A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

Abdurraqib considers far-reaching impact of the “Magical Negro” trope, dedicating this essay to the multitude of Black actors relegated to playing this role in films from the 1990s and 2000s. As an aside, Abdurraqib shouts out his friend Trey, who transferred to a private Catholic school that had mostly white students and where Trey became a star basketball player.

The 2006 movie The Prestige describes the three parts of a magic trick: the pledge, where the audience is shown an ordinary object; the turn, where the object “becomes or does the extraordinary” (51); and the prestige, where it “returns to its ordinary state, but slightly altered” (51-52). Abdurraqib compares this to returning to his hometown after college—but in this case, his transformation feels disappointing instead of magical.

In the movie, the magician Angier goes to extraordinary lengths to pull off his Vanishing Man Trick, which usually requires a look-alike double. Because he doesn’t want to share the spotlight, Angier completes the trick by cloning himself, drowning the original self in a box below the stage, and emerging across the room. The trick “requires sacrifice” (55). Abdurraqib sees Dave Chappelle’s career in a similar light. Chappelle’s mid-career disappearance to South Africa was his version of the turn: unexpectedly abandoning the height of his fame. His reappearance and later career is the prestige: Chappelle returned altered, having sacrificed his ability to satirize the dominant and powerful and instead targeting the less powerful. Abdurraqib suggests that part of this shift in Chappelle’s comedy is a change in audience—his humor was no longer intended for Black audiences at the expense of white people.

Abdurraqib identifies a similar dynamic in what he calls “the ‘n***** torturing’ scene” (61) from the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In it, a white police officer questions a white victim’s mother. When the mother accuses the cop of running a “n***** torturing business” (60), the police officer quibbles about word choice without denying that he has abused Black suspects. The scene is meant to be funny, and the audience at Abdurraqib’s showing of the movie laughed at it, though he posits that a different audience would have reacted differently.

Abdurraqib contrasts Chappelle with Ellen Armstrong, a 1920s magician, who began as an act in her father’s show. Her father John Armstrong, best known for making things like coins appear and disappear, performed for “packed Black churches, where he could court audiences who had already placed their faith in the unseen” (63). At six years old, Ellen Armstrong pretended to read audience member’s minds. As a teenager, she drew characters with chalk that would transform as she added a few lines. When Ellen was 25, her father died and she began to tour on her own, performing her father’s and her own tricks. Throughout her career, she continued to play to Black audiences.

Abdurraqib considers invisibility and visibility for Black Americans. He hopes for his own small, unspectacular exit.

As indicated by the title, Abdurraqib outlines 16 different iterations of blackface:

1.  Charles Dickens’s visit to a dancehall in Manhattan, where he saw a minstrel act by William Henry Lane, a Black man who performed under the name Master Juba. Abdurraqib presents the encounter like a historical document and includes a substantial excerpt from Dickens’s American Notes For General Circulation that comments on Master Juba’s authenticity.

2.  The post-2016 election trend of white people pretending to be Black on the Internet. Abdurraqib outlines how Black people can recognize a white person playing at being Black.

3.  Master Juba had an ongoing conflict with a white minstrel dancer named John Diamond, who insisted he could perform Black dances better than anyone, including Black dancers. Juba dominated their contests, only losing once.

4.  Abdurraqib describes a short scene in the movie 8 Mile, in which Eminem’s character defeats Papa Doc in a rap battle.

5.  Abdurraqib considers Black skin and skincare in relation to blackface. Abdurraqib describes his own experiences with caring for his skin.

6.  Dickens was a paradoxical figure. While in many ways a progressive man, he was also “racist, nationalist, and imperialist” (75). Abdurraqib uses the antisemitic character of Fagin to consider how Dickens could be sympathetic to Black people while also having no “mercy” (76).

7.  Abdurraqib directly addresses the reader, interrogating the euphemistic way white America talks about blackface.

8.  Abdurraqib describes a recurring dream of drowning Al Jolson, a white actor best known for his blackface role in The Jazz Singer. When Abdurraqib submerges him, Jolson’s face disappears. In the water, Abdurraqib can only see his own reflection. Jolson’s body disappears, leaving behind his coat.

9.  Without naming her, Abdurraqib describes Rachel Dolezal—the former president of the NAACP who claimed to be Black but was in fact a white woman. While some Black people gave her the benefit of the doubt after the revelation of her real identity, Abdurraqib “knew” (78) all along that she was not Black when she didn’t understand a question about being Black.

10. Abdurraqib considers why Master Juba wore blackface and suggests it’s a small way to reclaim Black identity and culture.

11. Abdurraqib connects contemporary incidents of blackface with Black History Month. Many white Americans still struggle to understand why blackface is bad.

12. There are three popular drawings of Master Juba. The first is of his encounter with Dickens. Juba is dancing. The second is a caricature where “Juba is mostly lips” (81). The third is an image of Juba in dress clothes. Abdurraqib finds this last portrait joyful, as it shows “Juba was whole, worthy of a most honest portrayal” (82).

