In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes to talk about book Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. Rhae Lynn is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. With meticulous research and piles of evidence, Darkology reveals the widespread and persistent use of amateur blackface minstrelsy across the United States from the Civil War through the early 2000s. Rhae Lynn is also the co-editor of three books, the founder of open-access teaching resource U.S. History Scene, and was featured in and served as an executive advisor for the PBS documentary series Reconstruction.
Researching and writing Darkology took a stunning amount of research, as well as a mental toll, and I’m grateful to Rhae Lynn for talking about how she grappled with all of it, the unusual challenges she faced when thinking about visuals for the book, and much more. Plus, she shares some excellent wisdom for how to keep going even when it seems too hard, or when you don’t feel like you belong.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Rhae Lynn Barnes, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment
- Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams, eds., After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America
- Rhae Lynn Barnes and Catherine Clinton, eds., Roe v. Wade: Fifty Years After
- Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman, eds., American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History
- Rhae Lynn Barnes, “Yes, politicians wore blackface. It used to be all-American ‘fun.’” The Washington Post
- Maya Angelou’s 1992 commencement address at Spelman College, in which she tells her audience “bring your people with you”
- Sandra Cisneros, “I Hate the Iowa Writers Workshop”
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and this is a podcast all about the craft of writing history. In each episode, I talk with the historian all about the nitty gritty details of how they research and write their books. And in this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes to talk about her new book, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment.
Rhae Lynn Barnes 0:24
I'm very excited to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:26
Rhae Lynn is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. Full disclosure, I took a graduate seminar in cultural history with her about six years ago, and I've been eager to see her book published since then. With meticulous research and piles of evidence, Darkology reveals the widespread and persistent use of amateur blackface minstrelsy across the United States from the Civil War through the early 2000s. Rhae Lynn is also the co-editor of three books, the founder of open access teaching resource US History Scene, and was featured in and served as an executive advisor for the PBS documentary series Reconstruction. Researching and writing Darkology took a stunning amount of work, as well as a mental toll. And I'm grateful to Rhae Lynn for talking about how she grappled with all of it, the unusual challenges she faced when thinking about visuals for the book and much more. Plus, she shares some excellent wisdom for how to keep going even when it seems too hard or when maybe you don't feel like you belong. Just a quick heads up, although our conversation about blackface, racism and white supremacy avoids racist language, there is a brief mention of lynching and suicide near the end of the episode. Here's my conversation with Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes.
Rhae Lynn Barnes 1:40
I think my trajectory as a writer is probably a little bit abnormal for most people who teach at universities. So I should say, I think of two trajectories. There's both me being a writer and also me being a storyteller. As a child, I was raised an only child, and so books were very much my friends, as well as movies. And an odd thing I did is I would try to memorize novels. I'm not entirely sure why I did that, but I think I was so obsessed with trying to understand what made stories work. And so one of my favorites was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I remember just obsessively trying to understand it so it starts, "Serene. Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better, but it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn." I bring this up because I think there was something about wanting to fully inhabit the language and be able to even at night after I was technically supposed to be in bed and no longer reading, I could recite the novels to myself, and so that was something that I was constantly doing. But in terms of actually treating writing like a practice, this started very young for me, when I was in junior high. I was in essentially what was a failing public junior high that the state had to take over because nobody could pass any of the standardized testing. I'm laughing because it was, it's, it's almost comical how bad the situation was. And what was bizarre about this school is there was the junior high, and then there was a railroad track, and then there was Disneyland. And so I was constantly after school being immersed in a world that's all about storytelling and creating vivid worlds and environments. And yet we were in a school that had not enough chairs. There were certainly not enough books. We were in trailers. And so when I tried to figure out where to go to high school, the high school I was going to go to was also failing, a new school opened up called the Orange County High School of the Arts, and it was a public school like LaGuardia, the Fame high school, but it was audition only, and I had been very engaged in the arts most of my life, but they opened a new department, which was creative writing, and I decided to, ultimately, I applied for multiple departments, and I got into multiple departments, but I pursued creative writing. And so what that meant is, from eight to two, I did the normal, standard California curriculum every day. And then from two to five, I was taking college level courses in creative writing. And James P Blaylock, who is a fantasy writer, was the director. A man named Tim Powers was one of my closest teachers. Tim Powers so he is very, very well known for fantasy and alternative historical almost like conspiracy theory books. But probably his best known role in Orange County is he was the caretaker of Philip K Dick, who wrote, you know, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is dedicated to Tim Powers and becomes Blade Runner. And so all of these really dystopian stories about Orange County and sci fi alternative visions of the political system in Orange County was something that I was being exposed to every day for four years every afternoon. And so this was an amazing gift, but also was very stressful to be a 14 year old and essentially being in college classes. But it made me, from a very young age, be used to churning out an enormous amount of content every single weekend, because I would be enrolled in five creative writing classes a semester, in addition to the normal high school curriculum. And in Southern California, the writing and literary culture is much more avant garde. So people like John Fante, Charles Bukowski were very influential, and then there was sort of a major cross mode- crossroads moment when I went to college. So because I was in this program, the expectation was that we would continue into an arts conservatory at the university level. And so I was accepted into script writing and playwriting programs. And really thought that that was going to be the trajectory of my life. I also applied to a few universities that specialized in history, but I went to the open houses for USC and UCLA and the script writing and film programs, and was really discouraged, because I recognized immediately that script writing was something that I excelled at. I was obsessively watching movies, that was my world, but they work on the protege system, which is not too unlike the mentor advisee system in academia, except for it's even worse, because there is normally only one or two proteges selected, and so George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had chosen their proteges. They were all men. They are the men who now pretty much run the Star Wars universe. And as wonderful as they are, it became very apparent to me immediately that there was no future for me in the context of that moment and in most writing rooms, if there was a token woman for comedy, it was almost always somebody pulled from the Ivy League. So if you think of like Conan O'Brien or Mindy Kaling and sort of that lineage. And so I realized this was a closed door. I ended up going to UC Berkeley, primarily because, in the context of the Bush administration, and growing up in Orange County, I wanted to get as far away from that environment as I could, and it was the most affordable option for my family being in a state school. But the magical thing that happened that I did not know is that at the time, it was the top university for cultural history, and that's really what changed my life into recognizing that all of my interests in literature, film, music and politics could be blended together into a new form of writing. And so I was very lucky to have met people like Thomas Laqueur, Leon F Litwak, who were giants in the field at the time, and recognized that there was a new life path for me. The other sort of major thing that happened to me in terms of being a writer is I was accepted into the Berkeley Poetry Review at UC Berkeley. And the Berkeley Poetry Review is strange because it is housed on the university campus, but it accepts submissions from all around the world, and I was the editor. I turned out to be the editor in chief for three years, and it was kind of controversial because I was very young. It wasn't a grad student. I had been elected three years in a row, and I think that only happened because of my experience going to the arts conservatory in high school, so I already had this very baseline knowledge of essentially, how do you so much of being an editor is basically like herding cats, and so I already knew how to do that. But Berkeley is a very foundational place in American poetry. So Poet Laureate Robert Haas was there. June Jordan had recently passed before I showed up on campus, but her program, Poetry for the People was active. Alice Walker lives in Berkeley. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from the Beat generation, has City Lights in San Francisco, and he was a part of Berkeley poetry. You, Ishmael Reid was Josephine Miles, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Scalapino. And so I was suddenly at the age of 18, 19, 20, 21, surrounded by these avant garde poets and Beat poets, and I was just absorbing what they were doing, how they spoke, how they wrote. And a lot of my job was essentially organizing 40 to 60 poetry readings throughout those three years. And that gave me a very interesting insight later, of how to organize conferences, history conferences in a way that were much more dynamic. And so once again, I thought this would be the new path for me, that I was going to go into publishing, but then the financial crisis happened my senior year, and so all of those jobs disappeared, so that did not happen, and that is how I ended up in a history PhD program, because I needed to figure out, how do I get money and health insurance guaranteed for five years and not be homeless? And that was a very real concern, because almost everyone in my life, my parents did not lose their house, but almost everyone else in my life did. And so that was what motivated the applying to history PhD programs. The last thing I would say about the storyteller component of this is, I think one interesting thing I get in feedback now from editors and readers is that they say it seems that I write by ear and that there's a bit of a musicality and wordplay to what I do. And I think that's very true. I think because I did not get a proper education in these failing schools. I did not know proper sentence structures, and then I was thrown into this world of poetry and avant garde where that was not the point at all, and that created complications for me in graduate school, because the expectation of structure and what an essay is and how a sentence is supposed to be, is not what I was brought up in. And the other sort of major form of storytelling would be pastors. So from a very young age, I whether it was my parents church, my grandparents church, my aunt and uncles, friends and family in Orange County, I was constantly in very diverse denominations. And from a very young age, I was not interested in going into Sunday school. I was like, No, I want to see what this fool has to say. And paying attention to, I was very obsessed with, do all pastors have some cheesy book where they get these like anecdotes and stories, and being very obsessed with, how do they come up with a speech every single Sunday? Why is this pastor captivating an audience, and why is this person the most boring speaker that I've ever encountered? And so I was always analyzing that. And so I think that religion was also a big piece to my interest as being a storyteller.
Kate Carpenter 2:27
Well, I want to dive in first to all the details of how you work. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Rhae Lynn Barnes 8:16
I feel like this is going to be such an unsatisfying answer for people who want a cute routine. So in finishing Darkology and its different iterations, from a dissertation to a book, I have moved over 20 times, and so that meant that there has been very little stability in terms of having a dedicated place or desk. I have written in bowling alleys, in bars, in cafes, I have written in the middle of the night because that was the only time I could get quiet. I will say, in the last two or three years, I have a little bit of more of a routine when I co write. I also do a lot of co-writing, simply because my co authors have had babies, and so we're dealing with the baby schedule. So a baby that is not even my own has been dictating when I write, but I love them, so it's fine. I certainly prefer to write on a desktop as opposed to a laptop. I have a lot of spatial issues and so, and I also think that's just how I grew up writing, and so I prefer a big desktop. If I can, I have a desk that when I am in a place with my own belongings, my best friend says it pretty much looks like an autopsy table, because it is, it is metal, and does look as if I'm about to do some sort of medical exam on it, which maybe I am doing an autopsy on American history. There's normally Dr Pepper involved. I have an addiction to Dr Pepper. I don't drink coffee. And I think one of the major things for me that has been unique in my life is. I very much take A Room of One's Own seriously, both in the sort of Virginia Woolf sense, but also Sandra Cisneros is someone that's been very important to me in my development, and she is a huge advocate of women owning their own property and what that affords you to have a private space to create, and so that means that sometimes I have had to work an extra job or take on weird side projects to afford that luxury of having a room to myself for writing and creating. But I think that that is critical for myself in terms of not being distracted and being able to reach a place whenever it happens to be fully immersed in the world that I'm trying to build.
