Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment

“Tremendous…. Barnes has corralled the chaos, contradiction, and surprise of American social reality; evaded mythology; and made… the ‘unwritten’ legible…. [A] painfully necessary autopsy of the nation’s soul.”
― Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe

“A decade in the making, Princeton scholar Rhae Lynn Barnes’ rich if disquieting history of blackface rips off the masks from entertainers and politicians alike. She wraps meticulous research around a mainstreamed (until recently) form of white supremacy, rooted in minstrel shows. From The Birth of a Nation to The Jazz Singer, from an empire at war to protests at home, from Japanese incarceration camps to Watergate, she exposes racial anxiety at the heart of the American Experiment and how blackface sanitized prejudices for white audiences.”
― Hamilton Cain, TIME, “10 New Books You Should Read in March”

“This cultural history may begin by focusing on blackface performance on stage and screen, but it broadens out to consider how minstrelsy came to be accepted as lighthearted entertainment on college campuses and within fraternal organizations well into the 20th century.”
― New York Times Book Review, “27 Books Coming in March”

“This was one of the books I was most intrigued by this year, and I was not disappointed. Long overdue, it’s a history of blackface and minstrelsy that is truly groundbreaking. It’s this month’s (year’s?) #RequiredReading.”
― Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“A startling, eye-opening examination of the scope and sweep of blackface minstrelsy in the U.S. in the century following the Civil War . . . even readers familiar with the topic will be astonished by the extent of the practice’s cultural penetration, and its enduring ties to anti-Black political agendas . . . Painstaking and impressive, it’s a magisterial and disturbing reconsideration of American cultural history.”
― Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Essential . . . [Barnes’] immensely readable work covers more than a hundred years of white America’s embrace of this sordid form of entertainment . . . An important and necessarily uncomfortable work on a disturbing legacy.”
― Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“This groundbreaking history of blackface in the United States uncovers not only the formation of the racist art form but its hold on culture and politics . . . meticulously researched . . . a landmark work.”
― Library Journal, starred review

“The scope and tenacity of Barnes’ research is impressive, as she reveals blackface as a cultural institution supported by white officials at every level of government . . . Darkology tells the story of a genre that pervaded American culture and politics across decades, taking care along the way to highlight the voices of those who resisted.”
― Booklist

“In Darkology, Rhae Lynn Barnes shines an unsparing spotlight on blackface, a wildly popular staple of stage and screen that from its inception in the mid-1800s was never mere entertainment. Relying on pernicious stereotypes that served to undermine the humanity of African Americans, blackface on its surface was meant for laughs, but in truth was a tool deployed at all levels of society, from local school boards all the way up to the federal government, that promoted and perpetuated anti-Black racism as the nation’s status quo. Through fastidious research and the painstaking pursuit of archives and documents hidden from historians for decades, Barnes has written nothing short of an exposé of the structural racism that undergirds the very foundations on which America is built. In ways both insidious and institutionalized, blackface has always informed what it means to be American.”
― Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor; Director, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research

“Rhae Lynn Barnes has written a surprising and exhaustive masterpiece about amateur blackface minstrelsy. Barnes dares to demonstrate that laughing at fictional concoctions of Black people has been as American as baseball. Convincingly, she shows that this most popular form of entertainment is central to grasping American culture from Reconstruction all the way to our own time. It never died, Barnes argues, in a vast print culture, in cross-racial performance, in commercialism, and especially with influence in the nation’s closets and family scrapbooks. A ‘contagion,’ like a ‘hidden river’ bursting forth, Americans have always loved and hated blackface. The secrets are out! Readers will be stunned at how much Jim Crow and its endless tenacles, manifested in blackface, have both strangled and released the American imagination. This gigantic spiderweb has captured more of our cultural time and power than most Americans will ever want to believe. With astonishing research, the book reveals as it informs about a tragedy at the heart of who we are.”
― David W. Blight, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass

“Rhae Lynn Barnes brilliantly recounts the long and twisted saga of blackface theater in America with remarkable excellence. This is a master class on the degradations of racist stereotyping of African Americas as happy slaves, mammies, half-wits, and raggedy Jim Crow musical clowns. With luminous prose and riveting attention to detail, Barnes investigates what the minstrel tradition means in terms of white supremacy writ large, with devastating results. Who knew that presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Gerald Ford were diehard fans of blackface entertainment? A stunning achievement.”
― Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, author of Rosa Parks

“Rhae Lynn Barnes’s Darkology is not only exemplary scholarship for its sharp original material, precision, and care, its vivid and engaging storytelling recreates a shameless world where the most popular forms of American entertainment treated the demeaning of Black people as the most natural of things.”
― Howard French, author of Born in Blackness and The Second Emancipation

“It is probably hard for present day Americans to believe how pervasive ‘blackface’ was during the 19th through the 20th centuries. Used as ‘entertainment’ in virtually all types of institutions in the country, it telegraphed the contempt in which Black people were held. Meticulously researched and fluidly written, Darkology is a necessary exploration of this revealing and disturbing aspect of American history.”
― Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello

“Reading Rhae Lynn Barnes’s Darkology is like taking a tour of the political unconscious of racial capitalism and empire in the United States―violent, desirous, and just plain weird―from slavery all the way down to the present day.”
― Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America

“Toiling for years in archives across the United States, Rhae Lynn Barnes has uncovered an often deliberately buried body of evidence: an indisputable record of the ubiquity of blackface minstrelsy across two centuries of American history. Darkology is the definitive, searing account of that unsettling past.”
― Jill Lepore, author of These Truths and We the People

“There are many things to praise about this lively and important book. But underlying its many virtues is the author’s twenty-year quest to transform a personal interest into a documented history. Darkology demonstrates the truth of the old adage: no source, no history. Undaunted by the perceived unimportance of her topic and by archival efforts to protect the innocent or the guilty, Rhae Lynn Barnes tracked down fading photographs, old movies, bureaucratic detritus, moldy scripts, and living witnesses, assembling an impressive archive that allowed her to demonstrate the astonishingly broad reach of blackface minstrelsy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Midwife’s Tale