spanish and English colonists arrived in the region and decimated the native population, and by 1670, the English had established a politically and economically dominant British crown colony of South Carolina. By 1720, there were sparse pockets of Native Americans, roughly 12,000 Africans, and only 5,048 whites in this royal possession. Given the majority-black population, economic cooperation between Europeans and New World Africans was a necessity, and this economic fact played a major role in the acculturation and identity formation of enslaved Africans and free blacks in the colony. In order to cultivate crops in the humid, tropical South Carolina climate, English planters depended on the hearty bodies and agricultural expertise of imported Congo-Angolans and Senegambians. Thanks, in large part, to a resourceful African population, this crown colony grew into an enormously successful venture responsible for producing massive amounts of rice, a significant staple crop for the British Empire. Additionally, South Carolina’s dependency on skilled Africans placed this enslaved population in a prime position to negotiate certain economic privileges.⁹ For example, on large plantations, enslaved Africans labored for their masters six days a week and worked for themselves one day a week on small plots of “their” land.

Charleston, in the late 1700s, was a major seaport with the largest enslaved population of any city in North America, and by 1820, the municipal census reported 12,652 slaves, 1,475 free blacks, and 10,653 whites.¹⁰ As the majority in an international, even cosmopolitan city, members of Charleston’s enslaved population were mildly “liberated,” with unique relationships to their masters, other whites, and a significant free black population. Free persons of color gravitated to this port city because it was the safest and most lucrative harbor in South Carolina, if not the entire United States. Charleston offered free as well as enslaved Africans the widest range of economic opportunities. Within the city’s complex economy, blacks were employed in skilled and unskilled occupations, including factory workers, shoemakers, stevedores, blacksmiths, leather craftsmen, bricklayers, and even firemen. Urban slaveowners profited greatly from such a diversified Negro labor pool, which thus allowed Charleston slaves to negotiate more entitlements, like the liberating practices of “hiring out” and “living out.”

Hiring out was a fascinating economic arrangement popular in a few southern cities. Under this practice, skilled slaves were allowed to arrange wages and hours with employers, collect their wages, give a specified sum to their master each month, and retain the rest for themselves.¹¹ Here we have a clear example of enslaved Africans, in specific market conditions, attaining a level of economic autonomy based on their marketable talents. On face value, it would seem that if an enslaved individual was earning an income and pocketing a portion of his or her salary, the term “slave” might no longer apply. A South Carolina committee studying hiring out recognized an inherent danger in this economic practice specifically because “slaves are permitted to go at large, exercising all the privileges of free persons, making contracts, doing work and in every way being and conducting themselves as if they were not slaves.”¹² To reinforce or remind Africans of their enslaved status, Charleston’s city council, in the early 1800s, instituted a system for monitoring hired out slaves. This system included badges to identify the type of employment, specific areas to transact hiring contracts, limits on the numbers of enslaved Africans that could be hired by one employer, and even salary caps.¹³

As for living out, in major southern cities such as New Orleans and Charleston, most enslaved Africans resided in quarters adjacent to the master’s house, but some bondservants were allowed to occupy homes completely apart from their owners.¹⁴ Unlike hiring out, living out was never officially sanctioned or supervised by law. As early as 1740, so many Charleston slaves were living apart from their masters that local authorities officially forbade enslaved Africans from sleeping away from their master’s compound. This colonial era ban on living out was never strictly enforced because wealthy slave owners did not support the municipal ordinance. Therefore, Charleston slaves continued to live out and even began renting rundown shanties in a suburb just outside Charleston; this area, known as “the Neck,” became Charleston’s first black neighborhood. Although quarters on the master’s estate were quite commodious compared with Neck shacks, enslaved Charlestonians often preferred the latter. One white Charleston woman observed “that even if they receive wages, besides their old privileges, they are not free as long as they are with their old masters, and you see them leaving their comfortable homes and living in miserable shanties.”¹⁵ Residing with their master was a constant reminder of bondage, and many enslaved Africans were committed to escaping that reality, even if it meant sacrificing comfort and flouting the law.

For urban enslaved populations, social and economic autonomy clearly became priorities, and according to historian Richard Wade, “as cities grew, they produced conditions which first strained, then undermined, the regime of bondage in the South’s metropolises.”¹⁶ With their aspirations fixed on liberation, Charleston slaves gradually redefined their social realities through shrewdly negotiated privileges like hiring out and living out. These economic practices also complicated the acculturation process in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Charleston. Hiring out provided enslaved Africans with disposable incomes, and living out created private, slave residences; these unique social and economic conditions led to the development of black leisure. Thus the stage was set for multiple forms of whiteface minstrelsy to emerge and for enslaved South Carolinians to inch closer to some semblance of emancipation.

Semiprivate Whiteface: The Country Dance

Throughout the colonial and antebellum American South, enslaved Africans cultivated private, often illegal gatherings where they could “steal” time away from forced labor and white surveillance to indulge in various forms of pleasure. Saidiya Hartman characterizes slaves “stealing away” as “unlicensed movement, collective assembly, and an abrogation of the terms of subjection in acts as simple as sneaking off to laugh and talk with friends or making nocturnal visits to loved ones.”¹⁷ In antebellum Richmond, Virginia, traveler and historian Frederick Law Olmsted uncovered “Champaign Suppers” where urban bondservants would congregate apart from their masters to socialize. Former enslaved Africans from rural and urban South Carolina recalled how they would gather “mos’ ev’ry Sa’day night for our li’l mite o’ fun from de white folks hearin’.”¹⁸ In colonial Charleston, enslaved and free blacks routinely congregated around the city in social events euphemistically called country dances. These semiprivate acts of unsanctioned leisure represent the earliest recorded examples of whiteface minstrelsy in America. Often centered around parodic performance, these offstage transcripts afforded black South Carolinians space to construct and develop resistant commentaries on the dominant culture.

I use the term “semiprivate” because we only have a record of this unique event because a white informant, a European visitor writing under the pen name “The Stranger,” reported on a country dance he allegedly witnessed. In August 1772, The Stranger began sending letters to editor T. Powell of the South Carolina Gazette, all intended to convince South Carolinians to enforce their languishing General Assembly laws and protect the “health and security” of their fair colony.¹⁹ One vigilante letter, published in late August 1772, focused on what he perceived to be a serious social nuisance plaguing Charleston: insolent Negroes.²⁰ The Stranger found Charleston slaves to be notably more rude and uncontrollable than country or rural slaves. In his opinion, black Charlestonians were especially prone to gaming, drunkenness, and other lewd behaviors, and he was most offended by the city’s remarkably well-dressed and incredibly haughty female slaves. We shall return to this particular nuisance shortly.

The Stranger is our principal witness to one of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Whiting Up
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Liberatory Whiteness
• Chapter 2 Imitation Whiteness
• Chapter 3 Low-Down Whiteness
• Chapter 4 Trespassing on Whiteness
• Chapter 5 Estranging Whiteness
• Chapter 6 White People Be Like …
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index