Beyond Blackface challenges the standard view of Blackface entertainment through the lens of  Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical produced, written, composed, and starring Black actors.  While acknowledging the racist roots of Blackface performance, it also challenges preconceived notions about the relationship between the use of Blackface makeup, dialect, costumes, and characters by both white and Black actors.  As historian Eric Lott has expressed it, white minstrelsy was based on both love and theft—a deep admiration by white performers of black music, dance, and comedy along with its appropriation for their own ends.  Similarly, after the Civil War, Blackface entertainment offered Black actors, singers, dancers, and composers an entre into the world of white, mainstream entertainment.  Black performers used these racist tropes to advance their own careers, often subtly subverting the message to fight back against these tropes.

My intended audience is students of Black culture, theater, music, and dance, to acknowledge the many contradictions and complexities in the relation of Black performers to their white audience, and to dig deeper into the questions raised by the use of Blackface in popular entertainment.

My major challenges have been that Blackface is such a “hot” topic that it’s difficult for a white writer/historian to address without acknowledging the basic limitations that I bring to the subject as someone who has not directly dealt with racial prejudice.  I’ve tried to acknowledge and balance the many contradictions and challenges in addressing Blackface’s history and leave open to further discussion/study the issues that I’m exploring.  I feel the best way to overcome overly simplistic understandings of cultural history are to acknowledge up front my own limitations and to ask my audience to try to examine their own particular biases in addressing this content.