#performing blackness

The only difference in the outrage is that the people discussing aren’t as much fans of Jesy’s music as they are Ariana Grande’s

Pls sit and think about that. A lot of our activism starts and ends with what problematic behaviors we are willing to accept or excuse from people depending on what they mean to us personally.

If you can’t make the personal sacrifice of divesting from someone or halting your support when they do something harmful, you are not activist. Because you are not willing to take action… it involves more than just posting quips on twitter or memes about other peoples oppression :)

Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture edited by Harry J. Elam and Kennell Jackson

Debord's notion of spectacle lines up well with Stephanie Dunson's thesis in "Black Misrepresentation in Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music Illustration," that "The erasure of black identity as a historical fact, perhaps even a psychological necessity, is a precondition for the American tradition of Blackface minstrelsy. Thus [racial] disparagement lies in the cultural system of privileging representation over reality and in the systems of power and oppression that allow such privileging to become the standard." Dunson then goes on to trace the transformation of whites performing Blackness, from a white man mimicking a Black man to a white man becoming an entirely foreign creature, using popular sheet-music covers, a type of mass marketing perhaps overlooked by Debord.

Debord traces "the spectacle" to the 1920s in his "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle," but I think the idea of image creating a new actuality has quite a bit of earlier relevance, especially to people whose image creation and therefore identity was not part of their own mode of production, i.e American Blackness as an identity created by white performers that eventually lived an existence beyond that of either the white performers or the Black existers.

It has been noted in historical critiques of Blackface that sheet music covers began to have portraits of [white] performers both in and out of makeup, not to show their skill at characterization, but to reassure audiences that they were, in fact, seeing a white person perform. The performance of Blackness had been so defined by white actors that the population was sure that the realest form of Black was a white person in black paint.

Black Acting School (by boobidyboo)