But Blacks were not the only people to face white racism during this era. The Chinese faced even worse treatment on the West Coast:
In fact, the anti-Chinese racism borrowed familiar themes—they were lawless marauders without the White man’s civilizing influence and, of course, the very future of White womanhood was at stake. To rouse White male anger, nothing was more effective than to present the enemy as a threat to white women. The real threat, of course, was that white women, left to their own devices, might quite willingly marry Chinese men or a Black men unless prevented from doing so. Let us remember that Chinese and Black men were given the right to vote beginning in 1870 when the fifteenth amendment was adopted. No women of any race or color could vote in the U.S. before 1920. It simply boiled down to who had control of the system and the answer, quite obviously, was White males.
The Yellow Peril racism was just as strong in Europe as in America and there is that angle about the safety of European (White) women implicit in the illustration.
The Golden Spike ceremony held at Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869. The Chinese workers, who laid on average about ten times more track than any other teams and who suffered far more casualties in far more dangerous terrains, were forcibly removed from the area before the photo was taken as though they had played no role at all in building the first medium to link the nation together. Robert Louis Stevenson noted that when he rode the American railroads, the Chinese were forced to stay in segregated cars. Stevenson thought it pathetic to see the “stupid” ill treatment of the Chinese whom Stevenson respected because “their forefathers watched the stars before mine began to keep pigs.”
So this was the milieu in which minstrelsy sprang up in the United States. The minstrel theme dealt with blackface characters being slaves on a Southern plantation. The lead blackface character was always trying to find ways to get out of work. When confronted by the Big Boss or the Mistress about his lack of being busy, he came up with ready excuses and was constantly outsmarting them (cartoons as Tom & Jerry and Pixie & Dixie were simply minstrel skits set to animation). On those occasions when the massa was not buying the stories or caught the slave red-handed in some deception, the slave character would be reprimanded in a gentle way—the way a parent reprimands a young child for doing wrong.
The true meaning behind these minstrel skits was not hard to figure out—the white audience was not really watching a slave slyly manipulating massa but rather they were watching themselves as children manipulating their parents. Most of the audience were white people who had grown up on farms where they had chores they were forever trying to get out of. If caught, the parents might discipline them but not too harshly. The white audience was simply reliving the carefree days of its agrarian upbringing. Those long, hot, sunny, summer days playing hide and seek in the tall corn, trying to steal a kiss from the girl or boy who lived on the next farm, sitting contentedly in the cool of the evening while the grown-ups talked or sang after a fine feast of a home-cooked meal carefully prepared by the ladies in residence. Once they left the farms and come to the cities with their overcrowding, crime, long factory workdays, isolation, drunkenness, corruption and a cramped, ugly skyline of sooty buildings and hovels—all the carefree innocence was gone forever. Minstrelsy brought it back to them—for a little while.
The blackface enabled whites to hide behind a shield of anonymity of sooty complexion living the happy-go-lucky, carefree existences that they somehow convinced themselves that slaves lived. With faces blackened and banjos in hand, whites could drop their socially responsible positions and shed all the burdens that respectability and propriety are heaped with and let the Lord of Misrule have reign for a while until the show was over and everyone went back home sated enough to be ready to start the grind all over again in the morning.
Consequently, minstrelsy was not nearly as popular down South as it was up North. In fact, blackface minstrelsy had its beginnings in New York and Boston and spread to such places as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Peoria, Milwaukee, etc. This is not to say that minstrelsy was not popular in the South but the Southern planters discouraged it because it caused audiences to pull for the slave in putting one over on the Boss and the Bosses did not like that message propagating. Even in areas up North and in the Midwest where whites had run all the free Blacks out of the town, they still enjoyed their blackface minstrel shows and crowded the theaters to watch them, to laugh, cry, clap along and sing while convincing themselves that they had a much tougher life than the dark ones they held in servitude, whose lives they held in their hands, lives they could (and not infrequently did) take on a whim without the slightest fear of consequence.
