THE VERY IDEA of "blackface" — which grew out of the minstrel tradition and consisted of white performers blackening their faces and hands with burnt cork or greasepaint to caricature plantation slaves — is found culturally and politically repulsive by most Americans today. It is a harsh and potent reminder of an earlier era that is, in many ways, all too recent. Up until the 1940s, blackface of the most grotesque sort — check out Bing Crosby in the 1942 Hollywood musical Holiday Inn, with music by Irving Berlin — was considered not only okay, but just good, all-American fun.

Our revulsion toward the ghastly mimicking of racial stereotypes, however, is but one phase in the complicated history of blackface performance in the US. Thomas D. Rice is generally credited with popularizing blackface performance with his "Jim Crow" — yes, that is where the term originated — song and dance in the 1830s. Rice’s act, in which he blackened his face with burnt cork, involved mimicking a black man named Jim Crow who sings these lines: "Come listen all you galls and boys, I’m going to sing a little song. My name is Jim Crow. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow." His act caught on and suddenly became a craze. Blackface quickly became an American theatrical convention that represented — at least for white audiences — one of the few authentic, wholly American musical traditions: one that wedded African-influenced musical themes with a sentimental (and obviously false) vision of black and white Americans living in harmony with one another.

After it was an established theatrical practice, blackface became the province of new immigrants. From the 1860s to the late 1890s, it was used almost exclusively by Irish performers. From the 1890s to the late 1930s, it was Jewish performers who used blackface as an integral part of their stage performances. Cultural historians such as Eric Lott in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1993) and Michael Rogin in his masterful Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (University of California Press, 1996) make the case that these immigrant performers, who were generally not viewed as members of the "white" race by Anglo-American culture, used blackface as a way of becoming American. By blackening their faces — thus emphasizing their fair skin — they emphatically and theatrically distanced themselves from African-Americans who had been here for over 200 years, but had never been acknowledged or accepted as full citizens.

Aside from reinforcing race boundaries, blackface served another function — to help absorb African-American culture into mainstream white culture. Performers such as Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson promoted blues, ragtime, and jazz to a wide white audience who may have found listening to African-American singers too foreign or threatening. Indeed, even after literal blackface began disappearing from mainstream theater and film, it was replaced with a figurative blackface — what might be called blackvoice — with white performers borrowing from and even mimicking traditional black song stylings and vocal mannerisms. This is the technique that made Elvis famous and continues to work very well for Eminem. Blackface — and blackvoice — have always functioned as theatrical masks that allowed white performers to express ideas and sentiments considered inappropriate in white mainstream culture. Thus, Al Jolson could sing in a highly emotional fashion about his love for his mother (in "Mammy"), Sophie Tucker could express her sexual desires in a way forbidden to white women, and Eminem can vocalize anger and rage that is more associated with the black underclass than with middle- or working-class whites. The presumption — for Jolson, Tucker, Elvis, and even Eminem — was that African-Americans were more in touch with their sexuality and their rage. That they were less repressed. That they were less civilized — primitive.

Theatrical blackface may be a mask that allows for truth-telling, but it can only function as such by grappling with the racism that underlies it very existence. And even then it is risky (show) business. When the Friar’s Club did a "roast" of Whoopi Goldberg in 1994, her then partner Ted Danson appeared in blackface and delivered material that was written by the both of them. Using a "sho ’nuf" voice, Danson cracked not-so-wise about how color affected his and Goldberg’s lovemaking, their kitchen, and their grooming habits. The material was edgy. But the routine failed, and both were accused of a gross act of racism. On the other hand, Sandra Bernhard managed, in Without You I’m Nothing, to get away with her blatant appropriations of black women’s culture, as when she wore a traditional African headdress while singing Nina Simone’s famous song "Four Women," in which four different African-American women describe their lives and feelings in the first person. The song is so associated with Simone and her radical Black Power politics of the 1960s (no one else had ever recorded it) that it was shocking to see a white woman perform it. Bernhard’s genius, however, was that while she sang it passionately, she also placed it in a broader context that questioned her own right to do so. Her satire worked because it drew comic tension from self-parody, and did not merely bust others’ chops.