American identity in the early industrial period relied on the consumption of the "Other". Blackface and Indianness arose out of a desire to shed the skin of Old World heritage for a new, unique and authentic American identity. Faced with the uncertainty of a nascent industrial economy that radically changed the relationship between individual and work, family, and politics, whites sought symbols of an early America, an authentic America. Whites yearned for a simple past, and contrarily, for those ideals to meld into the present modern era. Indians and Blacks were symbols of the anti-modern, the anti-civilization on which the fantasy of American authenticity was built. For marginalized Jewish immigrants to earn an American label, they performed an inauthentic racial authenticity, as it existed in the American imagination, through Blackface. As Rogin explains, “wishing away anti-Semitism required the disappearance of the Jew”. An authentic American identity required the erasure of Jakie's Jewish heritage and the participation in American racist attitudes. Yet, as Rogin notes, Blackface was an outlet for the jazz singer to express his blackness, his alliance to other minorities and feelings of marginalization, on the outside. His whiteness only makes him American when performing "his authentically felt interior" in an inauthentic homogenizing representation of black people. Through Blackface, Jakie earns the privileges of white American identity: access to white women, hegemonic cultural appropriation, and economic and social success; he asserts his superior white American status through the performed reinforcement of racial marginalization of Blacks.
Indianness also affords participants with the power to culturally appropriate aspects that fit into pre-established stereotypes to construct an American identity. Whites saw modernization as straying away from Americanness and looked to Native play to conjure a simple past where man was one with nature- a return to the pioneer history viewed as the authentic American experience. "The ways people construct authenticity depend upon both the traumas that define the maligned inauthentic and upon the received heritage that has defined the authentic in the past. Because those seeking authenticity have already defined their own state as inauthentic, they easily locate authenticity in the figure of an Other. This Other can be coded in terms of time (nostalgia or archaism), place (the small town), or culture (Indianness)." These assumed identities relied on the invisibility of the people impersonated. The imagined inauthentic collided with the real authentic; Natives still existed and Blacks and whites interacted regularly. For example, Black waiters serving whites during a blackface performance. Reality threatened the foundation upholding the fantasy. Without the fantasy, American identity returned to an undefined void. It is the Other that creates the white American.
Americans continue to shape their identities in opposition to an Other through Blackface and Indianness. It remains a tradition for whites and non-whites looking to move up the socio-racial hierarchy to erase their heritage or ethnic identities to become American through the cultural appropriation and mimicry of more so-labeled inferior races. The fashion industry puts white models in blackface in magazine spreads and mock Native dress appears on designers' runways. Halloween could be renamed Hegemonic Cultural Appropriation Day for the plentitude of costumed racial performers. News media frequently report on racist themed college parties. Sports mascots continue to represent American sports teams. And, stereotypes also remain as a gauge of what is racially authentic. The American mind, as in the past, holds on to ideas of what is racially authentic in the face of the living, breathing contradictions, the individuals who in the complexity of their own humanity, threaten the fantasy and thus white American identity. The costume, gestures, and language of a performance are reflections of what the participants believe to be authentic representations to the racially labeled group of people being mocked.
Without the Other, what American identity would take shape? Would a defined American identity require reconciliation with its contradictory past? Is there a way for "Others" to reclaim possession of their cultural authenticity in a politically imbalanced society that renders them invisible? I had hoped that the movements against such offensive performances would have resulted in major decline. But in the past twenty years since publishing my book, I am disappointed in the wide acceptance to reenact one of our great historical shames. From my work, it seems that to be American, one must engage in the demeaning of self and others.
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