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| Minstrel skits often reflected elements of proslavery ideology, which held that blacks were lazy, dishonest, and improvident, and unable to reason logically, and that antebellum slaves were content with their situation. Minstrels would act out scenes in which blacks avoid work, steal, are unable to understand modern banking and financial practices, or long nostalgically for the Old South. Clearly the product of white fantasies about whites’ own racial superiority, typical minstrel characters appeared widely in other popular media such as the two sheet-music covers reproduced here. White entertainers often felt compelled to identify themselves as white in order to attract their desired audience. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, some black entertainers found that performing minstrel routines was the only way they could gain entrance into the entertainment profession. Some black actors donned black "masks" in order to meet white audiences' expectations about "black" life. As Houston Baker writes, "To be a Negro, the mask mandates, to be a Negro one must meld with minstrelsy's contours" (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). One of Baker's arguments is that Booker T. Washington, making the best of a difficult ideological situation, appropriates the minstrel mask in Up From Slavery and converts it into a powerful rhetorical tool. Since white Americans had developed a blindness toward the actual concerns of African Americans, Washington wore the minstrel mask as a "strategy of attraction," repeating demeaning minstrel stereotypes, but only in order "to draw attention to the contours, necessities, and required programs of his own culture." Baker credits much of Washington's success as a public speaker, and as a fundraiser for Tuskegee and other African American concerns, to his ability to appropriate the minstrel mask. Although Baker writes about the use of the minstrel mask as a powerful rhetorical tool (a "strategy of attraction"), it presented difficult issues for writers like Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, who did not want to be forced to repeat demeaning racial stereotypes just to attract the attention of a white audience. |
| 1. Find two examples of Washington's use of minstrel stereotypes in Up From Slavery. Do you feel he is simply reproducing these stereotypes, or using them for some rhetorical effect, as Baker argues? What might that effect be in one of the examples you found? |
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| 2. Another way of stating Baker's thesis is to argue that African American writers, aware of the stereotypes that white America invented on the minstrel stage, used these stereotypes to outsmart unsuspecting whites in some way. Write a paragraph about how one of Charles Chesnutt's characters, in "The Goophered Grapevine," "Po' Sandy," or "The Passing of Grandison," uses the minstrel mask to outsmart one or more white characters. What minstrel stereotype is appropriated by the black character you write about, and how does he use it to fool the white characters? |
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| 3. Write a paragraph in which you consider whether Paul Dunbar's poem "We Wear the Mask" is about the phenomenon described by Baker. In other words, is the "mask" in Dunbar's title the "minstrel mask" described by Baker? Be sure to quote lines from the poem to defend your assertions. Finally, try to use your interpretation to explain why Dunbar concludes his poem with an exclamation point. |
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