Cake Walking, 2017

Cake Walking, 2017

spray-paint and acrylics on canvas

61 x 78.7 inches

The minstrel shows were a highly dubious amusement in nineteenth-century New York. In fact, white actors played the role of superstitious, naive, childish, and goofy black people, much to the amusement of an equally white audience. Part of the hypocritical ritual was blackfacing, the white actor painted black. Some whites felt convinced of their genetic superiority by pseudoscience. 

The Cake Walk had been invented on large-scale plantations by black slaves to poke fun at white plantation owners. As part of the minstrel show, the Cakewalk was also put on stage. The white audience seemed not to be aware that they themselves were actually the targets of that parody. 

During the Draft Riots, there were massive racial attacks against the black population of New York. In fact, the latter was the scapegoat, in part because politicians justified the war as being against slavery, and blacks in New York were very unpopular among the working class. Eventually, they were all too often used as strikebreakers by factory owners. Moreover, although blacks fought in their own units, they were not subject to conscription, as they were not considered regular citizens. This arrangement, too, fed the reluctance of white immigrants who did not have the financial means to buy their way out of conscription.

Category: