Rhae Lynn Barnes is the author of the new book Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. She is assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University, and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
Q: What inspired you to write Darkology?
A: The inspiration for Darkology has many roots, but they
all lead back to a lifelong attempt to map the architecture of American racial
representation.
My cultural imagination was forged in Anaheim, California,
growing up in the literal shadow of Disneyland—a phantasmal, curated version of
America circa 1955–the same year Disneyland opened. It was also the same year
as the Montgomery Bus Boycotts that brought America Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.
I remember being there with a diverse group of friends as a
child shortly after the 1992 LA Uprisings. The contrast was jarring: the world
outside was reckoning with systemic racial fracture, while inside the gates, we
stood on Main Street, U.S.A., a place designed to evoke innocent nostalgia and
an image of the 1950s that didn’t exactly match what was happening in postwar
America.
We wandered into the cinema that plays original,
black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons and watched Steamboat Willie. The very
foundations of American animation were dripping with the aesthetics of the
minstrel stage.
The soundtrack featured "Turkey in the Straw," a
melody most children recognize as the "ice cream truck song," but I
later learned began its life in the 19th century as "Zip Coon," a
staple of blackface performance.
It was a flashpoint in my consciousness. As I went to
Disneyland again and again after school (at the time, local residents could get
heavily discounted tickets and passes) I realized that the "happiest place
on earth" was built on a soundtrack and a visual language that most
Americans consume without ever questioning.
But the cartoon that truly struck me was a 1933 short where
Mickey and the gang stage an amateur minstrel show—a parody of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. In a moment of jarring slapstick, Mickey "blacks up" by
putting a stick of dynamite in his mouth; the explosion coats his face in soot,
a direct, violent nod to the burnt cork of the 19th-century stage.
As they performed "Dixie"—a song beloved by both
Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis—I felt a profound sense of cognitive
dissonance. I was standing in a place iconically designed to produce
"Americana," yet it was haunted by an invisible Blackness.
Whether in New Orleans Square or on Tom Sawyer’s Island, or
the "Mississippi" rebranded as the Rivers of America, what I saw was
a sanitized myth. Even as a teenager, I was unsettled by this absence of
reality, constantly trying to decipher where history ended and myth began.
The same thing could be said of my experiences going to the
other amusement park I grew up frequenting: Knott’s Berry Farm, which is a
reinterpretation of the American West. If you look at old photographs, they
used to have mock lynchings of Mexican Americans just hung up for decoration.
John Wayne loved to go there.
I would stand in line for rides with my friends and would
experience teenage girl things–trying to hold someone’s hand for the first
time, wondering if we would dance together–but also getting obsessed with
trying to understand what was happening with the soundtrack that was playing in
the rides, the animatronics singing at us, why the representation of the West
and California did not look anything like what I inhabited.
This curiosity took on a moral weight in high school during
a program at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. There, I learned how
stereotypes are culturally constructed and the devastating impact they have
when they move from the abstract to the lives of millions. It was a sobering
lesson in the lethal power of imagery.
I know there is a newspaper article somewhere that includes
an interview with a 15- or 16-year-old me standing outside the final
remembrance room, and I explained to the journalist that I was a young white
teenager from California who was raised Lutheran. That history was not my
history.
But the experience was empowering and transformative. I wish
everyone in America could go.
The actual catalyst for this book occurred during my
freshman year at UC Berkeley. Hurricane Katrina and its horrors took place
during our first week of living in the dorms. I remember all of the stereotypes
and caricatures in the media used to justify the complete neglect of humans in
a rapidly unfolding emergency.
I was enrolled in a course on American slavery, reading
seminal texts that argued minstrelsy had declined during Reconstruction,
eventually being "subsumed" by film and radio. But that academic
narrative didn't match the world I saw with my own eyes.
At the time, I was working as a photographer to get through
school, largely documenting fraternity parties. I knew what I was seeing at
those parties–the costumes they wore, the rituals, the language—the echoes of
those same performances.
When I looked at the footnotes of famous history books on
blackface, I saw a massive gap: scholars argued that the genre had ended in the
19th century as a stand-alone theatrical form, yet they cited plays published
during the Great Depression and World War II.
I realized then that there was a "missing century"
of American culture. If these shows had supposedly disappeared, why did we all
still know the songs? Why did racist jokes about watermelon and chickens still
land?
That contradiction sparked a quest to understand the
century-long "gap" in which amateur minstrelsy didn't just survive—it
became the hidden operating system of American life.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify
for you?
A: It’s a chilling title, isn’t it? The most haunting part
is that I didn't invent the word Darkology. I exhumed it.
