As the free Black population grew in North America and throughout the Caribbean, despite increasing legal segregation, so did cultural exchanges. Northern whites kept African Americans in distinct neighborhoods which they often had to share with poor whites. Faced with constant abuse and extreme racist violence, African Americans also found themselves the objects of intense and obsessive scrutiny. White fascination with Black style fed a stream of ethnographic accounts simultaneously marveling, ridiculing, and expressing anxiety at the sight of the Black “dandies and dandizettes” who were strutting their stuff in urban centers throughout the Americas. Whites hated it, but also couldn’t get enough: Creole songs and Caribbean-themed plays were all the rage in European capitals in the eighteenth century already, where actors such as Charles Mathews made their reputation rendering “true” interpretations of Black Americans, their speech, their singing, their dancing. Imagine a male Iggy Azalea in breeches and actual blackface telling London crowds he’s the realest. Throughout the cities of the Eastern seaboard, white performers, songwriters, and writers mocked and emulated Black festivals, celebrations, and balls. By the time American entertainer T. D. Rice figured he could stomp around New York stages in blackface doing his own impressions of Black speech and dance as a character he named Jim Crow, the ingredients in this cake recipe had been around a while. Look at the cake, copy it, slap some icing on it (make it Black), sell it as the real thing: you’re a baker now.
And so blackface minstrelsy took the country by storm, and also Great Britain, and on through Europe. Let’s say it again for the kids in the back: the pattern of fascination, scorn, and shameless pilfering that structures minstrelsy is the basis on which American popular culture rose, and I don’t mean just the United States: Rice echoed Mathews and eighteenth-century English comedies set in the Caribbean; plays featuring Creole songs and dances were performed on French stages, and Caribbean basin sounds and style were all the rage in nineteenth-century France as well, where half a century before jazz was even a thing, New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk moved to make a living coating Black music he’d heard growing up in European frosting. This was late-1840s Paris, and the art scene belonged to the bohemian. Ancestor to the hipster if there ever was one, the bohemian was an idle young man who chose eccentricity over conformity and art over convention. Whether or not he actually did make art as the bourgeois might understand, the bohemian turned anything he did into art. That could be writing, sure, painting, why not, making music, possibly, but it could just as well be talking shit, dressing fancy, or acting cool. Bohemians’ scorn for, and dedicated opposition to, the pillars of bourgeois society—family, work, virtue, good taste, common sense—their cult of pleasure, art, frivolity set standards of behavior that underlie what we expect of artists and hangers-on to this day.