Have you heard about Black Pete?
Black Petes, or Zwarte Piet as they are known in Dutch, are Siterklaas’ (Santa Clause) sidekicks. But instead of elves, they’re black midgets typically played by white people in black face.
I’m not making this up.
The Dutch version of St. Nick works his Christmas season magic accompanied by an army of little Jumpin’ Jim Crows, diminutive, black face helpers who look like an unholy cross between Al Jolsen and Rhoda from the Mary Tyler Moore Show?
If that ain’t a goddamn freak show, then I don’t know what is.
Black Pete only first caught my attention a couple of years ago, when he was still largely known only in the Netherlands. But this year, the little fella began reaching an international level of infamy as even the United Nations chimed in on Holland’s favorite little pickaninny.
White performers dressed in black face and performing as Black Pete is pretty cut and dried for most people: it’s stunningly distasteful. But then again, most people aren’t from Holland, and that’s where it starts to get interesting.
The Dutch have overwhelmingly rallied together in defense of Black Pete. Amid the hubbub following the U.N. condemnation, a Dutch Facebook page supporting Black Pete quickly garnered over 2 million of Likes. In a nation with fewer than 17 million people, that’s quite a statement.
But rather than helping their cause, the rationale most apologists offer only compounds matters. They insist that Black Pete needs to stay because he’s good for children; that the character is a cherished part of most Dutch people’s childhood, and many of them can’t imagine depriving today’s children of that joy.
Because really, nothing’s better for helping children gain a sound sense of themselves and others than by watching black face performers prance around cartoonishly.
As Americans, we can be quick to judge and condemn. The knee jerk reaction is to condescendingly nod our heads and mutter something about Europe’s backwards race relations. We know our own race relations are far from perfect, but black face in 21st America? And directed at audiences of children no less? Incomprehensible.
But what about red face?
The Kansas City Chiefs. The Cleveland Indians. The Washington Redskins. The Atlanta Braves. The Chicago Blackhawks. And beyond profiteering professional sports teams there are also prestigious research universities like Florida State the University of Illinois that continue to field teams with Indian names and mascots, have many fans who dress up in red face, and even present sanctioned red face Indian performances for the crowd.
Black Pete is atrocious, and just about everyone outside of Holland gets that. But America’s Indian mascotting is also reviling. Yet many Americans are as blind to their red face minstrelsy as the legion of Dutch supporters are to their beloved black face minstrel.
Certainly the two phenomena are not identical. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at deeper commonalities between them because the doe-eyed adoration and strident, at times even vicious defense of such minstrelsy can tell us something about how people understand and define themselves. In some ways at least, racial and ethnic miming says more about the mimers’ racial and national self-perceptions than it does about their perceptions of the groups they are miming.
The history of black face performance in the U.S. is long and unseemly. It first became popular during the early 19th century, and persisted until the demise of Amos and Andy which featured white actors performing step-n-fetch black face until black actors finally took over the agonizing roles when the franchise moved to television in the 1950s. But civil rights protests soon put an end to the show, all but killing the once popular black face minstrelsy as a form of entertainment in the United States.
But less well understood in American popular culture has been the role of red face mistrelsy. Most people fail to equate non-Indians dressing up and performing as racially stereotyped Indians with non-blacks dressing up and performing as racially stereotyped blacks. But of course they are branches on the same tree. And red face minstrelsy has at least as long a history as black face minstrelsy in America, and possibly even a longer one.
Red face minstrelsy goes back at least to the Revolution, most famously with the Boston Tea party. Red face minstrelsy went on to take many forms in America, ranging from fraternal orders like The Sons of Liberty and The Improved Order of Red Men (the most famous example of which is Tammany Hall), to the 20th century kiddie shenanigans of the Boy Scouts and countless summer camps.
By the turn of the 20th century was, white Americans aping Indigenous people had become very popular. All Indian nations had finally been conquered. At the same time,Americans were suffering the anxieties of modernization. The the industrial revolution and the rise of cities drastically altered American life, while massive waves of foreign immigration helped redefine it what it even meant to be American.
