Before Blackface in the South Was Funny

How Innocent Racism Merged with Serious Racism Over the Century After the Civil War

The Persistent Racial Wage Gap in Mississippi, which is much wider before 1965 [whites are on top in squares and Blacks on the bottom, showing two economically separate states]

I. The South is Not Laughing

Blackface was discovered mainly in northern urban shows before the Civil War. I heard some interesting clues about this when listening to the 1619 podcast on a long drive to Austin and back to Houston. I got the impression that these minstrel shows, stemming from the 1834 act one white man made, diminished the gravity of slavery up North and made it more acceptable through entertainment.

Those in the North who recently arrived and those going about their business were up against Blacks and whites in the abolitionist movement, and created a backdrop of demanding neutral people to side against slavery. But this oppositional technique that developed, the Jim Crow or minstrel show, eased that tension. It was easy to make light of something that didn’t exist in the North, and the vast majority of people never saw slavery. Thus, laughing at Blackface was not as difficult as it was in the South, helping dispel that polarizing political tension building up to the Civil War.

New immigrants felt that slavery was not such a big deal when laughing at “stupid negro,” or singing along with those minstrels in blackface. “Look how slow and lazy they are.” The brutality, the severe and continual living and work environment in the Southeast was erased by these northern shows, and the daily cruelty and threats white management heaped on them vanished, as did the incredible wealth extracted from that labor.

The “joy” and the “belief in American freedom” that the narrator in episode three of the 1619 podcast from the NYTimes, by Dr. Hannah Nicole-Jones, talks about were not present in the South itself. I became aware of this timeline and looked up when the first minstrel shows were held in Mississippi. There’s no indication that infectious or joyous black music was used for mass entertainment way down on the Swanee River.

The minstrel did not spread into the Deep South quickly at all. White men driving slaves knew from practice that Blacks worked the hardest, often 16 to 18 hours a day during harvest. Thus, the minstrel shows appear to have penetrated the Southeast only long after the Civil War, and they reached Mississippi only after 1900, as a quick Google AI search indicates.

I’m not sure I can trust AI completely. However, the lack of and slow adoption of the Jim Crow minstrel shows does indicate the resistance in the Southeast to making the slave situation humorous during the first 40 years of convict leasing, which was based on the constitutional American slavery of the Exception Clause.

The direct white evidence also erased was the quadrupling of cotton exporting from the Southeast by 1916 from 1860. The only method STILL employed was black hands picking cotton, mostly under the white man’s guns in slavecropping system. That system was complementary to the convict slave leasing that the state had for renting out captured and convicted blacks to plantations. There was nothing even remotely funny about this system.

In other words, after the Civil War, the white managerial brutality system had not stopped. If anything, it got worse. The brutality did not stop; it only got erased. Quadrupling cotton exports by 1916, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s economic report, no longer included labor costs and failed to show black hands picking the cotton.

II. When the Left Was Republican and the Right Democrats in post-WWII America

White managers in coal mines and rural wood farming camps or pine tar camps became more brutal. As white owners did not buy the black negroes with money like a car, and only leased them from the state government, the white managers did not have to be completely careful in whipping them to death or shooting the black convicts in the back. There was more supply. The white state-run government could just go get more through the police or sheriffs.

In episode 4 of the 1619 podcast, Jeneen Interlandi describes the health care system after the Civil War as deliberately resisting the provision of care to the millions of freed negroes. The white Southern politicians kept funding for the clinics for Blacks at a minimum, and when some of those clinics closed, the white politicians didn’t reopen them. There was no additional help for a surge during a measles pandemic. The white conservative Democratic politicians in the Southeast instead brought down the Freeman hospitals set up after the Civil War.

But which part of the government? When discussing this post-Civil War period of healthcare, nothing is mentioned about the division within the government. Where is the political division that plagued the country in the narrative? It was still rampant.

Was she talking about the state or federal government? The federal government was polarized, and the state governments in the South were even more so. How can we not know this incredible fact about American politics that Truman saw clearly, coming from the political far-right state of Missouri? His kind of white man in that state today is either solid white right or far right.

IV. Post-Civil War, The Democrats Got More Radicalized to the Right

Political white violence was rampant. White Democrats viciously hated free Blacks and were adamantly preaching against “Negro Rule” and “Africanization.” They created militias to kill Black and white Republican organizers to stop them from voting.

Yet her narrative contains none of this division on the federal and state levels. Most narratives don’t show the extreme left and right whites were on before the Civil War ideologically, nor in the decades after it.

White state managers and politicians weren’t merely indifferent but hostile. The burning down of the Black Freeman’s hospital and the destruction of healthcare were not from a candle tipping over by accident. White terrorism was normal, and arson was part of their playbook.

