In Blackface Nation, Brian Roberts offers a “double biography” that uses popular music to counterpose the rise of blackface minstrelsy against the unlikely popularity of the reform-minded Hutchinson Family Singers. He explains how “[r]eform, particularly progressive, liberal, or leftist reform, has almost always been interpreted as at odds with American popular culture. Usually tagged with the term ‘radical’, it has been depicted as marginal to the mainstream of history, outside American tradition” (6). Roberts claims his narrative will challenge this assumption by proving abolitionism and other reform efforts were more popular than previously imagined. At times this dueling biography does stitch together fascinating details about a progressive-family-turned-pop music-stars, but ultimately the Hutchinsons prove no match for the runaway popularity of blackface minstrelsy.

The most striking argument in the study claims that blackface minstrelsy was a “love crime” perpetrated by non-racist white performers. In his introduction, Roberts acknowledges the cultural and political work blackface minstrelsy performs: “[w]hat made blackface a part of the American racial state was the way it maintained hierarchies” (20). He also introduces the concept of “vitalist racism,” which he defines as “a type of racism characterized by a powerful white attraction to certain supposed black characteristics, a white desire for black style, dance song, and modes of expression” (20). Although blackface maintained racial hierarchies, Roberts argues this “vitalist racism” did not produce racists: “Few among the genre's early audiences, and practically none of its early performers, would fit the standard mold of the racist. As they were likely to put it, they loved ‘their’ black people” (20).

Roberts asks his readers to accept racism without racists, a concept sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva illuminates in his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Bonilla-Silva explains, “[o]ne reason why, in general terms, whites and people of color cannot agree on racial matters is because they conceive terms such as ‘racism’ very differently.”Footnote ¹ A modern correlate would be rapper-turned-rocker Kid Rock, who has been labeled a racist for his embrace of the Confederate flag, yet contends he cannot be a racist because he “loves black people.”

Avoiding the label “racist” is very much a contemporary white concern, one not necessarily shared by nineteenth-century blackface performers. In The Captive Stage, Douglas A. Jones Jr. quotes a passionate T. D. Rice curtain speech in which the minstrel pioneer distances himself and his “Jim Crow” from abolitionism: “I effectually proved that negroes are essentially an inferior species of the human family, and they ought to remain slaves.”Footnote ² Here we have proslavery racism from one of blackface's founding fathers.

More important than whether T. D. Rice was a racist, I find it difficult to fully conceive of Roberts's core concept, this “love crime.” The name naturally evokes Eric Lott's seminal blackface minstrel text Love and Theft , but Roberts differentiates his conceit in a footnote from Chapter Six: “… mine is that the white attraction was toward a blackface-inspired stereotype, and that whenever actual African Americans did not adhere to white fantasies of blackness the love could turn to violence” (328).Footnote ³

Roberts launches the “love crime” argument with two violent images from twenty-first-century white frat parties. The first image stages a white student in KKK regalia, and another white student in blackface with a noose around his neck. The second image depicts a white student dressed as a cop with his white fraternity brother in blackface kneeling beside a bucket of cotton, as the pretend cop holds a gun to the pretend black man's head. Given the recent tragedies of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, do these blackface images read like love? At one point, Roberts associates blackface with “a racism of love and yearning as well as fear and hatred” (186). The fear and hatred I understand, even the yearning or desire, but the “love” is beyond me.

Roberts's history, which retraces ground covered by earlier blackface minstrel studies, does not uncover a “love crime,” rather the work reads like a “hate crime” or even a “war crime.” The hate begins with those blackface frat party images. From there Blackface Nation walks the reader through a harrowing, long-standing war on blackness and black people: a representational and occasionally physical conflict that Roberts proves was waged by working-class whites, middle-class whites, and even progressive reformers.

The author is at his best when he draws an important distinction between the two prototypical blackface minstrel characters: Jim Crow and Zip Coon. He explains how for white working-class audiences, T. D. Rice's Jim Crow supplanted the stage Irishman as a model of identity: free expressions, unquestioned masculinity, and an anti-intellectual native intelligence. He contrasts this “love” for Jim Crow with a violent reaction to Zip Coon: “[b]y placing the character in blackface, by grafting the dandy onto a blackface character, George Washington Dixon provided a racial cover for this expression of rage. He also heightened the anger, exaggerating the distance between authentic selfhood and dandy pretense, giving it a specific target. …” (100). Roberts later identifies the target for white working-class anger: “The main target would be the representatives of a culture of uplift, the members of a rising middle class” (102). In this section, Roberts does not specifically pull middle-class Afro-New Yorkers into the target group. But later he does implicate black uplift as part of the problem: “[f]inally blackface would clarify the race confusion fostered by promoters of black uplift. It would re-crystallize racial boundaries” (186).

A rising black middle class sowed discord in the early republic, so blackface minstrelsy worked to set things right, and the white working class felt the need to act as well. Robert brings physical violence into his study when he seamlessly threads in the Five Points Riot of 1834, when white workingmen attacked aspirational African American businesses, churches, homes, and schools. Roberts characterizes these rioters as a crowd who knew their hatreds and sang blackface songs as they wrecked havoc. He explains how “… they loved their blackface. They seemed to hate black people” (158).

Beyond this hateful, blackface-fueled riot, representational crimes circulate throughout Roberts's work. I recall a frightening discussion of Uncle Remus, a typically docile minstrel storyteller from the pen of Joel Chandler Harris. Roberts highlights a story where Uncle Remus viciously attacks a black child for carrying a stack of books, sassing the old man, and basically embodying black uplift. Roberts remarks how the story read “like a standard lynching narrative” with Remus responding “like a Klansman” to the educational aspirations of a child (264).

Roberts also highlights real-life casualties in this representational warfare. He describes how the Fisk Jubilee Singers “allowed their songs to be marketed as coming from ‘no musical cultivation whatever’, as ‘simple, ecstatic utterances of wholly untutored minds'. They marketed a version of blackness rooted in nature and defined by slavery. Their excellent singing would never be the result of discipline and hard work” (269). Although Roberts advances an inconsistent argument on whether blackface music was indeed black song, his explication of how the Fisk Jubilee Singers allowed themselves to be “minstrelized” rings both true and tragic.

Perhaps the most stunning real-life victim is Sojourner Truth, a figure that historian Nell Painter depicts as a Dutch-speaking, hymn-singing former slave with Victorian ideals. Yet Roberts demonstrates how Truth was “minstrelized” by a white reformer, Frances Dana Gage, who actually wrote Truth's famous “Ain't I A Woman” speech using a heavy stage minstrel dialect. Further damaging, Roberts point out how two other reformers, Olive Gilbert and Harriet Beecher Stowe, each wrote narratives of Sojourner Truth that were heavily influenced by blackface (294).

This last casualty brings us back to Roberts's initial conception of the double biography of popular abolitionist reform versus blackface minstrelsy. The take-home message of Blackface Nation is that blackface minstrelsy was so dominant that even reformers succumbed to this ubiquitous performance tradition. Roberts fully chronicles the cruel power and reach of blackface, an idea already embraced by many scholars, but from my perspective, his narrative never delivers on a “racism of love,” or a “love crime.” At best, it reads like a national tragedy.