While digging through the archives, I uncovered this term
used by the architects of the industry—from massive publishing houses to
Hollywood icons like Bing Crosby.
They used "Darkology" to describe the
pseudo-science of studying, mimicking, and commodifying Black life. It wasn't
merely a hobby; it was a celebrated and competitive discipline. I found records
of fraternal orders, like the Elks, granting titles such as
"Corkologist" or "Master of Darkology" to members who had
perfected this art of dehumanization.
For me, the title signifies the moment I realized that
American racism wasn't just a visceral emotional reaction; it was a
professionalized, mass-marketed enterprise. Blackface minstrel shows were an
"R&D" department of white supremacy.
I’m bringing these insider terms into the light because they
were the vocabulary of Jim Crow America—a period named, tellingly, after the
most famous minstrel of all.
You asked about the subtitle, which is where the heartbreak
of the story lives. Originally, I wanted Darkology: When the American Dream
Wore Blackface. I fought for that because I wanted to capture how seductive
this mask was.
For generations of immigrants—Irish, Polish, Jewish,
Japanese—blackface was a cultural passport. It was the price of admission to
"Whiteness” or “Americanness” via a white supremacist culture when being
legally, socially, or culturally “white” was not possible.
Think of James Cagney, an Irish kid from the Lower East
Side, applying the burnt cork to signal he was on the "inside" of the
American joke.
Most devastatingly, I found evidence of Japanese Americans
performing blackface inside WWII concentration camps. It is a staggering image:
a people imprisoned by their own government, donning the mask of another
oppressed group just to prove they belonged to the country that locked them up.
It shows how deep the rot of that "Dream" really went.
My editor landed on Blackface and the American Way of
Entertainment. We made the shift because a "Dream" implies a fleeting
fantasy. Calling it the "American Way" forces us to admit that this
degradation was the infrastructure. It wasn't a bug in the system; it was the
operating system.
I also think the cover is worth mentioning. The challenge of
the cover was a moral tightrope: How do you represent a legacy that is, in its
very marrow, a visual hate crime, without replicating the violence of the
image? To place the raw iconography of minstrelsy on a bookstore shelf felt
like ambushing the reader.
The image we chose is disturbing in its banality, adapted
from a Depression-era instructional guide for children. We altered the
composition, transmuting the invisible performer’s cane into the shape of a
human spine—a nod to the truth that this history forms the hidden vertebrae of
all American pop culture.
Finally, we flooded the background in yellow. It completes
the historical quartet of the minstrel stage and print—red, white, black, and
yellow—but it also vibrates with the frequency of a hazard sign.
It’s a cautionary tale. It signals a history so often
wrapped in silence that it has become a ghost—and as this book shows, you
cannot exorcise a ghost until you are brave enough to call it by its name.
Q: The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said of the book, “Through
fastidious research and the painstaking pursuit of archives and documents
hidden from historians for decades, Barnes has written nothing short of an
exposé of the structural racism that undergirds the very foundations on which
America is built.” What do you think of that description?
A: To answer that honestly, I have to tell you a story that
still feels a bit like a fever dream. When I moved from California to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered graduate school to first work on
Darkology as a dissertation, I was looking for a sanctuary.
It was July 2009, during Barack Obama’s first months in
office. Back home, many people I knew in California were in crisis because of
the financial crash and housing crisis.
The same night Obama was elected, California passed
Proposition 8. I was really disgusted that that happened. I had never lived
outside of California before, but I was intentionally moving to the city that
had issued the first same-sex marriage licenses in the country.
I arrived thinking I was leaving Orange County, which
historically was a bastion for conservatism, and entering a progressive space.
I was a working-class student from a Teamster family.
Everyone in my family obsessively reads (I’m talking constantly) but everyone
was largely concentrated together. I was the first person in my family to move
away for college, let alone for graduate school.
I didn't know a soul in Massachusetts and in some ways I
think my addiction to the sitcom Cheers (famously set in a Boston bar with many
characters traveling back and forth between Cambridge) led me to make some odd
life choices.
All I had was a name my undergraduate mentors, the legendary
historian Leon F. Litwack and Waldo E. Martin, had scribbled on a Post-it note
for me: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. They told me to reach out to him as soon as I
landed. Because of my background, I had no idea about his fame or stature; to
me, "Skip" was just a name on a piece of paper in my backpack.
But I arrived and moved into this comically sad basement
apartment in Cambridge (one fine aspect is that it didn’t have a bathroom door,
just a piece of oddly cut plywood on a spring hinge connected to–I kid you
not–the stove!) but it was a room of my own to write and learn in and I was
proud it was mine.
