#minstrelsy

I wanted to explore an emerging trope in horror media and the...interesting history it stems from.

00:00 - Intro

02:22 - Minstrel Horror

06:17 - What Lies Beneath

12:41 - A lil Tangeant about Ice Cream

17:22 - Dark Shadows

24:25 - Firestarter

36:51 - The [White]Devil's Rejects

56:39 - plug

58:00 - Conclusive Thoughts

1:05:32 - Outro

I do not like this new PWHL cartoon design.

In theory it’s very cute. However the art style is something I think is uncomfortable.

It does not take a lot of digging or much of any digging to connect this style of white gloves back to minstrelsy and vaudeville (full of minstrelsy). I’m not going to cover the history of minstrelsy and black face, but I do think it’s very important to call out what these art forms have derived from.

Additionally you can see in the comments how quickly people are connecting this back to the Loki series Miss Minutes being referred to as the TVA Propaganda clock. This article discusses why people have associated Miss Minutes with American propaganda.

It’s not an art style I would chosen to tie the league with, and it makes me wonder what kinds of people are in the room and if any of this imagery was brought up to them.

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince opens at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, lowkey wild that it's being promoted by Richard Prince's Rasta swapped out for Arthur Jafa's Mickey Mouse.

Some people may know that there are Irish musical roots in the blues genre, which feels pertinent to a movie like Sinners. But the main reason behind this influence was Irish immigrant participation in blackface minstrelsy.

Sure, Irish immigrants were discriminated against, having left their colonized homeland, and were treated as a nonwhite ethnic minority. But part of their shedding this cultural heritage in order to join the white supremacist power structure was performing in minstrel productions, into which they incorporated their own Irish music and songs. From Morrison,

“This free expression […] allowed ethnic whites to mask their own cultural noise and raggedness in blackface, while African American identity in US society continued to be shaped by a hybrid of caricatured blackness within an expression of one’s ethnic whiteness.”

Irish music was seen by the Real Whites as noisy, messy, a signal of their inferiority. And these immigrants chose NOT ONLY to cast off their own culture, but rebrand it as part of Blackness, the inferior Other, in doing so.

When I see people cheering on Remmick and his Irish pride, his free expression of his traditions and music - beyond the points I’ve seen about a white vampire maintaining his monoculture over a bunch of POC that he killed to build his hive mind, I think it’s critical to consider the industry of Irish minstrel performers who chose white supremacist pride over their own heritage in the name of anti-Blackness.

Sources:

Matthew D. Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse”