Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.

By W.T. Lhamon, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 269 pages, $24.95 (paper)

The story of blackface minstrelsy is a quite familiar one. In general, historians and cultural critics view blackface as a form of popular culture that reinforced pernicious racial stereotypes, legitimated racial subjugation, and permitted whites to openly mock and dehumanize African Americans. Blackface, so the story goes, constructed blackness and black Americans as strange forms of "otherness" that could never be accorded respect and equality. One of the most often repeated stories claims that Thomas D. Rice created blackface minstrelsy after watching a physically disabled slave in tattered clothing engage in song and dance. This had been the widely accepted and largely undisputed view until now. In a rather provocative and wholly original book, W.T. Lhamon Jr. challenges the longstanding myths, narratives, and …