The very week I moved in, Professor Gates was arrested in
his own home, just blocks away. He was instantly thrust into a grueling
national spotlight. He exhibited an enormous amount of courage and grace and
compassion navigating that moment.
But because of the media storm, I wasn't able to meet or
work with him until a few months later, in January 2010, when I enrolled in his
graduate seminar on the African American Literary Tradition.
That Post-it note stayed in my bag, a quiet reminder of the
world I was trying to enter while the history of racial representation and
stereotyping I came to study historically was exploding on the nightly news to
this person I felt my mentors, Leon and Waldo, had in some ways tried to
intellectually entrust me to.
When I finally met Professor Gates, we connected over our
shared love of antiquarian books and of building our own archives.
Specifically, I remember walking down Broadway with him, talking about what
books we wished we owned and the singular genius of James Weldon Johnson, who
had to navigate the "coon song" music empire just to survive the peak
of Jim Crow.
Hearing Professor Gates describe my book now as an
"exposé of structural racism" makes me incredibly bashful. It’s a
description I prize because no one knows this literature better than he does.
He understands the painstaking years it took to find this material—history that
was scattered in attics and uncatalogued ephemera boxes that traditional
library searches simply cannot see.
Beyond his intellect, Professor Gates taught me that
scholarship is a form of community service. At the Hutchins Center, he has this
beautiful habit of ordering way too much food and insisting we all take home
to-go boxes.
He understood, perhaps before I did, that those of us from
working-class or international backgrounds, or folks far from home, were often
supporting families back home. It was hard being alone while doing this kind of
soul-crushing work. He wasn't just feeding us as scholars; he was ensuring we
had the literal and spiritual nourishment to keep going.
I tried not only to pay attention to how he researches and
writes, but also how he teaches so that everyone can understand American
history. That generosity is the spirit I tried to bring to Darkology.
He set a high bar, challenging me to keep the human at the
center and teaching me that you cannot make sense of America unless you take
Black cultural history seriously.
When he calls the book an "exposé," I think he is
acknowledging that I followed the archive and reconstructed it to reach deeper
into American history, showing that amateur blackface was the very masonry of
the American foundation.
This structural racism was built into our government, our
politics, and our economy, and once you see these patterns, you can’t unsee
them.
I found that the U.S. government literally federalized
minstrelsy during the Great Depression, using the WPA as a "Blackface
Bureau" to distribute racist scripts, and later shipping "Theatrical
Kits" to soldiers in WWII to boost morale through the communal
dehumanization of fellow Black soldiers serving in segregated units with
minstrelsy.
This was mirrored in our political power structures, where
fraternal orders like the Elks used these shows to build the networks that
launched political careers all the way to the White House.
Most hauntingly, I saw it in what I call "blackface
capitalism," where the profits from these shows funded the very
infrastructure of white America—paving the streets and building the hospitals
that Black citizens were often excluded from using in the era of segregation.
What might look like a strange little racist community show
behind closed doors was actually financing the wealth gap in segregation–it
strengthened white hospitals, white schools, white churches, white banks. When
you step back, it’s almost too overwhelming to take in.
Q: Can you describe the process of researching the book? Did
you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: Because this material was often buried or intentionally
suppressed, my research felt like a decade-long exercise in scavenging the
ruins of American pop culture. It ranged from the visceral—literally crawling
through damp attics and basements to rescue decaying paper—to the obsessive,
tracking down leads in archives that were never designed to be found.
One of my greatest challenges was the wall of silence
surrounding early fraternal orders. The founders of the Elks Club, for
instance, were often minstrel celebrities, yet they didn't keep membership
records. These were private, white, male spaces where the "business"
of racial ridicule was conducted behind closed doors.
To reconstruct these networks, I had to turn to 19th-century
celebrity headshots. I spent days with a magnifying glass at the Harry Ransom
Center and the Library of Congress, squinting at the lapels of performers in
photographs from the 1860s and 1870s.
Those tiny buttons they wore were often the only surviving
evidence of their induction year and their allegiance to specific secret
societies. There is a lot of evidence hiding in plain sight.
The bibliographic work was a massive puzzle. No one had ever
fully reconstructed the publishing lines for the companies that produced
amateur minstrel joke books and plays.
One scholar described it as we had no “bibliographic
control” over this history. Most internal documents were lost to a century of
corporate mergers or intentionally destroyed by families who wanted to erase
the source of their wealth.
