<\/p>\n
Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes spent 20 years researching the materials that would inform her nonfiction book, \u201cDarkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment,\u201d which explores the long history of blackface in American culture.<\/p>\n
A fourth-generation Southern Californian raised in Anaheim, Barnes grew up wanting to be a sportswriter, eventually meeting Vin Scully and corresponding with radio sportscaster \u201cBig Joe\u201d McDonnell, aka The Big Nasty. The daughter of an artist who attended readings by Charles Bukowski, Barnes attended Orange County High School of the Arts (now known as Orange County School of the Arts, or OCSA) in Santa Ana for creative writing, studying with James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers.<\/p>\n
Barnes, who is the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, shares both her personal story and also how she wrote and researched her book in this email Q&A, which has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
(<\/em>Ed. note: Barnes\u2019s responses were composed with newspaper readers in mind, but readers should nonetheless be aware that her academic research involved examining racist materials and practices.)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n SEE ALSO<\/strong><\/em>:\u00a0Like books? Get the free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more<\/a><\/p>\n Q. In recent years, blackface and minstrelsy have shown up in Percival Everett\u2019s \u201cJames\u201d and an episode of \u201cMad Men,\u201d but many would be surprised to learn how popular it was in the country.<\/strong><\/p>\n People are often surprised, and that shock is exactly why I had to write this book. For decades, the established historical narrative suggested that blackface minstrelsy died out by the dawn of the 20th century, supposedly \u201csubsumed\u201d by film and radio. Because of that gap in our collective memory, when it pops up in brilliant contemporary works like Percival Everett\u2019s \u201cJames\u201d<\/a> or that infamous country club episode of \u201cMad Men,\u201d we tend to view it as a strange, isolated relic or a quirky historical footnote.<\/p>\n But the reality is far more pervasive. \u201cDarkology\u201d is a cultural skeleton key to the soul of Americana. It uncovers a \u201cmissing century\u201d of American culture by exposing how amateur minstrelsy didn\u2019t just survive the 19th century. It became the hidden operating system of American life. I am not just talking about professional actors on a stage. I am talking about millions of everyday citizens. Blackface was an \u201cR&D\u201d department of White supremacy that was aggressively professionalized, mass-marketed, and sold to amateurs.<\/p>\n When you look at the sheer scale of it, it is staggering. I found that the U.S. government literally federalized minstrelsy. During the Great Depression, the WPA acted as a \u201cBlackface Bureau\u201d to distribute racist scripts. During World War II, the military shipped \u201ctheatrical kits\u201d to soldiers to boost morale through the communal dehumanization of their fellow Black soldiers serving in segregated units. Fraternal orders, like the Elks, used these shows to build the insular networks that launched political careers all the way to the White House.<\/p>\n Most devastatingly, I uncovered what I call \u201cblackface capitalism.\u201d The profits from these amateur community shows funded the very infrastructure of Jim Crow America, from paving streets, financing university buildings, and building the hospitals and schools that Black citizens were systematically excluded from using. It was also a seductive cultural passport.<\/p>\n So, \u201cDarkology\u201d is about looking that messy, violent reality right in the eye. It proves that this degradation wasn\u2019t a bug in the American system; it was the masonry of the foundation.<\/p>\n But I also want readers to know that it is a story of profound hope. This massive, decentralized machine didn\u2019t just fade away. It was systematically dismantled by the fierce, courageous resistance of Black mothers, soldiers, and civil rights workers who recognized the lethal power of these performances and put everything on the line to change the course of our history. For all of us who believe in that \u201cmore perfect union,\u201d there are amazing lessons of courage and hope here.<\/p>\n Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you? <\/strong><\/p>\n As an only child in a working-class Teamster family in Anaheim, books and movies were very much my friends. The first book to make a major impact on me was \u201cA Tree Grows in Brooklyn.\u201d I had this odd habit as a kid of trying to memorize novels. I was obsessively trying to understand what made stories work. I remember lying awake at night, long after I was supposed to be asleep, reciting the opening lines to myself in the dark: \u201cSerene. Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1912\u2026\u201d There was something about wanting to fully inhabit the language and hold the architecture of that story in my body that laid the groundwork for how I write today. I love that book very much and the grit of the main character deciding she\u2019s going to forge her own life against all odds and tradition expected of her.