What Lies Beneath: The Message Behind Blackface Memorabilia

Editor’s Note: This essay relates to the exhibit “David Levinthal: Heroes, Sluts, and Servants” from the CEPA Gallery, and is part of NEMA’s efforts to amplify discussions about centering equity in museum operations and interpretation. If you are have an exhibit, program, or policy you would like to review for Museums Now, please reach out to our editors.

David Levinthal’s Blackface series (1995-1998) features Polaroid photographs of ceramic memorabilia imbued with racial stereotypes. Racialized portrayals of grinning African-Americans in servile poses were prevalent during the Jim Crow era, which lasted from 1877 to the mid-1960s. The commodification of Black bodies was seen on everything from canned soup and drinking glasses to detergent and games. This form of racism could be bought everywhere, from five-and-dime stores to street vendors. Levinthal’s amplified images skillfully capture how manufacturers and advertisers used blackface iconography to habituate the public to stereotypes and reinforce negative notions about African-Americans.

For this series, Levinthal uses these stereotyping and caricatured objects which force the viewer to explore a more truthful portrayal of African-American culture. These offensive figures, depicting Black people as darker than black with features exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness—huge noses, bulging white eyes, and protruding red lips still haunt our psyche at garage sales and antique stores across the U.S. However, what is poorly understood through flea market sales and museum exhibitions, such as Levinthal’s is how these monstrous images and the derogatory ideology they represent relate to the difficulties experienced by African-Americans. These typifying images worked hand-in-hand with racist policies to uphold systems of discrimination by reinforcing the view that people of color are less intelligent, less human, or otherwise “less than.”

Although racist memorabilia demean and delimit African-Americans, it is important to consider Levinthal’s Blackface series in the context of racism and the Jim Crow era, during which laws prevented people of color from voting and owning property. In the fight against racial prejudice, the dehumanizing “collectibles” in Levinthal’s series can help teach tolerance, promote social justice, and encourage us to acknowledge the past, however painful and wrong.

Critics of Levinthal believe that his magnification of blackface objects in photographs fails to provide context and misses opportunities to convey how hurtful these degrading caricatures are to African-Americans. Moreover, the continued nostalgia for objects, such as ‘mammy’ or Aunt Jemima jars, perpetuates incorrect beliefs that Black people are cartoonish by nature and incapable of rising above their history of enslavement, a period when they were considered three-fifths a person. When organizations or individuals collect and place value on material culture that denies the full humanness of others, they allow these relics of the past to infiltrate and corrupt contemporary culture.

Blackface objects have power; they negatively influence society and minimize the painful lived experiences and heartache that enslaved people and their descendants bore and still bear. What lies beneath blackface memorabilia is not innocuous entertainment; underneath is the traumatic impact of unrelenting and unimaginable suffering. Upon closer observation, there are many disheartening similarities between the memorabilia in Levinthal’s series and the anti-Semitic propaganda caricatures that appeared in German newspapers, such as Der Stürmer. Like the stereotyped depictions presented in Blackface, the portrayals of Jewish people in Der Stürmer commonly utilized cartoonish features and misshapen bodies.

The objects photographed by Levinthal were created not to celebrate a community that contributed to American culture through inventions, the performing arts, and countless other ways; they were crafted as part of an apartheid system that perpetuated and profiteered from human misery. While some may see this material culture as harmless, there is another side to blackface imagery, as exemplified in the case of Bert Williams, born in 1879. Williams was an internationally famous African-American entertainer in the Vaudeville era who wore blackface. He was also a gifted student who was forced to abandon studying civil engineering at Stanford University. Williams was lauded for his portrayal of a shiftless and dumb “coon” named Jonah Man but was trapped playing roles of lazy and unintelligent black men.

The legal codification of discriminatory laws and the semantic encoding of “blackness” in the popular imagination occurred in the milieu of minstrel shows like the ones in which Williams performed. Well-known comedic actor W.C. Fields knew Williams and said that “Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever met.” Williams is pertinent to this review of Levinthal’s Blackface series because his life superbly highlights the circumstances of many black people during the height of the popularity of blackface collectibles. Regardless of visitors’ reactions to these objects, museumgoers are prompted to interact with images whose larger context they very likely do not understand—blackface memorabilia is hate in its rawest form. The objectification of African-Americans through blackface memorabilia and exhibitions is not just a glimpse into the past; it is a loud commentary on the deep sadness experienced by Williams and people who look like him—a burden that many still carry every day.

If accompanied by a larger conversation about why such objects exist and how they were used, Levinthal’s Blackface series has the potential to be genuinely educational and to help audiences better understand a painful part of America’s history. Discerningly, the Blackface series allows the museumgoer to see and mentally untangle the depths of deep-seated anti-Black racism, transcend those biases, and see their own higher moral values reflected.