13. At a family reunion, Abdurraqib worries about not being able to dance and thus does not participate, but stands to the side, “witnessing” a moment “too precious to be interrupted” (83).

14. Abdurraqib wonders if Al Jolson “truly loved Black people” (83). He made Black performance visible, but he did it via blackface. Abdurraqib positions this as consumption of Blackness, not love—Jolson was simply performing Blackness as a role, as his makeup could be washed away by tears.

15. At Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, Ben Vereen, having just won an Emmy for the TV miniseries Roots, decided to honor Black vaudevillian Bert Williams, who had performed in blackface. Vereen, too, wore blackface in an attempt to criticize and satirize racist stereotypes. Yet his audience—Regan and other rich, white, conservative people—missed the satire and found it simply amusing. To further obscure Vereen’s attempt at a political statement, his performance was cut short, so it appeared that Vereen was simply “shuffling and singing for a pleased white audience” (87). Abdurraqib deems this performance a failure: “If there is nowhere for a joke to land, it floats and floats and then is forgotten” (87).

The facts surrounding Master Juba’s death are unknown.

Children and their parents have differing perspectives on code switching. While parents see it as a tool for advancement and survival, kids reject it as inauthentic. Rebelliously, they swear and talk Black. For high school students, survival and success depend on sounding Black.

Abdurraqib then turns to Whitney Houston’s 1988 appearance at the Grammy Awards. Houston cannot really dance, relying instead on elaborate spectacle. The performance was an attempt to rebrand her, mirroring the change between her first two albums. The Grammys audience booed her. She returned in 1989, and the Black audience booed even louder, reacting to the perception that Houston had sold out for a white audience: Her second album shifted to more formulaic pop music, a Times magazine interview divorced Houston from her past and her Blackness, and her fashion and hair-styling shifted to the mainstream. Houston no longer seemed Black enough.

Abdurraqib returns to personal experience. He used to listen to alternative music, which angered Black people around him. However, he believes that variation in Blackness should be celebrated because all Blackness is outside of white society’s full acceptance. He argues that Houston was emblematic of these larger frustrations.

In her mid-career performances, Houston code switched, adopting the mannerisms of white-accepted pop: Her voice became more affected and less everywoman. But once she reached fame in 1990, she began to again present as more Black. In her 1994 speech to accept the Sammy Davis Jr. Entertainer of the Year Award, Houston uplifted Sammy Davis Jr., her Black audience, and her parents. Abdurraqib suggests that only by successfully code switching at the beginning of her career could Houston have gained the fame and appreciation to re-center her Blackness.

Abdurraqib considers Black people’s relationship to space.

1.  He does not love the moon as much as poets do, or as his enslaved ancestors would have. Instead, he lies about recognizing constellations to impress a companion, who then laughs and points out the Big Dipper.

2.  Considering his and his friends’ reactions to Michael Jackson’s death, Abdurraqib points out how little the moonwalk—the dance move Jackson made famous—has to do with the moon. He reflects on a moment in 1991, when his mom described Jackson—whose skin was altered by the de-pigmenting condition vitiligo and plastic surgery—as looking like a ghost.

3.  The moonwalk’s first film appearance was in the 1943 movie Cabin in the Sky, performed by Bill Bailey. Unlike Jackson, Bailey uses it to end his performances.

4.  The 1960s and 1970s girl group Labelle fused disco and the space craze in their futuristic costuming. Abdurraqib keeps on his desk a picture of the group he found in an antique shop. Their songs reflect the possibility Black people feel when thinking about space.

5.  Billy Dee Williams’s importance as a Black man in space in the Star Wars films was revolutionary. Abdurraqib connects Williams’s role to the science fiction of Octavia Butler and the genre of Afrofuturism. Williams allowed Abdurraqib and his friends to imagine a future where Blackness is cool.

6.  In a direct address, Abdurraqib reluctantly admits imagining that Chewbacca was Black. A friend’s dad was enraged that white filmmakers made what seemed to him a Black-coded character into a literal beast. While Abdurraqib hesitates to agree with that interpretation, he is frustrated that similar Black concerns were ignored and dismissed.

7.  Abdurraqib compares the deaths of Trayvon Martin and astronaut Michael P. Anderson. Many people argued about whether Trayvon Martin—a child—deserved to die. Abdurraqib considers contrasting media images of Martin, focusing on one of an even younger Trayvon in a replica NASA uniform. In contrast, Anderson’s death in the Columbia space shuttle explosion positioned him as an undisputed hero. Abdurraqib hates the desire to prove that someone did or did not deserve to die.

8.  Abdurraqib analyzes the Afrofuturist novels of Octavia Butler to explore how she celebrates Blackness and survival: Often, her characters’ Blackness is the reason for their survival, not a flaw or impediment.

Experimental jazz composer Sun Ra claimed to have gone to Saturn. The factual veracity of Sun Ra’s ideas doesn’t interest Abdurraqib, who focuses instead on their mythology and hope. He contrasts the limited facts known of Sun Ra’s mundane but difficult life with the fantastical image he created. His outer space aesthetic reflects the hope Black people have for the future.