We had our first TV set in 1961… on the day that I took my school 11+ exam… the day that my grandmother, who lived with us, had all of her teeth taken out…
On Saturday evenings the BBC entertained us with ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’. White men ‘blacking up’, singing and dancing, to my innocent and naive teenage mind, was a little odd, but I thought nothing of it.
Last night I watched a fascinating, revealing BBC documentary. Black actor, David Harewood, investigated the roots of minstrelsy…
In the 1830s Thomas Dartmouth Rice developed his minstrel act in New York, blacking his face, featuring the character Jim Crow. He brought his act across to London…
From Rice’s Jim Crow developed the blackface minstrel acts that were popular in the Victorian music hall… singing songs, telling jokes that often-mocked African Americans. For 150 years such acts were popular.
Rice had a clear agenda. Slavery had been abolished. Rice presented black people as entertaining buffoons. If they weren’t savages from some African jungle, they were limited simpletons. With such a narrative, although black people weren’t slaves, they could still be controlled by the powerful white majority.
My memories of the Black and White Minstrels?… It was the time of Windrush, but I was brought up in a white part of England. My attitude was ignorant… and probably patronising…
Today we still see prejudice, which, though sometimes veiled, still attempts to control with half-truths, and discriminatory generalisations. We’re told what all Muslims or all Mormons are like… how we should treat folks with Down syndrome or dementia… what ex-convicts or disgraced priests need…
And from my perspective of a faith that champions the disadvantaged and misunderstood, I recall St Paul’s anti-discriminatory words:
‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’
And I re-examine my attitudes and opinions for the hidden Thomas Rice in me.
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