Modern Day Minstrelsy in the Classroom.
Photo: @itellyahwut
Should fear arise within you, causing your ears and eyes to become singed by the fire in my words, those ignited by my pen, my tongue do me a favor. Follow your cowardice. Read no further. I’m tired of biting mine just to taste bitter blood back in the pit of my throat, swallowing the secret of your oppressive teaching and mentorship to protect the name sake of our academic institutions. If you wish to continue, you may recognize your racism in its reflections. Be careful to not let your feelings trip over my writing because its soles will be scorched. It would a great misfortune for you to misconstrue the poetry of my personhood, its ode to Blackness as a mere polemic.
As the saying goes, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay the hell out of the kitchen.” So I write for Black women, and girls, who glow during school years marred by disregard and disrespect from their non- Black professors, administrators, and even, Black male instructors and peers. What I write isn’t for the faint of heart, the ones who have yet to reckon with their whiteness, its positivity gleaned through generations of inhumane melting pot aspirations or inclusive fetishization. Hamilton! be damned. There are many non-Black music educators, historians, theorists, performers and composers who turn back the hands of time in their professions, ignorantly laying the groundwork for racism to manifest as performance. Like destiny, a mixture of minstrelsy and misgynoir resonate in the voices, gestures, and activities adding texture to their lessons.
On Twitter today I saw a thread posted by a fellow Black Ph.D student called @jatella. This person, I don’t know their pronouns, wrote “This is anti black.” as a caption to a retweeted video of a White, or white adjacent, male student’s presentation. His argument was to change the U.S. national anthem from the “Star Spangled Banner” to Lil Baby’s “Freestyle.” I won’t do the labor here but @Jatella does marvelous job unpacking (READ THE THREAD) how a White male student’s brief analysis elicited roars of laughter from his classmates, and thus, demonstrates comedic contradictions, incongruent with the sounds that render our nation’s “might” legible to the senses of the patriotic masses. It’s a riot to these students who have the privilege of witnessing a presentation such as this. His teacher granted him an A for this effort surely with the best of intentions.
If you have the poisonous post-racial disposition to view this pedagogical glass half full, maybe you’ll assert they were laughing because he was the class comedian. But if you listen closer, you might hear a deadness looming about the learning space. One that I know well and I’ll write about in time when I have the courage to voice an experience of mine during SEM 2019. In this moment I choose to write about a sonic space both living and dead. One which harkens back to the times of Blackface minstrelsy of the late 19th century. The sounds evolved throughout the 20th, where white men pretended to be enslaved Africans, darkening their faces with burnt black cork and polishing their lips with the reddest Ruby Woos of 1891.
Judy Garland in “Everybody Sing” (1938)
Photo: Billy Van Ware, NMAAC
Photo: Former Kansas State University student Paige Shoemaker, Snapchat
Drake in Blackface, The Story of Adidon, Photo: David Leyes
Photo: Michael Kutsche, Empire Total War
They performed this way to build a solidarity of working class whiteness comprised of Western European immigrant folk — Italians, Polish, Irish, German, maybe Greek and Jewish too—packed in theaters full to the brim. Many of them never once meeting, or coming to know, an enslaved African in their lives. And In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem writes “Our very bodies house the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors.” (10) Yes, this sentiment includes white people especially, because what the first two weeks of June showed us is the sheer number of those who have yet to understand how the acts of terror their ancestors committed remains within their bodies and is expelled in subtle and abusive ways. When we see this in the classroom students don’t have to look like Paige (pictured above). Without the slightest clue, these students, white and non-Black POC, hurl words that carry heavy historical weight with ease, knowing their good intentions absolve them. As a Black educator, or fellow classmate calling attention to the nodes of racism can be harmful. The first step is to notice the shift in the perpetrators’ body, sometimes their ancestors will jump out at any moment, their eyes and voices become deadened and hypersensitive, like the “revolutionary”soldier ready to fight for their ‘right’ to remain innocent.
So what @jatella, and 1000+ others, hear in the student’s video is the trauma of miseducated minstrelsy transported into the 21st century. The hollowness of his classmates’ laughter confirms this inclination, decontextualized from the inhumanity that begat it, these sounds match the shallowness of the male student’s (mis)interpretation of freedom in “Freestyle.” At its core lies a palpable mediocrity so accessible to collegiate White men—many are primed in high school through weaponizing reductive reports on hip-hop musicians. They lay claim of lineages which brought hip-hop to course through their veins without truly comprehending, let alone mentioning or deeply studying, the cultural and societal structures that built Atlanta’s Trap music. The hilarity inherent to this young man’s research project reinforces a racial sincerity on his part, a half-assed musical selection displaced and everyone gets the joke. As @jatella writes, “It’s important to be able to detect and explicitly name toxic positivity as where the jokes are always, finally on the Black.” All emojis and GIFs accepted. Misplaced captions of AAVE welcome.
