Black Acting School

Back in 1987 Robert Townsend directed a movie called "Hollywood Shuffle", which is a satirical movie that analyzes Black portrayals in popular media. Although I did not see the whole movie, which is a bit dated, I believe that the Black Acting school scene is particularly powerful and relevant to our discussion on Black face minstrelsy. In the beginning of the scene there is a young man preparing for an audition of a Black character. He is currently practicing his pronunciation of the phrase "jive turkey" when the man sitting next to him explains that the whole audition is "bullshit" and that only "Uncle Toms" would actually do the part. However when the receptionist calls his name, his voice changes to standard English and he puts a big, wide grin on his face. Our main character, the former person practicing his "jive turkey", begins to day dream. He starts to dream about a group of enslaved Blacks in the middle of the wilderness running for freedom. There are several types of popular slave characters present. There was a a female escaped slave that resembled Harriet Tubman, there were several slaves that were fearful and wanted to go back to the plantation, there was a male slave who supposedly valued white women more than Black women, and finally there was our main character, who was dressed in a butler outfit and with is slurred stereotypical slave speech, voiced that he was confused as to why they were leaving such a good slave master. Mid scene we hear someone yell cut and all of the actors break character and advertise the "Black Acting School" which prepares Blacks for certain roles in front of the camera.

In our readings from last week we discussed the role of Black minstrel shows within the white community, but within this post I wanted to focus on how this portrayal of Black entertainment reflects Black blackface minstrels of the late 19th and early/mid 20th centuries. In David Roediger's piece we know that for many Blacks to reach the entertainment business, they had to blacken their own faces and act out the negative and false representations of themselves on stage, which were created by Whites. He gives an example of Ira Aldridge who played in Shakespeare's Othello, as the main character. In this role he indeed had to Blacken his face and and make his lips seem bigger with make-up (127). The play Othello normally discusses racial issues but because it was part of a minstrel show, it was transformed minstrel-style into a comedy about the minstrel character. This play was also written from the perspective of a White man, Shakespeare, which reveals the pigeonholing of character, personality, and mental capacities of Black people as well as the codification of the prevailing oppressive systems at work during that time. The power to define the image of Black people lies in the hands of the creators of the minstrel shows and the artists that create them.

With this particular clip, "Black Acting School", Robert Townsend satirically analyzes the portrayals of Black entertainers. He conveys through comedy that African Americans are forced into very specific roles such as "crooks", "gang leaders", "drug lords", "inmates", "movie muggers", "street punks", and "rapists". All of these roles in the clip are what Whites perceive Blacks to be or how they should be portrayed. So now instead of Blackening their faces, the Black performers are stereotypically blackening up their characters. What I love about this work is that  Black people are in acting to school to learn these roles, which implies that they don't come naturally or aren't even necessarily true about Black people in the first place. After all, wouldn't you be asking the Black people how to be Black? The comedy continues because even with instructions, the Black actors are struggling with their directions of talking, walking, and acting Black. There is one scene were they show three men practicing their "jive talk" and the Black man can't curse correctly. So the White instructor stops him and shows him the correct way. The instructor grabs his own testicles and says "No no no. That's wrong watch me. You gotta be cool. 'Jive turkey mutha fucka!'" In this situation you have White instructors who are teaching Black people to embody constructed stereotypic Black identities. Dominant culture is helping to create these identities in order to make the portrayal of Black people more acceptable in the eyes of the public. This portrayal goes out into the world and reinforces the popular conception Blacks in a negative light. As a side note, I also thought it was funny that Robert Townsend said that the class is for dark skinned people only because light or yellow skinned people don't make good crooks. This directly relates to the idea of Black people blackening their faces. Because the portrayals of crooks and older minstrel shows are of dark skinned people, then it would seem unrealistic to have a light skinned crook or even a naturally colored light brown skinned minstrel performer. The images have been presented to such an extreme that anything that may deviate from that is unbelievable or unacceptable. Today the powers at be are gatekeepers of entertainment have the power define how Black characters are perceived.