Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes spent 20 years researching the materials that would inform her nonfiction book, “Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment,” which explores the long history of blackface in American culture.
A fourth-generation Southern Californian raised in Anaheim, Barnes grew up wanting to be a sportswriter, eventually meeting Vin Scully and corresponding with radio sportscaster “Big Joe” McDonnell, aka The Big Nasty. The daughter of an artist who attended readings by Charles Bukowski, Barnes attended Orange County High School of the Arts (now known as Orange County School of the Arts, or OCSA) in Santa Ana for creative writing, studying with James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers.
Barnes, who is the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, shares both her personal story and also how she wrote and researched her book in this email Q&A, which has been edited for length and clarity.
(Ed. note: Barnes’s responses were composed with newspaper readers in mind, but readers should nonetheless be aware that her academic research involved examining racist materials and practices.)
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Q. In recent years, blackface and minstrelsy have shown up in Percival Everett’s “James” and an episode of “Mad Men,” but many would be surprised to learn how popular it was in the country.
People are often surprised, and that shock is exactly why I had to write this book. For decades, the established historical narrative suggested that blackface minstrelsy died out by the dawn of the 20th century, supposedly “subsumed” by film and radio. Because of that gap in our collective memory, when it pops up in brilliant contemporary works like Percival Everett’s “James” or that infamous country club episode of “Mad Men,” we tend to view it as a strange, isolated relic or a quirky historical footnote.
But the reality is far more pervasive. “Darkology” is a cultural skeleton key to the soul of Americana. It uncovers a “missing century” of American culture by exposing how amateur minstrelsy didn’t just survive the 19th century. It became the hidden operating system of American life. I am not just talking about professional actors on a stage. I am talking about millions of everyday citizens. Blackface was an “R&D” department of White supremacy that was aggressively professionalized, mass-marketed, and sold to amateurs.
When you look at the sheer scale of it, it is staggering. I found that the U.S. government literally federalized minstrelsy. During the Great Depression, the WPA acted as a “Blackface Bureau” to distribute racist scripts. During World War II, the military shipped “theatrical kits” to soldiers to boost morale through the communal dehumanization of their fellow Black soldiers serving in segregated units. Fraternal orders, like the Elks, used these shows to build the insular networks that launched political careers all the way to the White House.
Most devastatingly, I uncovered what I call “blackface capitalism.” The profits from these amateur community shows funded the very infrastructure of Jim Crow America, from paving streets, financing university buildings, and building the hospitals and schools that Black citizens were systematically excluded from using. It was also a seductive cultural passport.
So, “Darkology” is about looking that messy, violent reality right in the eye. It proves that this degradation wasn’t a bug in the American system; it was the masonry of the foundation.
But I also want readers to know that it is a story of profound hope. This massive, decentralized machine didn’t just fade away. It was systematically dismantled by the fierce, courageous resistance of Black mothers, soldiers, and civil rights workers who recognized the lethal power of these performances and put everything on the line to change the course of our history. For all of us who believe in that “more perfect union,” there are amazing lessons of courage and hope here.
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
As an only child in a working-class Teamster family in Anaheim, books and movies were very much my friends. The first book to make a major impact on me was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” I had this odd habit as a kid of trying to memorize novels. I was obsessively trying to understand what made stories work. I remember lying awake at night, long after I was supposed to be asleep, reciting the opening lines to myself in the dark: “Serene. Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1912…” There was something about wanting to fully inhabit the language and hold the architecture of that story in my body that laid the groundwork for how I write today. I love that book very much and the grit of the main character deciding she’s going to forge her own life against all odds and tradition expected of her.
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Q. Who are some nonfiction authors or journalists you turn to for inspiration?
Here’s a secret very few people know: when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a sports writer. Growing up in Southern California meant marinating in a beautifully chaotic media stew where local sports writers and radio personalities were some of our defining cultural commentators. The daily commute was, by default, a mandatory two-hour radio show. At home, you’d watch a baseball game on TV, but we’d mute the national announcers and crank up the radio broadcast because your guys were the only ones who truly got it.
I was lucky to meet Vin Scully as a kid. But for decades, I secretly corresponded with a man who went by the nickname “The Big Nasty.” Also known as “Big Joe” McDonnell, he tapped out at 740 pounds and was an absolute fixture of Los Angeles sports journalism. I first wrote to him in the sixth grade, and despite his larger-than-life, garish alter-ego, he wrote back. He was kind. He was encouraging. As I started writing myself, every interaction with him felt like a blessing from my very own personal Lester Bangs a la “Almost Famous.” This is particularly laughable because I have never played a single organized sport. I danced, I played piano. But “The Big Nasty” taught me how to swear like a relief pitcher clinging to the dugout in the bottom of the ninth and how to tell great stories.
Joe was the city’s collective sports id, miraculously granted a press pass and a microphone. But what inspired me most as a writer was his bracing vulnerability. He was the first person I can remember being profoundly open about what it’s like to live with obesity in America and writing about the medical realities, the daily cruelties, and the mental demons he fought, all juxtaposed against the fine lines and controlled bodies of the athletes he studied.
One thing I learned from Big Joe and from my family, whose love for the Dodgers is basically a genetic trait encoded directly into our DNA, is the art of showing up to witness greatness. I have gone out of my way to luxuriously witness people kicking ass, which is why I took my dad to spring training last year to see Shohei Ohtani. I know with every fiber of my being that Big Joe would have had an absolute meltdown in the press box watching Ohtani. He would have flipped out over the cosmic agony of the Angels losing him up the freeway, and he would have loved every second of the hot, electric, Santa Ana-windblown madness of the World Series at Dodger Stadium. Joe taught me to value that raw, unfiltered passion for the story, and that unapologetic ethos heavily informs how I write cultural history today. I wish I could have sent him my book when it was released or told him when it became a national bestseller. But I guess he knows.
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
My reading life is a product of the somewhat unconventional literary education I got here in Southern California. It really started at home. My dad was deeply embedded in the arts, punk, gritty avant-garde film and that side of the local writing culture, except he does not write. He is a visual artist. He used to go see Charles Bukowski read all the time. In fact, if you watch some of the old DVDs of those poetry readings, you can actually see and hear my dad in the crowd, talking and heckling back and forth with Hank. That raw, unpretentious approach to words was my baseline. Maybe I shouldn’t have been reading Charles Bukowski as young as I was, but it certainly helped shape the kind of language I like.
Everything shifted when I was a teenager. I had been attending a failing public junior high housed in trailers in the shadow of Disneyland, but my life changed when I auditioned for and was accepted into the Orange County High School of the Arts (now known as Orange County School of the Arts, or OCSA) in Santa Ana for creative writing. Suddenly, I was taking college-level courses with brilliant fantasy writers like James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers. Tim was famously the caretaker for Philip K. Dick, and being exposed to Dick’s work and that entire lineage of dystopian, alternative-history storytelling profoundly shaped me. I learned to look at the surreal, manufactured landscape of Orange County through this sci-fi, slightly conspiratorial lens.
But the real magic happened right next door to the school. We shared a common wall with a bookstore owned by the legendary Rueben Martinez [Librería Martínez]. He had an old barber chair in the middle of the shop from when he would cut hair and loan out books to new migrants. After school, he would hand-sell me books, guiding me toward writers like Sandra Cisneros and Julio Cortázar. It was a portal that taught me books are where we go to find the language for our lives.
Q. What are you reading now?
I am currently loving “American Han” by Lisa Lee. But as a cultural historian, I am also a very promiscuous reader of unconventional and weird texts. I read a lot of environmental data, scientific guidebooks, and regional soil and flora reports while writing. When I am world-building for a book, I need to know exactly what kind of brush someone was trampling through in a National Park in the 1930s, or what flowers cast their scent in a specific geographic location. I extract every sensory detail I can to make history breathe.
Q. What’s your book about?
“Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment” is a cultural skeleton key to the soul of Americana. It traces how amateur blackface minstrelsy wasn’t just a fleeting theatrical phase, but the hidden operating system of American pop culture, politics, and capitalism.