Amid the angst and turmoil, the popular culture co-opted a stereotyped version of Indians, relegating them to a mythical, romanticized past and casting them as rural, noble, honest, honorable, primitives who, like America’s pastoral heritage itself, were to be admired and pitied as they were doomed to extinction in the name of remorselessly efficient progress. Thus, it is no coincidence that Indians became a popular motif for sports teams’ names, logos, and mascots at precisely during this period in American history, along with many other forms of red face minstrelsy.
One of the interesting things about minstrels is what they represent to audiences. While the minstrel may be dressed up as a black person or Indian, to white audiences they actually help define what it means to be white. By watching people dress up and perform as stereotyped blacks and Indians, white Americans often focused less on what it said about blacks and Indians, and more on what it supposedly said about themselves as white Americans. In other words, minstrelsy is about creating an inferior “other” in order to define oneself.
This seems counterintuitive, but Americans used racial minstrelsy to define what it meant to be “American.” And during the turn of the 20th century, one of the things it meant was to be white. Thus, racialized minstrel characters were a type of cultural foil. The characters were something that helped define white America by serving as distinctly inferior, cartoonish sidekicks.
One way to think of it would be like a kind of racialized Robin to the American Batman. Robin is the inferior super hero whose role is to serve the ultimate super hero, Batman. As such, Robin’s real purpose is to define Batman as the true super hero; we know Batman is truly great because we can always compare him to his inferior sidekick, who is like him but not nearly as good.
Similarly, red and black minstrels were constructed as the inferior versions of “American,” as deficient sidekicks whose true purpose was to define the superior American: the white American. This is why modern day supporters of minstrel characters often defend them as not being about Indians, but claiming the characters are an intimate reflection of themselves.
So while it seems absurd to most outside observers that Black Pete is somehow quintessentially Dutch, this is precisely what many Dutch defenders say. Likewise, defenders of Indian mascots often insist that Indian caricatures aren’t about Indians, but about the city or school they “represent.” It’s this counterintuitive logic that allows defenders of red face minstrelsy to sincerely make the stunningly ridiculous assertion that such caricatures are actually meant to honor Indians.
After all, isn’t Robin honored to serve Batman?
While the battle against black face was finally won about half-a-century ago, the battle to end red face minstrelsy lags far behind. Shockingly, some of the most recalcitrant institutions have been universities. Florida State of the red uniforms, screaming Indian logo, and stone spear logo, and Illinois, home of Chief Illiniwek, have been alarmingly truculent. Perhaps most disturbing, both universities have a long tradition of white students dressing up in red face, inappropriate Indian regalia, and conducting step-n-fetch Indian dances in front of screaming fans. A white Chief Illiniwek dances like muppet on crack during the halftime of baskebtall games. And prior to FSU football games, tens of thousands of fans” chop” while Hollywood “Indian” music plays and a redface minstrel rides into the stadium upon a painted horse and brandinshing a flaming spear.
Minstrelsy is also participatory in Atlanta, where thousands of Braves’ fans perform the Tomahawk Chop while the stadium P.A. system plays cliché music. And the Washington Redskins . . . well, the name itself is actually a racial epithet, so the supposedly Indian skin-colored burgundy uniforms and team log in the style of an Indian head nickel shouldn’t be all that surprising.
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The parallels between Holland’s Black Pete and our Indian sports mascots is informative. The apologias one hears from Dutch defenders of Black Pete are not so very different from the apologias one hears from the American defenders of Indian sports mascots.
Many Dutch people cherish Black Pete as something explicitly Dutch; the fact that he’s black is secondary to them. Similarly, many Americans cherish their Indian mascots as something distinctive to their schools and cities; the fact that the mascots are Indians is secondary to them.
And that is what helps create the blind spot for supporters. Whereas the rest of the rational, post-civil rights, post-apartheid world looks at this stuff and sees racist caricatures, supporters see themselves.
It’s time for racist minstrel characters like Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo and Holland’s Zwarte Piet to be put down. But when we appreciate minstrelsy as a complex cultural phenomenon instead of just a bizarre, buffoonish, and dated manifestation of racism, we can begin to better understand why so many seemingly rational people, who don’t otherwise display racist tendencies, will furiously swim upstream against the cultural tide to defend their ludicrous black face and red face minstrels.
And that’s important. Because if we can explain it to ourselves, then perhaps we can better explain it to them, and thereby facilitate the process of moving forward.
A long version of this article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.