The recent spate of blackface
outings seems to have started with the Megyn Kelly debacle a few months ago.
She didn’t actually wear blackface—she just wasn’t sufficiently disgusted by
it, and though she apologized for the gaff the harsh reaction quickly
unemployed her. Now, Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General
Mark Herring have been caught up in blackface scandals—many years ago Herring
blacked up to mock rapper Kurtis Blow, and Northam tarred up for his yearbook
page, teaming with a classmate who donned the hood-&-robe regalia of
American terrorism—a photo that school authorities apparently thought
appropriate.
Whether or not one accepts the rounds of sorrowful apologies , it is essential to note
that the Christian offenders—Kelly, Northam and Herring —are apologizing for a Jewish crime.
Blackface, as a form of
American “entertainment,” started out in the early 1800s, most notably through
a highly popular minstrel show performer by the name of Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a
white entertainer who blackened his face with burnt cork to ridicule Blacks and
their culture. White minstrel shows lampooned Black people, presenting them as
dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, criminal, but nonetheless
prodigiously musical. Rice’s popular blackface character was named Jim Crow—a name that came to describe
the racially repressive era after the Civil War in which white society was
determined to violently force Blacks back into plantation slavery. Blackface died a well-earned death,
but was revived when Jews became perversely connected with this racist “art
form” as performers and as fans, filling auditoriums to watch blackface stage
shows in Jewish neighborhoods all over America.
Jewish
History of Blackface Hate
From the time of the earliest
American colonies Jews had always been a
formidable presence in the slave-based economy, where they
became important slave traders and international marketers of slavery’s
products, especially sugar, cotton, and tobacco. But after the Civil War Jewish immigration to America
increased dramatically. Their history in Europe with Gentiles over many
centuries was one of conflict and violence, and so in America they saw distinct
advantages in helping to create a society that made but one distinction based
entirely on skin color. Brandeis’s Irving Howe, author of the most popular book on American Jewish
history, World
of Our Fathers,
is one of many Jewish scholars that
admitted that Blacks were scapegoats for Jews:
“For decades American blacks
had served…as a kind of buffer for American Jews. So long as native hatreds
were taken out primarily on blacks, they were less likely to be taken out on
Jews.”
So, for Jews, anti-Black
racism was a benefit and a valuable asset to their own goals
of gaining power and influence. Jews saw blackface minstrelsy as a vehicle to claim their
whiteness and to ensure that racism—and not religious ethnicism—would become the American way. It was
this conscious Jewish need to use Blacks as
scapegoats that drove their involvement in that atrocious “art form” known
as blackface
minstrelsy.
Jewish film scholar Lester D. Friedman is even more direct in his book Hollywood’s Image of the Jew:
“In actuality, many Jewish
performers gained early and continued success using [blackface]….Indeed, it is
too easy to ignore the derogatory aspects of such activities, the unconscious
racism accepted and nourished by such cruel parodies, by citing historical
contexts. The undisguised elements of ridicule in such blackface portrayals
by Jews
mimicking the outlandish stereotypes of blacks now looks suspiciously like one
group’s desperate need to assert its own superiority by mimicking another.”
University of California
religious studies professor Dr. Michael Alexander received a National Jewish Book Award
for his book in which he asserts that minstrelsy—the public ridicule and
mockery of the Black race—became identified with Jewish entertainers: “Jews performed this kind of
minstrelsy in the 1910s and 1920s better and more often than any other group in
America. Jewish faces covered in cork were ubiquitous.”
In fact, blackface and a
singing style pioneered by Jews known as “coon shouting” were mainstays of Jewish
entertainment, with their most popular performers, like Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Al
Jolson, Irving Berlin, George Burns, and Florenz Ziegfeld, using Black-race mockery as a dominant theme. Jewish historian
Dr. Jeffrey
Melnick says
that Jews played “a major role in the manufacture of the racial stereotypes on
which American popular culture depended.”