Speaker 1 8:19
How do you like to organize yourself? I'm especially interested because you've had to move so much. You have to organize in a way that moves with you. And then your sources for this project are so varied and scattered, and it's a lot to keep track of. Are there tools that you use?
Rhae Lynn Barnes 9:28
Darling, I'm a hot mess. I have a different system for all of my different projects because the kinds of sources require different forms of organizing. For example, when I write with Professor Glenda Goodman, who is a historian and musicologist, she is very organized. Every single source has a sub folder, sub folder, sub folder, and she gets quite angry at me if I don't adhere to the system so that we both know where everything is all of the time. I have a very, very intense memory, and so I have no problem remembering where I've put sources. But I think that madness does not lend itself to co writing, but in terms of Darkology, it is a very unique experience, because unlike most history projects, I have a lot of the physical sources myself. Over the course of 20 years, I have accumulated 1000s of sources that Americans have donated to me and that I am the temporary custodian of until I can give them to a public university or library, and that is my ultimate goal. And so they are off now. They are off site in a storage facility, part of it in Los Angeles, part of them outside of Philadelphia. But for years, they would come with me. And so so much of my life was driving around boxes, carrying boxes in, boxes up and down stairs, and living with sources that are essentially a visual hate crime does some incredible damage to your psyche. And so I remember having to, some nights, having to literally take fabric or sheets and put it over them, because I had no way when you're living in a one room with a mattress on the floor surrounded by these horrible images to get any separation from them. But living with sources, as much as it was detrimental to me and my mental health, meant that I could sit with them and really fall down the rabbit hole and understand the complexity and the depth and the violence that they held in a way that perhaps at first blush, I really didn't understand. And over time, learned how to unlock the puzzle pieces of how they were actually operating. And so that was a disturbing gift and burden to carry. In terms of physically organizing them, I often organize them by genre. So there's a few key source bases in Darkology. There are photographs, there are visual and audio recordings, film. There are what I would call multimedia, so player piano scrolls, board games. Then there are the books. There are how to guides, joke books, plays. And the plays are produced by about 79 publishing houses. And then, most critically to unlocking the social, cultural, financial and political world, are the programs, and so I organize them by genre, and then within that, I organize them by time, but also sometimes I've organized them thematically, like I need to find all of the books that focus on disability, or I need to find all of the books that focus on the mammy stereotype, and then it would switch again, where, if I'm writing about the Elks club or a certain president, okay, which, which of these shows were hosted by the Elks? And then put those in order, and so having them be physical meant that I could literally lay them out on the floor and put them in different orders. And so that has been an interesting experience. But obviously, when I go to the archives like the Library of Congress or the Harry Ransom Center or other places that hold these materials, it's just like everybody else. You get a box, it's on the table, and you can take a photograph, or you can sit there and type. And so I have experienced both realities. I think one of the most challenging things about this project were my financial limitations, and by that I mean filling up data and then having to do a side job or get an editing gig to buy a new computer, and you'd have to wait, like, sometimes people are like, Why did this project take so long? And part of it is just, I would have to stop and get a job for a few months and then I could continue on. And a lot of that had to do with being a custodian of these, these sources, and making sure that they were protected, first and foremost, because they are evidence of something very important that was entrusted to me by many Americans. And then ultimately they need to be-- curators say we need to protect these not just for our lifetime, but for centuries, and so to take these brutal documents that might have lived in somebody's damp basement for 70 years that have been exposed to mold or spores all kinds of different environmental temperatures, and get it to a base level where it can be preserved for the future, also has taken a lot of time and resources and money that I'm stopping writing and doing and saying, Okay, well, this one is important. How do I save or salvage this one?
Kate Carpenter 14:21
What for you is the relationship like between research and writing? How soon do you like to start writing? Is there a point where you're like, Oh, I'm drafting now, versus just taking notes?
Rhae Lynn Barnes 9:21
That has changed over time. For years, I would just obsessively research, especially because this project, I've grown up with this project, and so I've changed as a writer. I've been many different writers throughout this process. I originally set out wanting to understand how many amateur minstrel shows were there, and so I thought that I was in a counting game. Once I realized that that was going to be in the millions, I recognized, oh, this is more like the trans-Atlantic slave database, and that in order to do that kind of project, you need to have a research team and a center. And so this first step actually is just laying out the arc of what happened and being representational about it. And so for a long time, I only researched and then had to come to the realization of that is completely unachievable for one person to do. And once I recognized that, I started writing faster. I'm very, very into world building. And this comes from a place of wanting this history to make sense to the average reader who is not normally spending all day learning about Jim Crow America or learning about Japanese American internment camps or learning about World War Two. And so one of the more peculiar things that I do in my research, which again, took a lot of stopping and starting to get resources and working weird jobs, is I will research everything I can, through books and through sources. But if I can physically go there, I want to go there. There is a difference between reading so many different accounts of what a sandstorm is like in Manzanar, versus standing there against the Sierras in December and trying to endure it, and holding those realities and truths in my body and trying to experience what my historical subjects experienced helps me translate their testimony in a way that I hope is more vivid and experiential for the reader. And so that is another thing that often determines when I start writing. I often write in my head. It's almost like a madness takes over where I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, but then if I start pacing back and forth, or I hear certain lines in my head, I know, okay, I need to sit down and just physically get this out of my body. And I am not an outliner. I normally have a pretty clear sense of an arc, but it's almost like, you know, like Mean Girls, word vomit comes out, and I have to literally just eject this stuff out of me and then start making sense of it.
