I have a confession: I once put on blackface.
Not only that, I wore it in public, joining in with other black-faced performers in a song-and-dance number that most nowadays would deem racist.
I want to get ahead of this now, lest it come out anyway and my enemies try to make it even worse than it was.
This wasn’t a frat-boy goof or an ill-considered costuming choice for some party I attended as an adult. Such Ralph Northam/Justin Trudeau-level transgressions are best left to persons who are on track to become progressive politicians.
In my defense, I was 11. Also, the blackface was forced on me. I don’t mean forced like when thugs poured bleach on Jussie Smollett (uh … well, you get the idea). I mean forced like when you’re a kid at the mercy of adults who make you do many unpleasant things you’d rather not, such as square dance with the girls in school.
It was the 250th anniversary of the founding of my hometown: Mobile, Alabama.
Growing up in Mobile you learned that the three most important events in world history were the city’s founding by the French on a bluff up the river in 1702, its re-founding in 1711 at its present location due to mosquitoes or unfriendly natives or something, and the Battle of Mobile Bay in the Civil War (even though “our” side lost).
Mobile went all out for the semiquincentennial celebration of the 1711 event. It was as big a deal that year as Mardi Gras.
(Public Service Announcement: As a native, I am required to tell you here that Mobile — not New Orleans — is the birthplace and true home of Mardi Gras. Now back to the story.)
The 250th anniversary to-do was quite the party.
The city commissioners ordered commemorative coins struck bearing the likenesses of the two French brothers who founded “La Mobile” as well as the seal of Mobile.
And at a time when no one I knew wore a beard, except Jon Gnagy (I had his drawing books), they ordered all the men of Mobile to grow one, on pain of being placed in a fake jail set up in the parking lot of the new shopping center. Even my dad got into the spirit, the first and only time in his life he ever allowed whiskers to sprout on his face.
Westlawn Elementary School got into the spirit, too, with a pageant portraying the grand sweep of Mobile’s history as enacted by first-through-sixth graders.
Each grade was assigned a different part of the history. Most fifth-grade boys got to play Civil War soldiers. I was a fifth grader, but … . As a “gifted” student I had been placed in a mixed class with fourth graders. It was some kind of experiment to see if smarter older kids could help younger kids who showed budding giftedness as well. At least that was the cover story they gave me.
Fourth graders were assigned to be black slaves for the pageant. Because I was in that mixed class, I got lumped in with the fourth-grade slaves instead of the fifth-grade soldiers. Probably a paperwork thing.
My brother, by the way, was in third grade and got to be a Spanish explorer. To represent this he wore a bullfighter’s costume. Historical accuracy was not really the highlight of the pageant.
On the day of the pageant, I put on old jeans, a faded shirt and a straw hat. My mother blackened my face with shoe polish.
At some point in the show — well after my brother and his fellow matadors (and their ladies!) discovered Mobile Bay — we slaves trudged onto the school blacktop, dragging gunny sacks along imaginary rows of cotton while singing “Pick A Bale of Cotton” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”
I hated it, but to be honest, no more than I hated square dancing, playing kickball or, really, any school thing that disrupted my reading-drawing-thinking time while carrying the possibility of public humiliation.
For me, being a pretend slave, even if just for ten minutes, and even if I managed not to accidentally trip on my gunny sack, was as humiliating as promenading when I was supposed to allemande left — but not more so.
If you’re thinking, “Imagine how the black kids felt,” there were no black kids at Westlawn then. The only black person I ever saw within the school’s walls was Lindale, the janitor.
I remember the time Lindale embarrassed us boys when he came to our classroom and said to the teacher, loud enough for all, including the girls, to hear, “Tell the boys I’m working on the trough and not to pee in it.”
Hard as it is to believe nowadays, that was enough then to make a child turn crimson from head to toe (us melanin challenged kids, at any rate). It was a different time, which is kind of the point of my story, aside from simple reminiscing. And getting ahead of the blackface thing, of course.
To underscore how different the times were, the Gideons once came to our school and handed out New Testaments, right in class. No one thought anything of it. That is, no one except the mother of our one Jewish classmate, who made her return it to the teacher next day.
As for Lindale, we were all quite fond of him, as I recall, even despite the trough incident. However, it never occurred to us to wonder why he was the only adult in our school we could call by first name, or if he had children, and if so, why they weren’t in class with us. We were like fish oblivious to the water, in this case the ocean of segregation that surrounded us — segregation mandated and enforced by law.
The old neighborhood today is racially mixed, and from what I can tell driving by it, the school now has a predominantly black student body. Whatever they’re taught about history, I’m sure it doesn’t include slaves being happy with their lot, which is what one of our state-approved fourth-grade texts actually assured us.
One thing hasn’t changed. Westlawn was and is a government school, and thus a cog in an educational slavery machine.
I don’t use the word lightly. Between coercive tax funding and compulsory attendance laws, “public” schools, no matter how otherwise benign a particular one might be, dragoon both property and bodies into servitude on their behalf.
Not benign is the fact that with captured minds at their disposal, most of them inevitably propagandize in favor of some ideology, whether the curriculum be written by a David Duke or an Ibram X. Kendi.
Where (and when) the dominant ideology was Jim Crow, it was the schools’ job to reinforce it. Where it’s wokeism and the new race essentialism that are in the ascendancy, as they seem to be in places today, teachers and administrators are enlisted to promote those.
Even stripped of overt political content — the pipe dream of some naive conservatives — non-ideological government classrooms are an impossibility. After all, government schools propagate one overarching ideology that never changes from generation to generation, and regardless of the pedagogical fad du jour: Statism.
I like the definition of statism found over at the Zero Aggression Project: The belief that it’s moral for the state to threaten or initiate force against individual conscience, that agents of the state can legally do things that would be criminal for others, and that the ends justify the means.
Whatever other ideas it may promulgate, no government school will ever teach or even suggest that perhaps coercion is not a good or moral way to educate children. Its very existence screams otherwise.
This didn’t start out to be a polemic, so let’s just say that times have changed since I put on blackface (under duress) for a school play and no one batted an eye. And that so long as parents, kids and taxpayers are denied full educational freedom, they haven’t changed enough.
If you’re wondering, yes, there exists a photograph of me in blackface from that day. Unless someone breaks into my house and steals it, it will never see public light.
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