LAND OF THE CHIEF/ HOME OF MODERN BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY:
SAMSON RAPHAELSON'S STORIES AND OURS
U of I grad Samson Raphaelson is enjoying a nice little comeback lately,
a quarter of a century after his death. Members of the marching band
might recognize the name. A song that he coauthored in the 1920s has
recently turned up and undergone a revival with, as the university's
website reports, the band featuring it this season after
points-after-touchdowns. You have heard "Fight Illini: The Stadium Song"
if you go to games. Playing it is appropriate enough. After graduating
during World War One, Raphaelson stayed on to play a leading role in the
fund-raising for Memorial Stadium, write the first account of the
stadium's story, and orbit around the marching band as the figure of
Chief Illiniwek took shape in the 20s to the strains of songs like
"Fight Illini."
Beyond the corn fields none of those accomplishments account for the
extent to which Raphaelson's name has recently resurfaced. He is
discussed instead in connection with his role in bringing into being the
foundational talking film, /The Jazz Singer/. The film, which also is
the critical link between blackface minstrelsy and modern U.S. culture,
turned eighty this year. It was recently the subject of a lavish
retrospective at the American Cinematheque in Beverly Hills.
The story of the Raphaelson as the U of I football fan and that of
Raphaelson as the sophisticated writer responsible for the play on which
/The Jazz Singer/ was based are in fact the same story. This reality
greatly complicates the ways in which the university ought to think
about its own racial past, about its students' present flirtations with
blackface as well as with other racial impersonations, and about its
inability to let go of Chief Illiniwek.
The story is sadly fascinating. In 1917, Raphaelson saw a performance of
the imperialist classic /Robinson Crusoe/ in Champaign-Urbana. Al
Jolson, the eventual star of /The Jazz Singer/, headlined in multiple
roles, one of them---think about this!--in blackface as the "native"
character Friday in the Crusoe story. Raphaelson fell in love:
/I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson -- his velocity,
the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from tremendous absorption in
his audience to a tremendous absorption in his song ... when he finished
I turned to the girl beside me, dazed with memories of my childhood on
the East Side ... my God, this isn't a jazz singer, this is a cantor!
/
The horrors and history of white performance in blackface here fully
gave way before an opportunity to use racial disguise as if it had
nothing to do with antiblack racism.
The result was /Days of Atonement/, published in
/Everybody's Magazine/ in 1922, at about the same moment that Raphaelson
wrote "Fight Illini." Dramatizing something of Jolson's own life, the
play followed the Americanization-through-music of a young entertainer
and the ways in which his Jewish roots both were transcended and
survived. Jolson and George Jessel, then the bigger star of the two,
both pitched production of the play on stage and as a film hard.
Approached early on was D.W. Griffith, who rejected making a movie of
the play as too "racial." Presumably this meant too Jewish as Griffith's
vicious use of blackface performance in the service of antiblack racism
in /Birth of a Nation/, had already linked the minstrel tradition and
U.S. silent film, as /The Jazz Singer/ was to do for "talkies." When the
film finally appeared in 1927, the victimization of African Americans by
blackface was so off the studio's radar that it was touted as being made
"for the sake of racial tolerance" because it allegedly critiqued
anti-Semitism.
We should keep Samson Raphaelson in mind as we think about the
persistent confusion and racism of young white partygoers on campus and
the reappearance of Chief Illiniwek at this year's University homecoming
parade as two sides of a weighty coin. Those blackfaced partygoers are
routinely criticized as representing a departure from the traditions of
a liberal and inclusive university. They ought to be criticized. But so
should the traditions, which are in truth anything but inclusive or
antiracist. At their liberal best, such traditions reproduced and
recreated white supremacy.
Samson Raphaelson was very far from conforming to the academic and
Hollywood stereotype that has conservatives, blue collar workers and
hicks doing all of the heavy lifting required for building and
rebuilding white racism. Jewish and urbane, he lived as an undergraduate
with the great founder of the Catholic Worker movement Dorothy Day.
After Illinois, he joined forces with the director Ernest Lubitsh in
Hollywood, writing such witty and marvelous films as /Trouble in
Paradise/. During the post-World War 2 Red Scare, his politics earned
him the enmity of /Red Channels/, the anti-Communist scandal sheet. Just
before Raphaelson died, the left-liberal journalist Bill Moyers filmed a
warm tribute to him.
Nor, for sheer ugliness of racism, was /The Jazz Singer/ anything like
/Birth of a Nation/. Indeed when the late Michael Rogin dissected the
special dangers presented by the modernist blackface of /The Jazz
Singer/, precisely because it combined a white supremacist form of
racial disguise with liberal and pro-religious tolerance subtexts, his
/Blackface, White Noise/ generated a host of tortured defenses of the
film: but Jolson *admired* jazz; but the impersonation expressed
solidarity with Blacks; but, lighten up.
As complicated as the whole story is and must be, Rogin was right and
his critics wrong. Similarly the important historian of
nineteenth-century blackface, Alexander Saxton, was right to insist that
the very form of the act undermined any potential for it to carry
progressive messages within a white supremacist social order. Indeed the
very claim to control race and to decide if blackface, and Indian-face,
are well-meaning, admiring, or somehow not about race is itself an act
of white privilege. When the contemporary students who party in
blackface or around anti-Mexican stereotypes offer the justifications
for their behavior they act up within a tradition.
It pains me coming from really southern Illinois to sometimes hear
people in the university imagine that small-town people there are a
reason that the university cannot do the right thing and acknowledge
Chief Illiniwek as a lengthy and racist mistake. Mostly, none of us down
there cared about the Chief as I grew up and do not care now. The Chief
was made, endlessly marketed and scandalously held onto for fifteen
years after intense protest by Indians by cosmopolitan, often liberal,
university-connected people, most powerfully by trustees and
administrators.
Those same forces are now unable to acknowledge that the Chief was
their, and their university's, mistake. They resort to all sorts of
fancy footwork around whether the eighty years of selling it---not
"him," as a symbol of whiteness the Chief requires an impersonal
pronoun--was a mistake at all, or just a phase we all needed to go
through. Perhaps our reflecting on the uncomfortably close local
histories of modern blackface minstrelsy and of Chief Illiniwek will
lead students, if not administrators and trustees, to a little more
clarity on these issues.
David Roediger (Department of History/University of Illinois)
_______________________________________________
Mellon Myers Undegraduate Fellowship Program at Macalester (http://macmmuf.org)
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