Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Blackface is the practice of non-Black, usually white, people blackening their faces with makeup or, in the past, burned cork. The act of making one’s face up to be Black, however, is only part of what blackface usually entails. Performers had often blackened their faces, for example, in portrayals of Shakespeare’s Othello in 17th-century England, but these performances did not entail any kind of caricature or stereotyped performance of Black people, which more modern definitions of blackface usually do.

In the United States, blackface was a popular form of entertainment for whites in the 19th and through the mid-20th centuries that revolved around such caricatures and originally was part of minstrel shows. Jacobson is interested in why the enormous popularity of blackface performances as entertainment drops off in the second third of the 20th century, theorizing that it becomes less popular due to the racialization of formerly “lesser” whites as Caucasian.

Jacobson lingers over the infamous blackface performances of Al Jolson in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. He argues that the binary of racialized whiteness and Blackness enabled those who were seen as lesser whites, such as Jews (Jolson portrays Jewish Jackie Rabinowitz, who metamorphoses into Black Jack Robin when in blackface), to