Al Jolson Sings “Mammy” in
blackface
But blackface Jews had an even
more devious design. According to Melnick,
“Both Cantor and Jolson cultivated
what Cantor called ‘the cultured, pansy-like negro’; Cantor also made an early blackface
appearance in drag. The production of effeminacy—which is, in this context, another way of saying homosexuality—as a major modality for these Jewish men in blackface
was also tied up with their display as children…”
What blackface represents, then, is not simply Jewish ridicule of
Blacks, but a purposefully malicious destruction and redefinition of the Black
character fronting as entertainment. And it is a formula that has permeated the film output of Jewish
Hollywood for generations. This treachery was not limited to the Jewish actors
on stage and screen. B’nai B’rith is seen as the most prestigious of Jewish
organizations, and it is the parent of the notorious den of spies and
racists, the Anti-Defamation League. In the 1920s their monthly magazine printed meticulously crafted
examples of what they considered “jokes.” Here is a B’nai B’rith “joke” the
Jewish editors titled DARKTOWN:
Rastus: Whuffo’ yo’ ‘jeculate yoself
to me in dat onery manner?
Cicero: Whoffo’? Nigguh, who do yo’
calkerate yo’ is?
Rastus: Yo’ nigguh! mah family am
quality folks an’ ahm a pusson of rank.
Cicero: Huh! ah’ll have yo’ triflin’,
Rastus, to know that ah’m ranker than you is.
And this B’nai B’rith Magazine “joke” is titled “Good Enough”:
Mose: Dat’s a purty shirt you has
on, Rastus, How many yards does it take for one ob dem shirts?
Rastus: What you all talking about,
Nigger? I done got three like them in one yard last night.
In the age of Black leaders and
thinkers of such intelligence and prestige as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey,
Booker T. Washington, Nannie Burroughs, William Monroe Trotter, Ida B.
Wells-Barnett,
and Nobel
Drew Ali,
among many, many others, the Jewish leadership preferred to invent “nigguhs”
they named “Rastus,” “Cicero,” and “Mose.”
B’nai B’rith’s blackface
depictions occurred in the 1920s, more than a decade after that same
organization set up the Anti-Defamation League to counter what it saw as the
prevalent public ridicule of Jews! According to the ADL’s 1913 charter:
“For a number of years a
tendency has manifested itself in American life toward the caricaturing and defaming
of Jews on the stage, in moving pictures. The effect of this on the unthinking public
has been to create an untrue and injurious impression of an entire people and to expose the Jew to undeserved contempt, and
ridicule.
The caricatures center around some idiosyncrasy of the few which, by the
thoughtless public, is often taken as a pivotal characteristic of the entire
people…”
So the highest levels of the American Jewish leadership were keenly aware
of the negative power of these blackface images, and even forced their own
Hollywood brethren to cleanse the Jewish image, while these same Jews ran the
image and reputation of Blacks into the gutter. Jews smeared black shoe polish
on their faces and assaulted the consciousness of the entire world with
anti-Black racism in its purest and most concentrated form.
It
gets worse.
At the same moment the ADL began, a number of Jewish businessmen from the Boston area were plotting to finance the most degrading and hateful blackface
movie ever made—The Birth of a Nation.
The silent movie epic released in 1915 was the first movie blockbuster,
smashing all box office records. It rewrote the history of the Civil War to
make the Ku Klux Klan terrorists the heroes and saviors of a grateful white
nation. It depicted all Blacks as notorious criminals, uncontrollable rapists
of white women, and intellectual, social, and spiritual inferiors who had no
useful or rightful function in America except as slaves. So racially hateful
were its blackface portrayals of the Black man that the Ku Klux Klan used this
Jewish production as its recruitment film! How many of the thousands of
American lynchings this Jewish-financed film was responsible for may never be
known. For the many white immigrants pouring in to America by the millions at
the time, it was the first “black” image they would see and it depicted
an American racial system they could
believe in.
The NAACP condemned The Birth of a Nation in the harshest words, whilst
Jewish reviewers trumpeted the virtues of the film, Jewish-owned movie theaters
premiered it, and Jewish distributors spread the debased Black stereotypes to
theaters around the world. Louis B. Mayer made so much money distributing this blackface hatefest that
he started Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the “greatest” of the Jewish movie studios, where he continued
to make movies that trafficked in the ugliest stereotypes of Native Americans,
Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and Arabs.
Jewish music publisher Isidore Witmark created and distributed
disgraceful “coon” images of Blacks for world consumption. Witmark, along
with his Hollywood brethren, were leaders in institutionalizing anti-Black
racism.
The Jewish-dominated media takes a hard
line with whites who have been blackface-outed, but they are careful to conceal
the Jewish role in the history of this truly American hate phenomenon. Kelly,
Herring, and Northam were certainly racially naïve, but the treacherous
blackface Jews had something far more diabolical in mind.