The inspiration for it was forged right here. I grew up going to Disneyland after school. I remember being there shortly after the 1992 L.A. uprisings; the contrast of the outside world reckoning with systemic racial fracture while we stood inside the innocent nostalgia of Main Street, U.S.A., was jarring. I remember watching “Steamboat Willie” in the park’s cinema and realizing the foundations of American animation were dripping with the aesthetics of the minstrel stage. The same was true of Knott’s Berry Farm, where they used to have mock lynchings of Mexican Americans hung up for decoration. I was constantly unsettled by the absence of reality in these spaces, and “Darkology” is my attempt to map out how we entertained ourselves into becoming Americans — and the profound, often violent, cost of that entertainment.
Q. What were some of the most challenging aspects of researching the book?
The sheer mental toll and the institutional censorship. Over the course of 20 years, I became the temporary custodian of thousands of pieces of racist ephemera that Americans donated to me. Living with sources that are essentially a visual hate crime does incredible damage to your psyche; there were nights in my tiny apartments where I had to drape sheets over the boxes just to get some psychological separation. But I would tell myself the heroes of my book, who fought and successfully dismantled this huge industry, did not have the ability to opt out of White supremacy in Jim Crow America.
Accessing the history was equally fraught. I spent days at the Library of Congress requesting titles only to be told they were “missing on shelf,” until an archivist finally admitted she had hidden them in 1987 because Klan members were coming in to Xerox and reanimate the plays. When I tried to research the benevolent fraternal orders that used these shows to build political machines, I was escorted out by police at the Elks Club headquarters and dubbed the “Erin Brockovich of blackface.”
But the deepest challenge was the environmental research. You can read every testimony about the Manzanar concentration camp, but it changes you to actually stand there in the freezing wind against the Sierras and realize that Japanese Americans, imprisoned by their own government, were performing blackface inside those camps just to prove their American cultural identity.
Q. Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend?
I do when trying to fall asleep. I love the audiobook of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” But the audiobook production for “Darkology” actually presented one of the most intense ethical dilemmas of the publishing process. I made the difficult choice not to censor the incredibly violent, racist language in the primary sources I quote in the book. If I shielded the reader, I would be doing a disservice to the Black Americans who fought these shows at great risk to their lives — they had to hear it, so we must acknowledge it.
However, translating that to audio was a different reality. The producers originally wanted a single narrator. Because I am a White woman, I advocated that the primary narrator representing me needed to be a White woman. But I fought hard to ensure that the chapters narrating the life stories and fierce resistance of Black women like Betty Reid Soskin, who fought against blackface in California schools in the 1950s, were read by Black women. I haven’t heard the audiobook yet. I don’t know what decisions the voice artists ultimately made. But they were so powerful in the small excerpts I have heard.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
Almost no one knows how fiercely I was discouraged from writing it during the Obama Administration (people saying I was digging up an ugly past), and also how much I was discouraged from writing it in this way. In history departments at universities, there is a very traditional path for a debut book. Many colleagues told me to “wait my turn.” They wanted me to write a safe, highly contained and structured monograph — perhaps just focusing on the federalization of blackface in the 1930s or just the print culture aspects.
I received a letter from a Pulitzer Prize-winning academic in Los Angeles who warned me that writing a narrative-driven, multi-century exposé for a first book might not be well received by the academic community.
But we were in the middle of a pandemic. Millions of Americans were dying, including two of my best friends and many of the elders who had bravely entrusted their stories to me. I thought, Wait for what? There was no guarantee I’d live or that anyone would read this book, so I needed to write it in the way that would reach Americans. I realized that if I died of COVID-19 all these stories would die with me.
I had to write the book that felt true to the people who lived this history, like the Black Rosie the Riveter mothers who fought on the front lines to desegregate California schools. I decided to take the chaotic, difficult option, even if it meant risking my professional safety, because it was the only thing my conscience would allow.
Last night, I received an email from a professor at Columbia University who said he was proud of my triumph, but also said “Darkology” is a “page turner” and that was deeply meaningful. Americans want to learn our history. They want it in all its complexity. I’m honored to have brought a new piece of history to life for American readers.