Kate Carpenter 24:47
What then does your revision process look like?
Rhae Lynn Barnes 24:52
I have gone through so many different forms of revision. When this was first a dissertation project, it was really about getting the clean, what are the topic sentences? What are the arguments? Well, you know, how do I sign post this and make sense of this madness? But then, when I switched over to thinking about a book, the revision was completely tied to the structural decisions that I ultimately made. The hard thing about this book is when you're transitioning from a dissertation to a first book, it would have been very easy and satisfying to focus in on something tight. And I would have been able to produce a monograph very quickly. And what I mean by that is I could have written a very compelling book about the federalization of blackface, looking at it from the 1930s to the 1950s, very clear intervention, very clear arc, very clear topic sentences, case studies. I could have also done that with, how did this switch from a professional genre to an amateur genre, compelled by print culture after the American Civil War? And looked at it from the Civil War to around 1920 and the publishing houses, and that would have been a compelling book. And then the third option would have been a civil rights book of how did civil rights activists and workers recognize this as something that they needed to organize around and protest? And I think all of those books would have been very easy to structure, but my frustration was is because the 30 books that exist about blackface and the historiography, primarily look at antebellum America before the American Civil War, very much focused regionally in New York City, Manhattan, the Five Points, or there are iterations in film and television, there was nothing that I could point to to show well, why are civil rights activists organizing and dedicating their lives and putting their families in jeopardy in the 1950s and 1960s if this genre supposedly ended in 1860, 1870? That doesn't make sense. How does it get federalized if it ended in the Civil War? And so I realized that what I had to do was make a clear argument as best as I could that unfortunately, this is a very, very messy history, and that what minstrelsy means changes in the different contexts. So the classic arguments by Eric Lott and David Roediger that blackface is something that creates whiteness out of white working class white ethnics, because if you can apply blackface and then remove it, you are inherently therefore white doesn't work in a Japanese American internment camp where everyone is there because they are inherently, legally not white, and they are considered an enemy alien. And so I had to create a new timeline and trajectory and constantly remind the reader as best as I could that we're wading into this new history together, that this genre and the century in which it dominated has not been written, and essentially leave easter eggs everywhere for future readers, future students, where I'm sort of like, PS, huge story happened in China or PS, huge stories in jails and hope that someday other people can fill in these gaps, but getting that structure and deciding, coming to that conclusion that I was going to have to do something more complicated than I think colleagues expected or wanted, especially when you're on the tenure track, it would have been I could have easily published an academic book in either of those three topics and published it within two years, and I think they would have been a fine book, but I felt such an incredible social responsibility as an American citizen to help the people who entrusted their histories to me and help them make sense of what happens to them. And here I'm speaking about Black mothers, for example, who were on the front lines of desegregating suburbia in California, desegregating schools in California whose children the first week or month of being in school, their first big assignment or project was to be in a minstrel show, and the horror that these mothers, who were isolated because they are the only one, that's what integrating means, had to face. And fight, and if they're telling me their story and entrusting it to me, then I can't just write about the federalization, and I can't just write about the 19th century story. And so in a lot of ways, the structure became a response to trying to make sense of things that were illogical. Why in the 21st century can you still go up to somebody and they know Oh, Susanna? Why do we still know that supposedly a Black person eating chicken or watermelon is supposed to be funny? Well, if you stopped the story at any of those other iterations, you still have this glaring gap that makes no sense. And so that was the more difficult path that I had to reckon with
Kate Carpenter 30:51
To talk more about that structure and other details, I asked Rhae Lynn to read an excerpt of the book. This piece comes from Part Two titled "Booked," in which she describes how blackface minstrelsy changed from an improvisational performance in the 19th century to something that was written, standardized and mass produced. Here's Dr Rhae Lynn Barnes reading from Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment.
Rhae Lynn Barnes 31:17
“Blackface books are road maps with material clues about how they traveled through America. Each annotation, underline, circle, crease, and stain tell a story. Take, for example, Harry L. Newton’s A Colored Honeymoon: A Minstrel Afterpiece, published by Denison. This farce, featuring performers in blackface and drag, chronicles a Black newlywed couple’s descent into spousal abuse. A Colored Honeymoon cropped up in teacher catalogs and was advertised on other plays’ back covers, demonstrating its perennial popularity and decades-long circulation. Though published in here editions (1915, 1930, and 1940), the play’s text remains consistent, highlighting the Afterpiece’s enduring appeal. Its book covers tell a compelling story. A 1915 edition with a US Postal Service processing stamp documents its journey from Denison’s Chicago hub. A 1930 reprint, boasting a vivid new cover and price increase from fifteen to twenty-five cents, reveals its continued popularity despite inflation. Finally, a dog-eared, fifty-cent 1940 copy is a palimpsest of resale and ownership. ‘Purchased’ stickers from shops in Des Moines and Mason City trace its itinerant life in Iowa before S. Mizke, a schoolteacher, scrawled their name on the cover. The inscription suggests the play’s possible use in a classroom. Analyzing the Afterpiece’s book covers exemplifies how minstrel objects offer invaluable insights into the pervasive nature of racist entertainment and its movement through society.”
Kate Carpenter 33:23
This is just one example of many in this book where you treat readers to kind of a close look at the material culture itself, looking at the evidence and showing how you read it. Why was making that part of the research transparent to readers an important part of the story for you?
Rhae Lynn Barnes 33:41
It was really critical to me that I wanted to teach Americans reading this book how to read these analytically, because I know that millions of American families have these and that they will find them, and there are so many simple clues on the covers that would help you unlock what is this very bizarre object that I found in Grandma's closet. And I should say, it's not only white families that have these. This is a performance genre that Black performers were forced to do. I reference the Japanese American performances. And so it was a moment where the educator in me wanted to make this transparent, step by step. And I also do this in the beginning, in the introduction, talking about all of the misclassifications in the libraries, because I wanted to create a roadmap that either a researcher or American could replicate. And I also wanted to show the ways in which everyday objects, even something that might seem as silly as a joke book when read materially, can give you an incredible amount of insight about the social, economic and organizing power that it held in American society in the moment it was used and created. And the other thing that that paragraph shows is the longevity that we are having jokes and songs from this play being performed during World War Two. And so then the next step in this chapter, if I was a researcher, would be, as I did, look up that person in the census, look up that show in the newspapers locally, look at the yearbooks of who these students were in that person's class, and you realize, oh, these children, who are essentially the children of defense workers in World War Two, are memorizing and performing these jokes from turn of the century Jim Crow America that actually are like repackaged and repurposed from a show that was written as pro slavery ideology in the 1850s and then you start to see, oh, wow, now I understand how you have this intergenerational handing down of white supremacy in this cultural, innocuous, seemingly innocuous way. It's just a silly little play. It's 15 cents. What harm can it do? Well, a lot, and that's what I wanted to make visible.
Kate Carpenter 36:13
You've talked a little bit about the sources in this book and this project, in the sense that you have become a custodian of this very large archive and some of the challenges of accessing these sources. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about how hard it was to gather all this information. And I'm especially interested, one thing that happens that you talk about in the introduction is that, through sort of happenstance, a little bit, you end up, your work on this gets publicized, and so you get a lot of sources in response to that. Was that surprising to you? And what was your, what was your plan before that happened? Did you already have enough material otherwise?
Rhae Lynn Barnes 36:53
So what you're alluding to is, I started this project, I think in earnest, I guess I would date it around 2008 as a senior thesis. Finished it in 2009 then I went straight to graduate school, and it was a dissertation. I already had 1000s of sources, and many of them were very hard to get, because this history is censored. So in the introduction, I talk about how when I would go to the Library of Congress, for example, I have a very weird experience where I'm for days calling titles and they're coming back, missing on shelf, missing on shelf. And I was a graduate student. I only lived off of my stipend. DC is an astronomically expensive place, and so I start panicking, because I'm like, how, how are all of these things missing? I cannot afford to stay here another day. And so I go to one of the archivists, and she pretty much starts interrogating me, of like, why do you want to see these? What are you doing with these? Do you know what they are? And so I explain very systematically my argument, my research, what I'm doing, what are my intentions are. And she disappears, and she comes back, probably an hour or two later, with a wagon full of everything that I couldn't find. And she admitted that in 1987 she hid them because Klan members from Virginia were coming in and requesting them because now post civil rights they had been banned. These publishing houses didn't exist anymore, but they were annual traditions in a lot of these communities still. And with the birth of Xerox machines, they could go into the Library of Congress and reanimate the genre. And so I had to prove to her that I was not going to do something malicious with them. And so that's an example of the, a positive example of the censoring that ultimately turned out positively. There were a lot of negative examples of censoring. For example, going to the benevolent and protective order of the Elks or the Elks Club's headquarters, where I tried very hard. It would have been easy if I was a white man instead of a white woman, to access these archives, but they are racially restricted. They're closed to membership, and I was escorted out by police, and they gave me a nickname, Erin Brockovich of blackface. And I thought that was very funny, because I was like, I understand that you're making fun of my body, my class, how I talk, but like she wins in the end. So that's fine. Please call me that, and I will win in the end. And of course, for example, the Japanese American story was also very much classified. They were listed as psychological and medical exams for citizenship readiness, and therefore you had to have a survivor help you get their own so called medical evidence of how they reacted to a minstrel show as a child. And so when I finished my dissertation, I already had too many sources. And then when I was doing my postdoc, really what I was doing was honing it down and becoming more manageable. But I had found two stories. One is the FDR chapter, and one is the Gerald Ford chapter that I was focusing on, because I really wanted to nail down the political story. Fast forward to my first year as a professor, and I've had Google alerts for years on certain phrases related to my research, and I remember on a Thursday night about one in the morning, all of these really extreme right wing political forums started going crazy because they had found a photograph of the then Democratic governor of Virginia in blackface, and it was unclear if he in this photograph, there were two individuals if he was in blackface or dressed as a Klansman. And I sort of wrote it off as like, Oh, child, you don't even know what's coming because I knew what I was writing about Roosevelt and Gerald Ford and the fact that these were the building blocks of how political power worked in Jim Crow America that