New Blackface, Same Old Song

WASHINGTON -- "Black up some white folks and they could deceive a resident of Benin," George S. Schuyler dryly observed in "Black No More," his classic satire of race relations.

Schuyler, who began hurling rhetorical brickbats during the Harlem Renaissance, continued tossing them almost until his death in 1977. An expert at poking holes in all manner of American obsessions, he used his novel to expose the flimsiness of our ideas about physical differences between blacks and whites.

"When you consider that less than 20 percent of our Negroes are without Caucasian ancestry and that close to 30 percent have American Indian ancestry," he argued, "there cannot be the wide difference in Caucasian and Afro-American facial characteristics that most people imagine."

Schuyler came up with his estimates long before such things as DNA testing, so I can't vouch for his numbers. But I see his point. It makes me wonder what he would make of stunts such as "Black. White.", the miniseries currently airing on FX.

In the six-episode series, a black family, the Starks, trade racial identities with a white family, the Wurgel-Marcotullis. After "Trading Places" and "Trading Spouses," reality-TV programmers may very well be running out of ideas.

Some critics have raved over the transformations both families endured, but I can't see them fooling any residents of the African country of Benin. To my jaded eyes they look no more convincing than those odd-looking folks in the famous "race" issue of Colors magazine. In a much-discussed photo feature called "What If," the editors used digital tricks to paint Arnold Schwarzenegger brown, Spike Lee white, as part of a package of celebrity makeovers. The issue, while puckishly designed, also asked serious, provocative questions: "What is the difference between black, white and in between? We know everyone's blood looks the same. But what about hair, eyes, noses and earwax? Why do people have painful surgery to look more 'white'?"

"Black. White." seldom digs as deep. While the cast members' makeovers seem to work when they meet unsuspecting folks on the street, those encounters often risk perpetuating stereotypes instead of eliminating them. What's more, rather than forcing us to confront our own misperceptions, the show lets us off the hook by allowing us to pass judgment on the unsuspecting people whose prejudices are brought to light. Viewers can take comfort from being party to the deception.

In contrast, the Wooster Group, a New York experimental theater troupe, makes no attempt to fool anyone. Their revival of Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones," about a black American railroad porter who becomes the dictator of a fictional island nation, features a Caucasian actress in the title role. In blackface.

The show is going over well among the artsy Lower East Side crowd, a bunch not likely to include many black faces. Real ones, I mean.

One New York reviewer called the lead performance "riveting, haunting, altogether astonishing." I haven't seen the play. I have only seen a photograph of the central character ingloriously splashed across a newspaper page, cavorting in all her burnt-cork exuberance. Of course, the picture can't provide the context necessary to appreciate the merits of her performance, but as a snapshot it looks lurid, nightmarish and altogether revolting. When compared with the subtle, unthreatening shape-shifting made possible by Hollywood latex or digital photography, a thick slather of shoe polish achieves only a decidedly stomach-churning effect.

There's too much history in those layers of lampblack, a coating no performer can put on without conjuring up the ghosts of minstrels long gone, from Jim Crow and Zip Coon to Bert Williams and Al Jolson. The very first minstrel show probably occurred in 1843, in New York City. Within a year it became the most popular form of live entertainment in America. In his book "Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot," Michael Rogin, notes that "blackface provided the new country (the United States in the 1800s) with a distinctive national identity in the age of slavery."

Because I know the Wooster Group knows all that, I figure that its decision to cast a white woman as a garish caricature of a black man derives from some ironic sensibility far more sophisticated than my own. To illuminate that sensibility would probably require a contrarian wit on the level of George Schuyler. Who knows, I might have to go all the way to Benin for that.