Public Works and Accolades

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 looks beyond Hollywood’s high-budget films intended for White spectatorship by reading independently produced race films alongside the racial caricature produced in mainstream Hollywood. Beginning with an analysis of race film, this chapter demonstrates four directions that depictions of Blackness took on the screen between the years 1929 and 1934: blackface performed by Black artists who capitalize on a successful White performer’s use of the blackface mask; all-Black films made by all-White creative teams that utilize a range of overt and covert disguises to uphold a set of imaginary beliefs about Black life and the Black body; the minstrel show-within-a-show and southern repossession formulas that allowed for flagrant uses of burnt cork; and finally the material realized through Oscar Micheaux and other Black filmmakers who linked themselves to White consciousness only insofar as it impacted the funding of their films. The remainder of this chapter recounts the concealed ways that White audiences utilized covert masks through a handful of exceptional Black artists, the most popular of which was the mask used by Bill Robinson. Robinson pioneered an era on screen, often making sacrifices through casting, song choice, choreography, and even his own relationship to the NAACP. This chapter introduces the Bill Robinson effect through which romanticized portrayals of an individual allow audiences access to a nostalgic and unquestioned slave-owning past while shielding them from the shameful parts of this narrative.