EDITOR’S NOTE: Mark Wakeman, a 1965 graduate of Wayland High School, already has written one guest column. This one is about the recent controversy over public officials being found to have dressed up in blackface in their youth.
by Mark Wakeman
My name is Mark and I’m an _________________( your choice here, they all fit ).
An interesting viewpoint, likening racism to a disease. I have found it exists everywhere to a certain extant, living as a Yankee in the southern U.S. or living in Munich and hearing about how bad the Prussians are, or a South Korean coworker excoriating the North Koreans as being worse than pigs.Mind you, these are all members of the same race. Prejudice, intolerance, and racism are all facets of the same mind set that makes a tribe of monkeys kill another monkey for being a different color. I also grew up in Wayland in the 1950s and ’60s, and there weren’t ANY Afro-Americans. Yet I was still told by my peers about them being lesser human beings.
I was fortunate enough to have had parents who correctly identified these ” teachings ”as a product of a sick mind. My father had a black woman as his dearest friend from high school, and they remained close friends until his death. Yet, in a comedy sketch in the early ’60s, he also did a song in blackface as part of the act.
Before trashing someone and all the good they have done fore an indiscretion that they ignorantly performed in the past isn’t really going to help. Only education can defeat ignorance, and while we seem to be making some progress in the right direction regarding women’s rights and racism, there is an enormous amount of work to be done .
If only there were a vaccination one could give their children to immunize them from contracting this mental pestilence ( spread by means of words and writings), how much better we would all be. As I mentioned, my father, Wallace Wakeman, also wore blackface for an Al Jolson song, and he was vehemently anti-racist.
I had never even heard the word ” nigger ” until I moved to Wayland as an 8-year-old, and I only used it once, not even knowing that it was derogatory. Boy, did I catch some hell behind that one. Never used it again.
Ironically, the first ” Talky ” movie was The Jazz Singer, 1927, Staring Al Jolson, who was Jewish, but performed in blackface.
The thing is, this was acceptable because AfAms still weren’t considered to be equal. Also apparently not having feelings to be hurt. Twelve years after D.W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation.
Next decade saw a lot more AfAms in movies, although most of them were all black casts. Bill Robinson, aka Bojangles, a famous tap dancer from Harlem, danced with Shirley Temple in a movie, The Little Colonel, 1935. It was the first of four movies they made together, but not without some extremist criticisms. It was the first interracial dance pairing in Hollywood history and was so controversial that it was cut out in the south.
The next year, in the GREAT movie Swing Time, Fred Astaire donned blackface to do a dance number about Bojangles of Harlem.
The question arises, was it a tribute from one great dancer to another, or exploiting someone’s well deserved fame? Read this and form your own opinion.
Basically, what I’m getting at was that some things were done that were acceptable at the time, but evolving and changing mores have cast them, in retrospect, as horrific. If my father was alive today, he would hang his head in shame for doing what he thought at the time was good clean fun.
I think that most incidents of this sort can be chalked up to ignorance, and forgiven, if the person who has committed them has learned better. If no malice or ill will was intended, no harm, no foul. This isn’t even close to holding a woman down and attempting rape.
As time passes, we are hopefully learning to change our ways and viewpoints and hopefully each generation will come a little closer to the goal of not casting aspersions on some one or group of persons merely because they part their hair on the left, which of course is blasphemous.
Mr. Wakeman,
Sir, very well done, We need to concentrate on what unites us not divides us.
Nicely done, Mark.
As long as it isn’t used as a band-aid to conceal disease, this kind of excuse is valid. I think it cannot be a blanket answer. It really, really depends on the person uttering it. I also wonder what your dad’s friend really thought of his black face performance. I suppose that could evolve with time, too. Interesting subject.