I had to work backward, using mail-order catalogs—much like
the Sears catalogs of the era—to build a checklist of every play and songbook
offered to the American public. Once I had the shopping list, the hunt began to
find where these books actually survived so I could read them and document the
scripts.
It was maddening; I’d chase what I thought were dozens of
different authors, only to discover they were all the same prolific writer
using scores of increasingly ludicrous pen names to flood the market.
To build the world of the past, I rely on photography as a
primary blueprint. I need to know the specific texture of the curtains in a
19th-century concert saloon or the exact wattage of the lighting in a
vaudeville house. Unlike a historical fiction author, if I say the wallpaper in
a room was yellow, I have to be able to prove it was yellow.
But my research doesn't stop at the visual; it is deeply
environmental. I spend a lot of time reading scientific guidebooks about
regional soil, flora, and fauna.
I want to know exactly what kind of brush someone was
trampling through in the 1930s when they put on a minstrel show for the CCC in
a National Park, or which flowers cast their scent across the whitewashed deck
of FDR’s "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia.
I extract every sensory detail I can from the written and
visual evidence to make the history breathe. Nerdy stuff, but I always want to
know the answer.
I met Ethan Hawke in Austin, Texas, in 2018 when he released
Blaze, and I asked him about some of the period pieces he’s worked on and
produced from a historical research and world-building perspective. He simply
said it has to pass the smell test. Does this representation of the past smell
right? I have to get it to smell right.
The final, and perhaps most vital, step is the pilgrimage. I
take this commitment very seriously because there is a limit to what the page
can tell you.
You can read every existing testimony about the Manzanar
concentration camp during World War II, but your perspective shifts the moment
you stand there yourself—when you find you suddenly can’t breathe because of
that biting combination of freezing wind and dust filling your lungs or you
hear the never ending bang bang bang of every shutter and screen door slamming
in that wind and echoing off the mountain walls.
Standing in the dark shadow of the Sierras changes the
temperature. It changes how I personify the past for the reader. And sometimes
that is hard. I have had to hold historical truths and places in my body I
really wish I hadn’t gone to. It would have been easier not to.
But I remind myself I am only a temporary conduit trying to
translate pieces of the past in writing. These were other people’s lives, with
no escape or reprieve, and I have to respect that. Don’t ever complain. It is
an honor to learn, read, and write.
By far, the most rewarding part of this journey was
conducting oral histories. I had the profound honor of speaking with survivors
of the Japanese American concentration camps and Civil Rights workers from the
1950s and ‘60s. These activists took American culture so seriously that they
were willing to jeopardize their livelihoods to protest these shows.
Having just witnessed the horrors of state-sponsored
dehumanization in Europe during World War II, they understood with terrifying
clarity that racial stereotyping wasn't just "entertainment"—it was
the fuel that could escalate Jim Crow America into something even more
catastrophic.
At one point, I dreamt of creating a database of every
amateur minstrel show performed in the 20th century, but I quickly realized the
scale was staggering; it would have surpassed a million entries almost
immediately.
That prolificacy was the point. These activists were
fighting a machine that was everywhere. Their bravery gave me the moral compass
to finish this work and keep going, even when I felt like I didn’t have it in
me to try again.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m a fairly promiscuous writer—I prefer working on
multiple projects across different genres and eras to keep my perspective
sharp. One project I’m particularly excited about is a co-authored book with
Professor Glenda Goodman, a historian and musicologist at the University of
Pennsylvania.
We are tracing what I’d describe as one of the most famous
songs in human history that, paradoxically, no one alive today can accurately
sing or play. We only possess fragments that have mutated over several
centuries. It is a fantastic story that cuts to the core of global American
culture, racial representation, and the machinery of entertainment. I can't
wait to share it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I want to thank you for this opportunity to talk with me.
While Darkology uncovers unsettling truths about the institutions we cherish,
it is ultimately not a book about the darkness—it is a roadmap for how we found
the light.
Blackface didn't simply fade away; it was dismantled. It was
systematically uprooted by a courageous coalition of mothers on the front lines
of school integration, soldiers in the barracks of World War II, and college
students who refused to accept the status quo.
When the University of Vermont finally ended its 70+ year
blackface tradition in 1969, it wasn't by accident—it was because a generation
looked at the evidence, listened to each other, and chose justice and forward
movement.
This is a story of hope because it proves that America is
capable of profound change.
Every page reveals that the smallest acts of human kindness
and local protest can trigger monumental shifts. We are a nation still growing,
still striving, and still moving forward. This history reminds us that no
matter how deep the roots of discord go, we have the power to decide what comes
next. We change the course of history. And that’s exciting.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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