“America is a land of masking jokers,” the novelist Ralph Ellison wrote in 1958 in an essay on American identity. “We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense, when we are projecting the future and preserving the past … the joke is at the center of the American identity.”

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When white Americans dumped tea into the Boston Harbor, Ellison argues, they were wearing the costumes – the masks – of Native Americans; when white Americans wished to ease their discomfort with black Americans, they simply adopted blackness itself as a costume, a clown suit, attempting to at once crudely mimic African Americans through stereotypes and to create a caricature that could be easily laughed at and spoken down to. It was an act of both offense and defense: an attack through derision, and a kind of psychological defense against a deeply feared group. The entertainer in blackface – even when it was a black American forced to put on blackface makeup – “is [always] white”, Ellison noted.

At the height of its popularity in the late 19th century, seeing white performers adorned in coal-black makeup, woolly wigs and outlandishly red lips was one of the most beloved pastimes for white American families. As an image, the iconography of blackface dates back centuries, appearing in colonial-era illustrations of black Africans. These images sought to portray black people as clowns and freakish beings, exaggerating features so as to suggest the “otherness” of black bodies. In the 1830s, however, blackface took off in its most recognizable form today, when it was integrated into onstage performances by white Americans who donned dark makeup, red lips and rough curly wigs, the blackness of their makeup amplifying the whiteness of their eyes and teeth.

The performances began in a number of north-eastern states. They often featured singing, dancing, skits and instrumental music, the latter often some form of “Negro melodies”. Blackface shows were marketed as a peculiar mix of high- and lowbrow entertainment; they were bawdy and crude, planting, in this way, the seed of vaudeville, but they also attempted to translate more elitist forms of art, such as opera, to a popular stage. The segregationist Jim Crow laws took their name from a minstrelsy act, Jumping Jim Crow, by blackface showboat Thomas Dartmouth Rice – sometimes considered “the father” of minstrel performance – who claimed it was based on a slave he knew.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Blackface occasionally appeared as a peculiar form of part-mocking homage.’ Photograph: AP

So lucrative was blackface that even African American performers had little choice but to wear it if they desired a modicum of success with white audiences. Such was the case with one of the most famous black stage actors of the 19th century, William Henry Lane – better known as “Master Juba” – who was forced to wear blackface until he became sufficiently famous around the globe to travel, sans blackface, with a troupe of white actors. Lane astonished audiences, dancing a modified Irish jig and reel set to syncopated African rhythms, which laid the foundations for tap dancing. He was a prodigy, dancing in public from age 10 in the mid-1830s. Yet he had to humiliate himself in order to proceed; he had to, as a foundation, exist as a carnivalesque gag onstage, so that his white viewers might, after a hearty laugh and jeer, have a chance of noticing the extraordinary movements of his feet. In this way, blackface was a demeaning vehicle to success, a prerequisite for achieving posterity well into the early 20th century.

Blackface is the joke that comforts white Americans

Blackface occasionally appeared as a peculiar form of part-mocking homage, and perhaps the clearest example of this is in a remarkable 1932 episode of Betty Boop, I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, which featured Louis Armstrong and his band. The cartoon begins with Armstrong and crew providing background music for Betty Boop, Bimbo and Koko the Clown’s safari into a vast jungle; the troop is unceremoniously attacked by swarthy, grotesque-faced cannibals, who kidnap Betty Boop and prepare to cook her.

In what must rank as one of the most blatantly racist scenes in popular cartoon history, the episode cuts to Betty Boop’s sidekicks being chased by the floating head of an animated thick-lipped caricature indistinguishable from the iconography of minstrel shows, which morphs into Armstrong’s own gigantic, floating face, then back into the cannibal’s visage. To be sure, such racist imagery was common in early American cartoons, the origins of which are intimately tied to minstrelsy and vaudeville. Mickey Mouse, Bimbo and Koko may even be imagined as minstrels themselves, as the critic Nicholas Sammond has argued, their earliest onscreen performances often echoing the dance routines and musical numbers of minstrel shows. Against mounting criticism from civil rights groups, such blatant racism in public works steadily evanesced, fading, instead, into the background – no longer as obvious as Armstrong’s transforming face, but still there, for those who looked.

When a 1984 yearbook photo of Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, surfaced of a man in blackface and one in Ku Klux Klan robes, Northam claimed he did not remember being in the photo, but admitted he had darkened his face the same year to dress as Michael Jackson for a “dance contest in San Antonio”. It was a homage, he implied. “In the place and time where I grew up,” Northam said during a press conference, “many actions that we rightfully recognize as abhorrent today were commonplace.” Northam seemed to believe that the “commonplace” nature of racism absolved him – but, of course, it does not, cannot. Incredibly, the Virginia attorney general soon revealed that he, too, had worn blackface in the past. None of this was new in politics; the Missouri Democratic governor Mel Carnahan still won a 2000 Senate seat after a photograph surfaced of him singing in a blackface quartet.

The fact is that blackface has never left America; it has simply become less overt. It appears whenever other racist symbols do: the noose, the watermelon, the assumptions that black bodies are dangerous bodies, that one should cross the road when a black body walks towards you, day or night. It haunts us like some grotesque ghost, grinning and laughing, and hoping a certain kind of white audience still sees it, still laughs at it, still feels comforted, even, by it.

It still appears in countless ways: the exaggerated features on Aunt Jemimah; the seemingly unending stream of college students caught on camera with faces painted black; the minstrel-era features of Japanese anime and manga characters, such as Mr Popo, who are popular in the United States; the caricatured effigies of Barack Obama that conservatives have erected, year after year, to shoot, lynch or even detonate on camera. Blackface is a protean, all-encompassing form, indelibly interwoven into this country’s psyche, its images of red lips suggesting both eroticism – harkening to colonial-era stereotypes, still extant, about the “heightened” sexuality of black bodies – and blood, the blood of the black corpses that fills America’s soils. Its act still plays out on the stage of America today.

Blackface is the joke that comforts white Americans who, consciously or otherwise, are terrified of nonwhite people, as Ellison knew. It lives on like a comfort food. The critic Elias Cannetti argued, in Crowds and Power, that laughter allows us to take power over the one we laugh at; perhaps this is why, even now, blackface still exists, a crude, cruel attempt by certain white Americans to retain a sense of racial superiority. Blackface is a ghost we may never be able to exorcise; it is too deeply, painfully American.