[78-L] Race observations

[fnarf at comcast.net]

From: bruce78rpm at comcast.net

> Jolson started out in Minstrelsy and milked the sentimentality of it 
> right up until the end. Does that make him a racist or a bigot? 

Yes, of course it does. I can't see how a sentient person could possibly believe otherwise. Not only is his racism obvious on the face of it, it would have been impossible for him not to be.

Does that make it wrong to listen to it? No, of course not. Jolson was a product of his times, just like everyone else was, and in fact an understanding of minstrelsy, and the way it addressed race, is essential to understanding how America and American music got to where they are today. 

All American music, ALL of it, is a dialog between black and white. And America, lest we forget, was an astoundingly racist place in Jolson's day -- more so than at any time in its history. The 1920s were, after all, not just the decade of jazz and flappers but the decade of the Ku Klux Klan. Jolson's time was the time of Jim Crow as well, when the social and political gains of blacks were being erased left and right.

If you're not hearing those echoes when you listen to that music, you're not hearing anything. Pretending it didn't happen is a poor way to understand history. And extreme defensiveness about racism -- "well, I'M not one, that's for sure!" -- is evidence to the contrary, I'm afraid. If you want to understand American culture, you have to meet it on its own ground, though.

I strongly recommend Nick Tosches's book "Where Dead Voices Gather" to learn more about how the conversation between black music and white music has taken place over the years. It's largely about minstrelsy. There are black vectors into white music and white vectors into black music all over the place, and the fact that these took place under a cloud of all-pervasive racism doesn't make them less important; it makes them more. Minstrelsy is in fact one of the ways we got OUT of racism -- sort of.

To call America a "post-racial" nation, though, is ignorant. We will never be post-racial, nor should we aspire to be. More inclusive, yes, but race is not something to banish from our understanding. Attempts to do so, as we have seen here, fail horribly.

-- 
Steve