Thomas Dartmouth Rice as Jim Crow, 1833.
In 1828, New York City-based actor Thomas Dartmouth (a.k.a. “Daddy”) Rice embarked on a career- and epoch-making endeavor when he began impersonating a rural Black stablehand he called “Jim Crow.” His wildly appreciative audiences were made up of primarily working-class white men in the urban North, but the minstrel show, or “Ethiopian minstrelsy,” soon spread to all corners of the English-speaking world. Henry Mayhew, in his 1851 report London Labour and the London Poor, mentions street urchins blacking up with cork and singing and dancing for coins on corners, and in his third volume he includes a detailed interview with a homegrown English blackface minstrel.
The typical minstrel show
In 1848, Frederick Douglass denounced minstrelsy as “The filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.” Nevertheless, the Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller defended it as a uniquely American artistic expression, alleging that “All symptoms of invention [in America] are confined to the African race . . . [unlike “Yankee Doodle,” an English song] “Jump Jim Crow” is a [song] native to this country.”
Minstrelsy has been the subject of serious scholarship across disciplines for over a century. One of my esteemed professors at the City University of New York, American music scholar John Graziano, co-taught a course on it with a professor of theater studies. Another CUNY professor, American historian Eric Lott, wrote a groundbreaking study of the genre in 1993, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, in which he asserts that it was not simply white racial prejudice that made minstrelsy so popular among the working classes, but, more crucially:
The white working classes, Lott suggests, were deracinated and adrift in the cities, cut off from their centuries-old connection to the land. “Jim Crow” and other stereotypes became, for them, a stand-in for the “natural man” whom they had left behind in their migration from the country to the city, and for whom they never ceased to long.
Papageno in The Magic Flute serves a similar function, though without the overlay of racism. Birdcatcher to the Queen of the Night, he is a creature of the earth and forest, almost half-bird himself.
Afro-English baritone Roderick Williams as Papageno, Royal Opera House, 2019.
Indeed, this kind of aesthetic pastoralism, this longing to return to a lost Golden Age, is a consistent trope across time, from the earliest days of a written western literary corpus to the present — from the Roman-era Greek story of Daphnis and Chloe, to the mass rustication of urban countercultural types in the 1970s, to Beyoncé’s new album.
I believe that the current support for anti-Zionism among the student and intellectual classes is also an indication of this (for want of a better term) deracinated pastoralism. A great deal of recent attention has been paid to the longstanding sympathies of Black American activists for the Palestinian cause, and many of the pro-Palestine protests of the past few months have been spearheaded by activists of color. The energizing of this historical alliance by the Israel-Hamas war has breathed new life into student activism across causes, at the same time fracturing the traditional coalition of American Blacks and Jews.
A pro-Palestine march in Cincinnati in November, 2023 (© Kevin Williams for the New York Times). The Times noted: “The event was organized by the Cincinnati Socialists, but it was heavily attended by Muslims, Black activists, college students and peace advocates.”
“Palestine to Africa: Palestinian Liberation is Black Liberation” protest in New York on November 5, 2023 (© Maggy Donaldson / AFP).
The intellectual classes, not unlike the working-class minstrel-show audiences of old, are urbanized, cosmopolitanized, and severed from any deep cultural roots. To the intellectual, the working classes are a profound mystery. As T.S. Eliot wrote in his 1917 poem “Morning at the Window”:
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
The housemaids may have “damp souls,” but in dampness there is fecundity. The faces of the working class are “twisted,” but nevertheless, they smile. To the ruling-class observer, though these smiles are incomprehensible, they invoke a fleeting sense of yearning, a nostalgie de la boue.
The rootlessness of the contemporary intellectual, combined with the recent privileging of melanin-rich phenotypes over pallid ones across social and cultural spheres as guardians of higher wisdom, virtue, and spirituality, contributes to this longing of the intellectual for the worker, and the white for the Black. It is theft, but it is also love; specifically, it is a love from afar, projected across a wide gulf of appropriation and faulty understanding.
Sixty-eight percent of Princeton’s class of 2025 self-identify as students of color. This is remarkable, and while it may represent a genuine attempt to redress past injustices and a welcome leveling of the playing field, I doubt it. I suspect, rather, that a good many among those 68% self-identify as students of color on, at best, a tenuous biological basis, perhaps derived from a miniscule percentage of bloodline detected on a home DNA test. But perhaps this shouldn’t matter. If gender is fluid, and one’s gender identity can differ from one day to the next, then perhaps race and ethnicity can as well.
As the novelist Percival Everett notes, race is a myth:
But the “love” component of “love and theft” — the cross-cultural and -racial longing of the deracinated urbanite — is a desire for authenticity, for some sort of truth writ large, for a healing of the generational etiolation of the ruling classes. The flocking of intellectuals to the pro-Palestine cause seems very much to me in line with Eric Lott’s thesis.