The purpose of the white managerial class was not just to keep the cost efficiency down of their plantation and mining or other raw material business operations, but to make Blacks utterly dependent and terrorized. Any government subsidized healthcare, even that keeps costs at a minimum, white Southern conservative politicians and businessmen were against as their grip would be loosened, and Black Americans on temporary welfare would be free for a time to get their bearings, develop a plan, and leave the convict leasing and slavecropping systems in the Southeast that financially benefitted the white upper class.

This intentional white Democratic viciousness is erased from our collective minds and the collective American narrative. It’s no coincidence. Those white conservatives still dominate the national landscape, now under the Republican Party label. So, the narrative is told from a perspective without the white Democratic ultra-conservative political and business animus of wealth building that happened from after the Civil War until 1963.

The business-conditioned structure of the white managerial class didn’t agree with freedom and emancipation after the war, just like before it, and was still against it. The conservative white Democrats gave nothing to newly freed blacks when they slowly regained political power in the first decade after the war, in order to keep freed Blacks trapped and without food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and education. The white conservative goal was the use of their Black labor at the lowest wage cost possible, which was either constitutional American slavery or slavecropping.

White businessmen either paid Black workers nothing, as in convict leasing for producing necessary raw industrial and agricultural materials, and instead paid the state government for the use of Black convict labor, or paid next to nothing, or worse, left them in deepening debt each year of slavecropping.

Free negroes in the South, numbering about one-quarter million before the Civil War, had an advantage and may have offered some help. But they were, in general, overwhelmed.

Then the narrator fast-forwards 60 years. To President Truman? Huh? 60 years gone. This happens in narratives due to time constraints, but it misses the evolutionary actions that spread white racism against Black Americans, as opposed to restraining it.

Nevertheless, it is fascinating. She plays the clip in which President Truman remarks to Congress during the first televised State of the Union address that there are many more Republicans than there were “the last time I was here.” Remember, he’s a Democratic President. “Many of you have moved over to the left,” Truman says. He is talking about the rise of Republicans in Congress. What is mind-bending to think about is that he is describing himself, as a Democratic president, as someone on the political right, looking at the Republicans on the political left. For me, this is proof that the political spectrum was reversed from 1948 until 1963. The Democrats on the right and Republicans on the left.

The Republicans are leftists, pro-civil rights. Truman says so. How is that not revealing? How does a reporter miss the clear cognitive dissonance of this remark?

V. The Truman Show

Truman wanted not a charity, he said, when he wanted universal health care that everyone pays into. That’s what he plays with the idea, but under the surface, describes how people would pay into it, setting up acceptance of the government doling out taxpayer money. It’s a great production and very convincing in showing how he cares for the American worker, an expression that extended the ideals of his boss’s New White Deal. He’s grandly taking up the mantle.

At the time, the only hospital still running from the Freedmen’s Bureau for Black Americans was in DC, the podcast tells us, and the segregationist laws split care in the Southeast by putting black hospitals far away from the remaining Black hospitals segregated from the white ones, or putting special black medical care units in the basements of white hospitals.

Hannah Nikole-Hones tells of how she read Jim Crow’s laws (in Southern states) about segregating nurses. This practice was terrible, of course, but normative. Yet what happened nationally? What national law was there in line with The New White Deal? I started to get the suspicion that the glorious New White Deal from the Blue Right-Wing Party of America of the 1930s had yet to design an expansive healthcare insurance scheme from which they could monetize it, turning the medical profession into an industrial complex.

The racial inequality of the New White Deal was crafted by using non-racial constructs and then racially applying them, but it is possible that this new industry, healthcare insurance, which would become one of the top growth industrial complexes post-WWII and growing greatly right now, was not yet conceived of, and so was not segregated. Truman was talking about “all Americans,” but meant he didn’t yet know how it would be implemented and was just announcing government funding for the system.

Universal healthcare didn’t happen. The industry sprang up against it. Health care was insurance-based for corporate (white) workers. There seemed to be widespread support, but then, as the guest discusses, the AMA attacked the proposal. They don’t want the government to run it. This white organization segregates black doctors and serves the white managerial and upper class, who want to increase costs.

The big problem began overlapping: The more the costs rose nationally, the more money the white Doctors made, AND the more the white doctors were supported, the more the pro-segregationists would keep Black Americans deprived of healthcare, continuing the corporate segregationist de facto policy. That type of transformation to corporate segregation was still their goal in the South after WWII, or course. Slavecropping wouldn’t end until 1960 and after.

But it also began to overlap with Northern corporate elites, whose investment in new businesses in healthcare and in producing global healthcare equipment for export to a re-growing Europe prevents the government from taking over this fledgling industry. Anti-welfare for Blacks, a sentiment and propaganda tool, began to spread.

