Are white coaches awake to our indifference about ‘blackface minstrelsy’, asks Fenella Trevillion
Have you heard people say, ‘racism was not a thing for me growing up, there were very few black people at our school and none in my neighbourhood’? Then, in almost the same breath say, ‘and yes, I watched The Black and White Minstrel Show on television every Saturday night’. Next, a pause, a taking in of breath – race panic.
Let’s hope that after George Floyd’s murder in the US, people have a greater understanding of racism and its systemic nature.
It’s curious though, despite this, there’s a seeming indifference to ‘blackface minstrelsy’. Grandy (2019) says “it was part of British cultural tradition and history, not race”, pointing out that for 20 years, millions of British people (16.5 million in 1963) spent their Saturday nights watching the Black and White Minstrel Show. Some are probably white coaches today. How is it, when examining our racist behaviour, that the issue of blackface seems often to have been passed over?
On asking (white) coaches about black and white minstrelsy, some admit to discomfort, yet none – including myself, until recently – had interrogated that experience. It wasn’t until seeing actor David Harewood OBE’s documentary on blackface that I did so. I learned that Harewood had a psychotic breakdown after leaving drama school, in part due to blackface minstrelsy. This crisis centred on his view of his identity, one shaped and “contaminated by the minstrels”.
For me, this narrative caused a shocking awakening of the racist nature of this art form and a clarion call to re-examine my own racism in this respect.
The film explored the roots of blackface minstrelsy in colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and as a deeply embedded racist art form. For instance, the West African banjo was the classic accompaniment used by slaves singing about their experiences of life, songs that were often filled with pain. That form was appropriated and misshaped into a light music hall genre with joyful singing and dancing; all by white people with painted black faces. They portrayed demeaning stereotypical black characters with happy, carefree stances.
T D Rice, a white man, is known as “the father of minstrelsy” (NMAAHC). He popularised the show in the northern states of America where few had seen a black person, implanting negative images in the minds of white people, and maintaining control of this critical narrative.
Blackface minstrelsy was brought to London’s west end in the 1830s, in part, as Harewood explains, because it commanded the highest audiences but also, to meet Rice’s ulterior motive, of influencing against any notions of equality that were circulating around the time of abolition of slavery.
Harewood’s documentary highlights how Rice used this art form to entertain, while impressing on white English people his view that black people were naturally inferior and primitive. He wanted to disavow the English of any other view and, as in north America, these stereotypes of black people were fed into the public mind in an insidious way. This art form became extremely popular and by the late 1800s was street entertainment seen by old and young of all classes. It was further popularised through movies and television and performed by Hollywood stars such as Fred Astaire and Judy Garland.
All this negatively influenced generations of white people, many of whom had not seen black people until the arrival of the Windrush generation in 1948. The racist response to black people’s arrival in the UK at that time has been well documented. From 1958 until 1978 blackface minstrelsy described in the documentary by historian, David Olusoga, as “racism made into an art form”, was seen both by black and white people. The white majority audience clearly loved it. For black people such as Harewood, it was those negative stereotypes of blackness that contributed to a crisis of identity. We can assume it had a similarly devastating effect on other black British people too.
Coaching and identity
As coaches, working with people on their identities is core business, and this piece of deeply racist historical culture may assist our understanding of it. Today there’s little mention of black and white minstrelsy, but its erasure has left a marker, and for some, this is a challenging scar.
Some white people may see it as merely ‘harmless fun’; where for some others the marker may be a sensation, a sense of discomfort with unknown origins. This is in contrast to many black people’s experience – Harewood described it as “venomous”.
More than 86% of coaches, in 79 countries, identify as white (Future Trends in Coaching 2021), which suggests that we white coaches have a responsibility to continually educate ourselves, and specifically in this respect, to consider the visual portrayal of black and brown people through popular culture and through the colonialist history taught in schools (at least until recently). Cognisance of the impact of this historical trauma lie in many people’s backgrounds, often playing out in the workplace and in daily lives.
An embodied racial justice stance, not just a new lens
Our coaching capability comes in part from our own curiosity, learning and being present with whom and what we’re experiencing, seeing, and feeling. Preparation for any session requires contemplation of the uniqueness of each situation, each person or each team. It’s not about putting on a different lens for each occasion. An embodied racial justice stance comes from a profound ongoing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and systemic understanding of our encounters and the changes necessary at all levels.
As coaches we sign up to a code of ethics such as the Global Code of Ethics (2023) and among other things, to having an awareness of our unconscious biases and ‘systemic injustice’. How might we do that?
Some ways for me, have been:
- Continual exploration and curiosity about the historical context and power of whiteness and the construct of racism.
- An on-going self-examination and reflection on my own whiteness and attempting to continually disrupt it.
- Starting with contracting, bringing openness and a lightness about getting it wrong sometimes; always celebrating difference and holding a generative feel to the sessions.
- Accepting the client’s (or supervisee’s) experience of the world and holding an attitude of curiosity during the encounter.
- Encouraging in the client a stance of empowerment and connection with sense of belonging to their own history, ancestors and culture and, simultaneously exploring how that touches into their daily experience.
- Through supervision using a framework of criticality.
- Having a diverse ecosystem, not an echo chamber, that supports me.
- An awareness of the difference between empathy (‘feeling in’ to another) and compassion (‘feeling for’ another) and one of the potential personal costs of emotional empathy and, the benefits, on many levels, of compassion.
Skilfulness, compassion, and hope
On returning to the jarring feelings in me when I heard a white person denying being racist due to growing up in a white world, then proceeding to talk about loving the racist art form blackface minstrelsy, I reflected on the question: had these been statements in supervision (or coaching), how might the supervisor (or coach), coming from a racial justice stance, respond capably and authentically?
Stepping in with reactive anger is all too easy at these moments. Anger with the other, projective anger through avoidance of our own racism, and overall dissonance, might be the unintentional result. This may be authentic yet, less than skilful.
Similarly, in work with a black or brown person who has just relayed their experience of racism, we commonly feel reactive anger and feel in with empathy; likewise authentic, possibly, less than skilful. One truth we all hold is that this work is complicated and challenging.
Capability and skilfulness come from deep understanding, reflection and cultivation of a generative space that yields compassion and kindness for all those in it.
As Joan Halifax says: compassion is “a key to reducing systemic oppression and nurturing a culture of respect, civility and belonging”.
Bringing skilfulness and compassion into that space will also bring hope, perhaps the keystone of coaching and supervision.
About the author
- Fenella Trevillion is an executive and career coach, supervisor, facilitator, and writer. She lives in Oxford, UK. She has 20 years’ leadership experience working in large, complex public sector organizations. She now facilitates, trains and supervises coaches and coaches people in the public and voluntary sectors. Her early life was spent in apartheid South Africa which provides the basis of her values. She brings a racial justice stance to her work, reinforced by a commitment to anti-oppression, social and climate justice. www.fenellatrevillionassociates.org
References
- C Grandy, How the Black and white minstrel show spent 20 years on the BBC, The British Academy, 2019: https://bit.ly/3MfSxL6
- J Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding freedom where fear and courage meet. Flatiron Books, 2019
- D Harewood, David Harewood on Blackface, BBC iplayer, 2023: https://bit.ly/3SdWhAP
- Global Code of Ethics, accessed October 2023: https://bit.ly/46Z8gWM
- NMAAHC, Blackface: The Birth of An America Stereotype, National Museum of African America History & Culture: https://bit.ly/46Lk5jF
- J Passmore, Future Trends in Coaching: Executive Report 2021, Henley Business School: https://bit.ly/3tGmcqm