blackface was an essential part of political financing, campaigning. If you don't want to explicitly say that you're a segregationist, but if you show up and do your political speeches at a minstrel show, it's really clear where your political allegiances are. And so I didn't think anything of it. The next morning, it had trickled into the news, and so I woke up to a lot of phone calls and text messages from people going, Uh, I think you might want to say something. And so at first, all I did was a Twitter thread. Back when, before Elon kicked me off, Twitter used to be a very interesting place for public history and engagement and education. And the other thing that had happened a few months before was Megan Kelly had lost her show because she kept saying talking about blackface and Halloween costumes and how she didn't understand why that was an issue, and so I felt like I was watching in real time all these journalists trying to make sense of something that didn't make sense, because if blackface ended as a main theatrical form by 1900s why in the 1980s are all of these students doing these shows? That makes no sense. And the source base that they were focusing on were the yearbooks, because that was the easiest and most accessible way with the digitization of yearbooks, for them to find the evidence. As somebody who's done an extensive amount of research on blackface and universities, I actually think those are the least interesting sources. It's really the programs. The show programs is where you rip off the lid and see the inner workings of how minstrel shows are animating the entire not just student body, but financing buildings on campus, athletic programs, Greek life, how the alumni system is completely involved in these minstrel shows. And so I put up this thread, and didn't think anything of it. And then some really fancy people like Chelsea Clinton and other people started retweeting or responding, and I realized, okay, people want to know about this. So at the time, the Made by History column for The Washington Post was still pretty new, and I wrote to them, and I wrote up a little piece. And what's abnormal about that story is that it was in Virginia. Minstrelsy and blackface is a northern creation, and the bulk of it happens in the American north and the west. But he did it at the Virginia Military Institute, and the military and its federalization of blackface is really the key to understanding how and why it showed up in that story. So I wrote about that, and then the Washington Post contacted me and said, seems like you know a little bit more about this. And I said, Oh yes, I do know a lot about this. And so they asked me to write an extended feature about American presidents. And I left little hints as to where the book was going, but could not say everything I know, because you're constrained by word limits, but I recognized that this was going to be an interesting way to introduce my book to Americans and get the story out that this is an incredibly serious thing. And I did something kind of cheeky, which is I after the after that article came out, was asked to do some radio and TV interviews, and I said in one of them, and I want to thank the Americans who've sent me evidence from their families of this sordid history for my collection. And that was true, that had already been happening. I did not think through the ways in which I think I unintentionally gave license to families who did not want to sit with the unpleasantness of having these things in their house to have a place to offload them, and in their minds do something positive and good. But there were also people who were genuinely like, I am horrified, and have recognized my family did something. And please, almost all of the requests was, please make this available for Americans to understand what happened. And could you use these in your classes? And so ever since then, I have used them in all of my undergraduate classes. But what that meant was is it opened all of these new stories and complexities that I then had to deal with at a moment when I thought the book was done and went, oh shit, we're starting over again. And that was very hard for me, because once again, would have been really nice to just put a ribbon on it and instead step back and say, Okay, there's this whole other dimension of how these are circulating in unofficial archives and being kept and preserved intergenerationally. Why? Because they held incredible social meaning in terms of somebody's place within their culture and society, and that's something that I needed to understand. And the materiality, going back to the covers, held the keys of how that happened. I'm very frightened about what will happen when the book comes out, because it could happen again. So people have asked me, Why have I not donated it yet to a library or organization? Why do I pay for these off site storages? And it's because I feel like probably for the first year after the book that this will happen again, and then I want to take them and make them available. My dream is for a public university or library that does not require, you know, getting into an elite institution so that Americans can do this. Another thing that I've been doing to try and to democratize this is a lot of universities have history and slavery programs, and so I've written to almost all of those programs and said, your university also has a very active blackface history, especially right when emancipation happens, you switch over to this fundraising model, and I tell them how, or give directions of how they can start finding this in their universities and also in the students families. And I know a lot of the programs have also started implementing it. And so it's something that is very once you have the tools, you can do your own family history, your own local history. And in this big dream of mine, I wish some day to have an exhibition where whatever institutional home will have these can do an exhibition, not just of these sources, but also what other Americans have done to understand their their own unique history as it relates to the topic.
Kate Carpenter 48:32
I want to ask, you everything about this book seems very challenging, but I want to ask you about a couple of particular challenges you had to struggle with that not all historians do. And so one of those is language, and you address this right up front in the book, and you made a choice in this book not to shield the reader from the incredibly racist language in the materials that you're studying, with good reason, I think, so that's sort of the full force of the racial violence of blackface minstrelsy is here. You know, you can't act like you don't know how bad it is when you read the book. Was that a tough decision to make, though? I mean, obviously there are, there are other worries that come along with it. Did you ever consider doing it differently, or did you know that was how it needed to be from the start?