The minstrel show idea, though untrue, of “lazy blacks,” conveniently reflected that divisive tool. It wouldn’t be long before Ronald Reagan began his “welfare Queen” crusade in the 1970s, which helped him align with white segregationists and businesses to eventually put him in the white house.

VI. Spreading the White Wealth Through the Hard-Working and Deserving White Myth

Humor helps spread attitudes through the media, laying the groundwork for further segregation. As minstrelsy spread to the South, it also became accepted there, setting the stage for nationalization after The Birth of a Nation, the first Hollywood blockbuster and a super-white racist movie, spread this national disease. Soon, Shirley Temple and Judy Garland would be on the silver screen, forced to sing in blackface. The whole white country in the 1930s could laugh together after the newsreel.

The New White Deal helped create this Union of National white businessmen and southern segregationists through the Social Security program. It created a white managerial class of beneficiaries who received retirement support and now medical insurance support, giving them a sense of being elevated above Blacks nationally — and yes, above poor whites.

Segregationists in the Southern managerial class always pushed down poor whites, as they are ideologically hierarchical, hence the phrase supremacy. Outside the South, the increasing wealth of “early Americans,” inheritors, aligned with the desire to separate from poor white immigrants living in cramped conditions in the early 1900s, and with Black emigrants also working low-wage jobs and living in cramped conditions.

The Northern “elitist” attitude stems in part from the New White Deal Law of Social Security and the 1930s mortgage law, codified in the 1938 FHA manual, which gave whites mortgages to make neighborhoods “harmonious.” The government elevated and secured the upper- and upper-middle-class white classes in the Northeast, the West, and the Southeast. This monetary “welfare” for the white upper class created greater political power and mentally unified them through a sense of belonging to a “business” and professional class of certified men, such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, industrial designers, city planners, and civil engineers.

Although the laws were devoid of a racial construct, these new national laws, which used non-racial or race-neutral constructs that were racially applied, allowed whites in the white-collar classes outside the South to feel overtly racist and segregationist if they wanted to. White bankers, for instance, may not have felt comfortable denying Black Americans a housing loan in Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Oregon, but they didn’t have a choice.

Behind closed doors, the bank manager, acting on instructions from the bank owner and lawyers, directed the loan officers to deny loans to these Black American applicants, regardless of how well qualified they were. According to the FHA 1938 handbook, issued under the New White Deal banking laws, the loan officers could not make neighbors “non-harmonious.”

That federal law conditioned white bank managers and loan officers to be more “racist” by requiring them to deny loans. This practice was forced on them and spread to their families at the dinner table. Over time, they were turning neighborhoods “white” through this practice forced on them, becoming more “racist” whether they liked it or not. That law lasted until 1968.

In the South, by contrast, white bankers and businessmen didn’t need these non-racial constructs to push them toward racism, though they had them (i.e., the poll tax, the literacy test). They had overt segregationist laws, such as those forbidding interracial marriage between whites and negroes, which began around 1676 in Virginia and lasted until 1967. This conditioning was far longer, deeper, and politically created and enforced by elected politicians and sheriffs in most statehouses and county town halls. But how to spread it to the North?

The effect of those New Deal laws was long-lasting, as they institutionalized racist practices through race-neutral constructs that were applied nationally in banking, housing, and Social Security, creating a sense that corporate whites were special and apart from Black Americans and that they ran the country. That feeling is indelibly stamped now into the Republican Party and very visibly unapologetic at Trump’s second inauguration.

Today, most white corporate Americans can be relied on to vote Conservative, no matter who the candidate is (today, the whites are Republicans and not Democrats, when Truman was speaking, and the marginal white civil rights business wing of the Republican Party evaporated). The corporate world became white by design, not by accident or some internal racism.

Money is green, not white. The poverty in the Southeast is not white, either, but black. Whites maintain their power structure not out of being good businessmen, by loaning to all people, but by being selective.

Strangely enough, or not, blackface doesn’t look close to being finished. National racism never ended, neither did convict leasing, lack of healthcare for the poor, nor repression of wages for Black Americans.

It may not be so funny anymore, but it still tries to be a joke. Megyn Kelly famously defended blackface on-air during her NBC morning show, Megyn Kelly Today, in October 2018. Just three days after her remarks, NBC announced the cancellation of Megyn Kelly Today. If only corporate cancel culture really moved that swiftly. Instead, it just killed the discussion the way Trump is killing DEI programs, with corporate America following suit, as they’ve been politically trained to do since the New White Deal.

I swear that I can still hear the laughter of white men coming from behind those closed oak doors of power.