Featured image: Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s infamous 1984 medical school yearbook.

BOOKS

Annemarie Bean; James V. Hatch; & Brooks McNamara (editors.)  Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy.

Douglas A. Jones.  The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North.

W.T. Lhamon Jr.   Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.

Eric Lott.  Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

William J. Mahar.  Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture.

Brian Roberts.  Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925.

ARTICLES

Marc Aronson:  The complicated mix of racism and envy behind blackface: Why we’re still talking about minstrelsy in 2018.

Rhae Lynn Barnes: The troubling history behind Ralph Northam’s blackface Klan photo: How blackface shaped Virginia politics and culture for more than a century. 

Stephen A. Berrey: What Justin Trudeau’s brownface photo says about white innocence. 

Brent Staples:  How Blackface Feeds White Supremacy: A racist caricature from 19th-century minstrel theater still haunts America.

Rhae Lynn Barnes: Yes, politicians wore blackface. It used to be all-American ‘fun.’

Brain Roberts, interviewed about his book Blackface Nation.

Randa Tawil:  Why blackface remains popular on college campuses:  White students use a racist practice to work out their identities — and enforce white supremacy.

Christopher D. E. Willoughby: Blackface is just a symptom of American medicine’s racist past:  The study of medicine is rife with racist assumptions and experiments that still shape health outcomes today.

VIDEOS AND PODCASTS

Rhae Lynn Barnes: links to Democracy Now interview as well as clips of Blackface performances with commentary.    

Interview with historian Eric Lott, about the contemporary resurgence of Blackface.