Rhae Lynn Barnes 49:15
Yes and no. So in my teaching, I do not ever say these words aloud when I'm reading primary sources, I will say, you know, N, word, C word, I mean, because the truth is, is that there's derogatory language for women and every minority and ethnic group imaginable in American history, and that is because they can read it on the page. I give them the primary source, they know what the word is, but these words are incredibly violent. In the book, I realized that, yes, they had, I could not censor myself. This is part of the reason Americans don't understand this and keep replicating the problem is they don't understand the history, and so if I as the person who knows the most about this amateur form also censored myself, I was doing a serious disservice to American citizens, and it's incredibly uncomfortable. But I mean, the most serious thing I can say is one of my best friends from high school, her brother, I would say, died in what you could consider a modern day lynching, and that was the last word he heard on this earth. And so who am I to say, Oh, is this is uncomfortable for me to write in a book when that level of violence and reality was experienced by every single Black American who fought these shows at great, great risk to themselves, because unlike the 1915 protests, where the NAACP and families are protesting Birth of a Nation, that's protesting Hollywood, that's an abstract thing. When you're protesting an amateur minstrel show, you are going face to face against your police chief in a Jim Crow segregated town. You're going against your child's principal, who is in charge of if your student can take honors classes, can they get a college letter of recommendation? You're going against the Elks Club, the Rotary Club, all of the local power that can essentially blacklist your business and put you out of business. And so if they had to sit there and listen to it and fight it, then, yeah, we need to acknowledge that this is what happened. But I will say even so, there are a lot of visual images that I did not use because they are so extreme that I mean, because when you writing a book, you have word and page limits. And also because, although this is a trade book, it has 1000s and 1000s of footnotes that added extra hundreds of pages, you have a limit. And so there are some shows and some images that I knew, if they were not given the proper contextualization and analysis they would have, would have come off as sensationalism, and that helps nobody. But this leads into one of the hardest things about this book, which is, while the inside of the book talks about these things, the challenge is, how do I reach the readers that I want to know this history, but I can't use any of the images on the cover, because a cover is different. That's advertising, that's monetization, that's something that you would encounter in the world at an airport, on a shelf, on a desk, and so without the proper context, that would be extremely violent. So trying to make a choice about how to visually represent a visual genre without using any of the visuals has been bizarre. I know you're interested in book promotion. I was encouraged, now that Twitter has collapsed, to use Instagram. Well, I used to just use Instagram in a very different way, because I did photography. Now, all of a sudden, I'm supposed to be using it to promote a book. But I can't play any of the music from the book. I can't show any of the images from the book. I have an incredible amount of archival footage. Can't show that because it would be the same thing. I have thought about possibly creating some commercials that would have a warning at the beginning. But the other bizarre truth is we're dealing with AI robots that will flag accounts and delete accounts who are not understanding that there's a warning at the beginning and so how it's just been an amazing tightrope to walk. The thing for me that was the most troubling wasn't the use of the language in the book, it's that I knew that this would be an audio book, and so who would the narrators be? And originally they only wanted one narrator, because I am not famous. This is a first debut, solo authored book, and I had to very much advocate and say, well, the person representing me needs to be a white woman. However, there are some of these chapters that I feel very, very strongly about that you are going to be narrating someone's life story as a Black woman, and that needs to be read by a Black woman. I personally do not say those words when I read excerpts in public. This is a choice that was out of my hands. I don't actually know which way it will fall. I know who the narrators are. I'm very happy with them, beautiful, skilled performers and interpreters of text, but it will be their own choice with the producers what they decide to do. And that is something that I had to realize I had no control over. But they will obviously be reading the author's note.
Kate Carpenter 55:07
Wow, yeah. Well, not to switch gears too abruptly, but in the last bit of our time, I do want to talk a little bit about what is the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten.
Rhae Lynn Barnes 55:18
Two things just came to mind when you ask that, which is, this is gonna sound funny. And I don't mean to sound funny, but maybe it is. I was friends with a woman in college who was George W Bush's speech writer, but she always said the phrase, writing is generative, and so whenever, whenever I would get, God, I just can't do this. I can't look at this today. I can't handle this. She would say, writing's generative. Just write a sentence, and then you have something to respond to. And that was very helpful. I think the most critical advice as a author and writer came from James P Blaylock when I was in the Orange County High School of the Arts. And I remember very vividly being 14 years old, and he said, and at that point, he had been teaching writing for decades, and he said, my students who get book contracts are never the most talented. It's the person who didn't give up because the amount of rejection that you're going to endure is unimaginable. And I think anyone who's gone through the grad school process knows you're rejected from grad schools. Some years are you rejected from all of your funding. You don't get sabbaticals, you don't get archival fellowships, and so just having to learn on a very spiritual level that some doors close in some moments for a reason that you are not going to understand until later down the line has been one of the hardest lessons to learn. But also recognizing that that is true, that you move forward when you don't give up. And I want to acknowledge and say that that has been very, very trying. There are times writing this book, I will not shy away from saying that I felt suicidal. This is a horrible topic, and holding it in my body, because I felt that I had to fully do my best to understand and inhabit it. Meant not just reading a source and writing it down and just going, Okay, well, that's in the past. I had to really inhabit it and live it to try and translate it and make it real, was hard. And I think women in particular, whether it's elder care, pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, harassment, stalking, sexual assault, I could go on and on and on of what has happened to myself, my friends, my colleagues over the course of their experiences in grad school and writing a first book, meant that the not giving up is incredibly hard. And there are times when I did give up and say I can't handle this. I mean, I remember one time talking, I wrote an email to Eric Lott, who is sort of the major blackface figure, and I literally said, Do you know someone who would want to take this over? Because I can't, I can't handle it anymore. I can't, I can't handle it. Cannot do this. And if you read my dedication page