But minstrelsy was global from the get-go hence its inevitable return home. It traveled the routes of America's 20th century imperial sprawl. Historical traces of it can be found from Northern Europe to the Middle East. Britain only cancelled its beloved "Black and White Minstrel Show" in 1978, and South Africa still celebrates its "Cape Town Coon Carnival." The impact of blackface is still felt in West Africa of all places. There "tranting" and the "Concert Party" are forms of blackface theatre that can be traced to when colonized Africans began to mimic what they thought were freer, cooler and more politically empowered African-Americans. They blacked up, sang songs about "Broadway" and "Dixieland" and over the decades evolved a distinct style of extremely popular theatre. Ignorant of its origins in slavery and racism –– or in some cases simply uninterested in them –– minstrelsy produced something of enduring value to their equally black selves.
     So in this international sphere the contexts and intentions of blackface are too distinct to dismiss as simply "racism." To do so is to flagrantly miss the point. Today's blackface tests the very right to comment on race and racism however crudely. The claim on blackface is a claim also on the right to reflect back to America images of its historical legacy or to use similar images to say quite different things, or to just mock this country's hypocrisy, pretensions and the ambivalence of its international influence. This is the point. After all, not only can blackface have alternative meanings, it always has. Minstrelsy was never only racist just as not all blackface is minstrelsy.
     Even though many attempt to project its offensiveness back into its origins in American slavery it was really in the 1960s when it began to be seen in exclusively negative terms. Call it a product of the hypersensitivities of desegregation where white guilt began to be cowed by a black resentment that defined itself by an increasing humorlessness and a perpetually furrowed brow. It was then that lines were drawn not to contain or correct a contentious history but to exert power in policing those lines. Blackface was certainly used to express love and hate and a sometimes-murderous envy towards blacks. It also expressed a profound ambivalence about a nation peopled by immigrants not yet sure what color they were or would be in the years before "whiteness" was opened to ethnic Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish peoples.
     But the open secret of minstrelsy is that it was not only performed by or for whites! Even in its earliest days many blacks cherished and claimed it. Many were proud to prove that blacks were better at performing as blacks in a time when most whites simply didn't think it was possible! Some blacks that "blacked up" were considered cultural heroes in the fight against racism. The fact that Bert Williams––the black blackface performer who integrated Broadway––was celebrated by race-leaders like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes attests to this. He was perhaps the greatest victim of that 1960s moment, a scapegoat for a notion of race pride that amputated history in order to exploit its own pain.
     The saddest fact of this blind hostility to blackface is that it ignores the fact that African-American show business has its roots in black blackface performers and much of American popular music in "coon songs." It is conveniently forgotten that this racist minstrel music made a black recording industry possible and was pioneered by African-Americans like Ernest Hogan and George W. Johnson, singer of the first black "hit record." It also was at the root of American pop, from Stephen Foster to Al Jolson to Bing Crosby to Shirley Temple; the list is daunting and eye-opening. Simply put (and with the utmost respect): without Bert Williams, no Jay Z., without Steppin Fetchit, no Tyler Perry and without Hattie McDaniel, no Oprah.
     So this all too prevalent idea that blackface minstrelsy is permanently a racist slur and always an assault on blacks or people of color is a troubling yet understandable one. It is far too simplistic and hinges less on the intentions of the performer or the context or even on the actual history of the form. A historically quite recent view it depends instead on an audience that has made "being offended" an expression of cultural and political power and are resistant to having that power challenged or mocked. Those who respond with such absolutism to blackface are not only hostile to the less salutary moments of common history; they are desperate to control the terms of racial conversation, here and abroad. This very American tendency, whether manifest in whites or blacks, says far more about what we have become than what we ever were.

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