<\/p>\n SEE ALSO<\/em><\/strong>:\u00a0Where\u2019s the nearest bookstore? See our map of 80+ SoCal bookshops<\/a><\/p>\n Q. Who are some nonfiction authors or journalists you turn to for inspiration? <\/strong><\/p>\n Here\u2019s a secret very few people know: when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a sports writer. Growing up in Southern California meant marinating in a beautifully chaotic media stew where local sports writers and radio personalities were some of our defining cultural commentators. The daily commute was, by default, a mandatory two-hour radio show. At home, you\u2019d watch a baseball game on TV, but we\u2019d mute the national announcers and crank up the radio broadcast because your guys were the only ones who truly got it.<\/p>\n I was lucky to meet Vin Scully as a kid. But for decades, I secretly corresponded with a man who went by the nickname \u201cThe Big Nasty.\u201d Also known as \u201cBig Joe\u201d McDonnell<\/a>, he tapped out at 740 pounds and was an absolute fixture of Los Angeles sports journalism. I first wrote to him in the sixth grade, and despite his larger-than-life, garish alter-ego, he wrote back. He was kind. He was encouraging. As I started writing myself, every interaction with him felt like a blessing from my very own personal Lester Bangs a la \u201cAlmost Famous.\u201d This is particularly laughable because I have never played a single organized sport. I danced, I played piano. But \u201cThe Big Nasty\u201d taught me how to swear like a relief pitcher clinging to the dugout in the bottom of the ninth and how to tell great stories.<\/p>\n Joe was the city\u2019s collective sports id, miraculously granted a press pass and a microphone. But what inspired me most as a writer was his bracing vulnerability. He was the first person I can remember being profoundly open about what it\u2019s like to live with obesity in America and writing about the medical realities, the daily cruelties, and the mental demons he fought, all juxtaposed against the fine lines and controlled bodies of the athletes he studied.<\/p>\n One thing I learned from Big Joe and from my family, whose love for the Dodgers is basically a genetic trait encoded directly into our DNA, is the art of showing up to witness greatness. I have gone out of my way to luxuriously witness people kicking ass, which is why I took my dad to spring training last year to see Shohei Ohtani. I know with every fiber of my being that Big Joe would have had an absolute meltdown in the press box watching Ohtani. He would have flipped out over the cosmic agony of the Angels losing him up the freeway, and he would have loved every second of the hot, electric, Santa Ana-windblown madness of the World Series at Dodger Stadium. Joe taught me to value that raw, unfiltered passion for the story, and that unapologetic ethos heavily informs how I write cultural history today. I wish I could have sent him my book when it was released or told him when it became a national bestseller. But I guess he knows.<\/p>\n Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life \u2013 a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else? <\/strong><\/p>\n My reading life is a product of the somewhat unconventional literary education I got here in Southern California. It really started at home. My dad was deeply embedded in the arts, punk, gritty avant-garde film and that side of the local writing culture, except he does not write. He is a visual artist. He used to go see Charles Bukowski read all the time. In fact, if you watch some of the old DVDs of those poetry readings, you can actually see and hear my dad in the crowd, talking and heckling back and forth with Hank. That raw, unpretentious approach to words was my baseline. Maybe I shouldn\u2019t have been reading Charles Bukowski as young as I was, but it certainly helped shape the kind of language I like.<\/p>\n Everything shifted when I was a teenager. I had been attending a failing public junior high housed in trailers in the shadow of Disneyland, but my life changed when I auditioned for and was accepted into the Orange County High School of the Arts (now known as Orange County School of the Arts, or OCSA) in Santa Ana for creative writing. Suddenly, I was taking college-level courses with brilliant fantasy writers like James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers<\/a>. Tim was famously the caretaker for Philip K. Dick, and being exposed to Dick\u2019s work and that entire lineage of dystopian, alternative-history storytelling profoundly shaped me. I learned to look at the surreal, manufactured landscape of Orange County through this sci-fi, slightly conspiratorial lens.<\/p>\n But the real magic happened right next door to the school. We shared a common wall with a bookstore owned by the legendary Rueben Martinez [Librer\u00eda Mart\u00ednez]<\/a>. He had an old barber chair in the middle of the shop from when he would cut hair and loan out books to new migrants. After school, he would hand-sell me books, guiding me toward writers like Sandra Cisneros and Julio Cort\u00e1zar. It was a portal that taught me books are where we go to find the language for our lives.<\/p>\n