and my acknowledgements, you will see that I lost one of my best friends to a form of suicide, postpartum psychosis. We believe she didn't actually know what she was doing, but that was the person who sat and wrote next to me in libraries all across America. And so the not giving up then became not just for myself and not just for the people who entrusted their stories to me, but also saying, well, now I need to do this for the other women in my cohort and I, I was actually very shocked. I almost kind of had a borderline panic attack two weeks ago, because one of my friends, Sakura Christmas, who was in my cohort, said, and keep in mind, our cohort began in 2009 she said, Did you realize you're the first woman in our cohort to finish your book? And I always thought I'm not the smart one in this cohort. And what that said to me was, the level of endurance that and just trauma that we have all gone through in trying to write these histories. And I think a lot of people are not open about what it what it does to you as a human being, not just to write and research these stories all day long, but also the realities of how a lot of historical disciplines are structured, that you're separated from your family, that you're moving, that you have little resources, and what does it mean to put this bizarre story ahead of like having a retirement account or basic things that your peers are are going, going through. The last thing I'll say about the best writing advice was actually the writing advice I didn't take. And this is probably the most controversial thing that I'll say. This is my first book, and I did not write the traditional first book. I had many colleagues across different universities. This is actually not just about my current colleagues who said, you need to wait your turn, wait your turn. And what they meant by that was, is you can't write a narrative history and you can't write a big book for your first book, you need to do that federalization book. You need to do that print culture book. And I got to the point of saying, wait, wait for what? You know, we were in the middle of a pandemic. Millions of Americans died. Two of my best friends died. The elders who had entrusted their stories to me were dying, begging me to tell their stories. And I thought, wait for what? There's no guarantee that I would get tenure if I wrote the book you wanted, and then what did I do? I just dedicated 16 years of my life writing something that's not representative of who I am, and it's not going to help these, the people who desperately want their story told. And by that, I'm not in any way shitting on academic writing or publishing. I do both. I have books with academic presses, but this particular story, I felt with all of my soul, I needed to do anything I could as an American citizen to get it in the hands of other American citizens. And there have been ways in which people have not been pleased that I've done that. I think one of the more interesting letters I received in trying to promote this book is I wrote to a man who's in academia, who's won a Pulitzer Prize, and I said, Hey, you know, I met you when I was a grad student. You encouraged me. I finished this book. And he wrote back a letter that was like, Whoa, I cannot believe you did this. This is a third book, and he said, I'm going to be honest with you, this might not go well for you in terms of academic rewards, but I want you to know that as somebody who is descended from refugees and who had to build a life in America, you did the right thing for you, and so something that I take very seriously with my students now, when they're obsessed with grades and stuff, it's like, I don't care. Are you pleased with what you've done? Are you happy? And it's interesting to start getting initial feedback about the book. Because so I did not know what this meant, because I'm not from a writer's family, but it got a starred review from Kirkus and Library Journal, and I was told by many people that this is essentially the equivalent of getting like a Michelin star or being nominated for like a Critics Choice Awards in that other critics are saying this is a body of work that has literary merit and so to be recognized for the writing and not just the research, meant something to me to say that that giving that not giving up, and all of the people that I carried with me and tried to do this for, meant something how it will be received. I don't know, as I sort of jokingly said to you, I'm in this blissful one month period where, I mean another element of this is I deal with a lot of harassment. People are not excited when you tell the white supremacist history of organizations that are beloved to them. So I know that that's coming. And it doesn't just mean harassment of me as an intellectual, but I think when you write a book about bodies. It gives people on the internet license to make fun of me. For example, I have melasma, which is like a hormonal thing that can make some of you your skin have, like, blotchiness when you're on your period, or if you have a miscarriage. And so I've seen comments of like, oh, the blackface girl's doing blackface, people commenting on the fact that I'm very curvy, and trying to racialize and class that, and so I know all of that's coming, and it's coming because I didn't take that advice, right? I didn't I didn't do the simple, tight book that was an option. I decided to go with the more chaotic option and pursue something that I don't know if I've achieved. I don't know if I've succeeded, but I know that I tried, and that was the only thing that I could do.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:31
I think maybe I'll leave it there, because that is just such a beautiful note to end on, and a testament to everything you've poured into this book.
Rhae Lynn Barnes 1:04:37
Can I give a suggestion please? Any listeners out there two things that I want you to listen to. One is Maya Angelou talking about bringing your ancestors on stage with you. So when you're scared as a writer or as a public speaker, she says, think about your grandparents. Think about your friends who have passed and say, Come with me now. I need you. And that has been so helpful for me. The other thing, this is more naughty, almost 16, maybe 18 years ago, Sandra Cisneros did an interview, and you can find it on YouTube. It's a five or six minute clip, and it's called I Hate the Iowa Writers Workshop. And if you have ever struggled because you feel because of your gender, race, class, ethnicity, language, disability, that you the way you want to tell stories has not been embraced by the institutions that you are at. I encourage you to listen to that six minutes. It is the most powerful six minutes that articulates so many of the struggles that I think many of us grapple with, but don't have a way to articulate or a venue to talk about. And that clip has saved me many times.
Kate Carpenter 1:05:59
I'm gonna go watch it after we finish this conversation, I imagine many listeners will too. Dr Rhae Lynn Barnes, what a joy to get to see this project out in the world and get to talk to you about how it came together. Thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Rhae Lynn Barnes 1:06:15
Thank you.
Kate Carpenter 1:06:15
Thanks to Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes for joining me for this conversation, and thanks to you for listening. You can find links to the new book Darkology, as well as those inspirations she encourages us all to listen to in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. And if you like the show and want to keep it going, consider becoming a supporter at patreon.com/draftingthepast. Not only will your financial contribution help me continue to produce the show, you'll be able to get ad free versions of the episodes. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
