Hey, hey, blackface comedy

A skit featuring men in blackface aired on Channel Nine’s Hey Hey it’s Saturday on Wednesday night. When I checked the web on Thursday morning under the entry “Blackface”, Wikipedia already had coverage of the Hey Hey “incident”.

The idea that such a skit could appear on national Australian TV will not enhance Australia’s reputation abroad. It will be taken in India and elsewhere as further proof of Australian hostility towards black people and, in addition, of Australian ignorance of slavery as an institution dedicated to white superiority and black suffering.

The Indian press has already made a great deal of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and elsewhere. “White Australian Policy is alive and well”: I can see the headlines in the UK US and Asia already.

Where would we start? Slaves were brought to the Americas in the 1500s. Slavery was used generally to force blacks to work cheaply; occasionally it might have been used on Native Americans. Slavery is familiar to most of us as a North American institution, but there were slaves in many other places. Although slavery was officially abolished in Brazil in 1888, there are disturbing discussions about forced labour in Brazil in 2009 which suggest that the institution lives on in various forms, even today.

During the Civil War in the USA, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the slaves free after winning the Battle of Antietam which finally gave the North a taste of the success it had been seeking:

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and part of States are, and henceforth shall be, free …

A Civil Rights Act gave citizenship to black people in 1866. But success for the North and the subjugation of the South began a long period of difficult times for people of colour. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Tennessee in 1868. It is merely the best known of many instruments to empower whites and subjugate people of colour. White governors gave orders, and police stood by idly, as lynch mobs shot blacks with impunity. Lynch mobs strung up black men on the excuse that they had attacked white women.

Lynching was explained by Benjamin Tillman, Governor of South Carolina:

"We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him."

After men of colour returned to the US after World War I, they might have felt they had fought for and deserved equality. There were 25 race riots in the first six months of 1919, and black Americans were lynched and murdered, sometimes while still in US uniform.

A lynching in Marion, Indiana was photographed and later made the subject of a poem, Strange Fruit. Subsequently, this was made into a song by Billie Holliday. As whites had no guilt about these actions, they were often recorded, with whites smiling as they stand by blacks hanging from trees.

Struggles for equality continued throughout the1960s, with Southern Senators attempting to block or delay any legislation that would force schools, buses and other institutions to integrate. Riots in many US cities confronted Americans with the brutal realities of the “Land of the Free”. Struggles for equality continue to this day.

The TV show Oz shows in fictional form the fate of so many African Americans for whom there are very few options: too often a life of violent crime, followed by jail and a violent death. It is these life patterns that Barack Obama has taken pains to identify by attempting to show men and women of colour the need to support their families; and for children to do their homework and respect their teachers.

Blackface comedy took stereotypes of blacks and exaggerated them. Blacks were portrayed as buffoons, constantly seeking sex, especially from white women. They were gross and stupid. What kind of mentality would this appeal to? The answer has to be stupid white people who are using art to keep blacks in servitude.

The Black and White Minstrel Shows used art to put blacks down by racist ridicule. Art can be, among other things, an instrument of social policy. We can see this in Nazi art, with handsome blonde Aryan soldiers defeating ugly snarling Jews and other races. There are innumerable examples from Soviet art. And early paintings of Australian Aborigines depict strange, perhaps comical, savages.

Art also needs to explore humour. But it is not funny to see people suffer, nor to find their suffering a subject for light-hearted attempts at humour. The movie Bruno mocked American thinking about race, but it did so with a bit of finesse and a glimpse of compassion.

Today the US is struggling to break free of its racist past, with a black President and some forward progress in education. Does anyone want to take us back to those evil days?

And so we come back to the blackface sketch, approved by Channel 9 in gross ignorance of the servitude and suffering of so many people of colour. No wonder Harry Connick Jr. was horrified.

We don’t want Soviet-style censorship of the press. I can hear the howls of indignation already at the mere mention of the idea. But surely there should be some controls on the jackals of the press who hold all of us up to ridicule. The ABC is publicly accountable, perhaps not as accountable as some would like. There should be better procedures for community attitudes to prevail on so-called free-to-air TV. Free to show us all up to be racist and idiotic, I suppose.

Senator Stephen Conroy and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, please take note