Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask

Blackface minstrelsy, the nineteenth-century performance practice in which ideas and images of blackness were constructed and theatricalized by and for whites, continues to permeate contemporary popular music and its audience. Harriet J. Manning argues that this legacy is nowhere more evident than with Michael Jackson in whom minstrelsy’s gestures and tropes are embedded.

During the nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy held together a multitude of meanings and when black entertainers too...