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Drag, Blackface and the Catholic League’s Perpetual Victimhood

Drag, Blackface and the Catholic League’s Perpetual Victimhood

Last updated on: February 9, 2019 at 3:50 pm by Mary Pezzulo

Drag, Blackface and the Catholic League’s Perpetual Victimhood 2019-02-09T15:50:19-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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As for their “giving to charity,” a quick look at their website shows that the Sisters do give many grants to “progressive grassroots projects that promote wellness, joy, tolerance, and diversity within our communities.” Some of those grassroots projects are surely not the Catholic League’s cup of tea, but I see several local charities working with the homeless on their list of recent beneficiaries. Haircuts for the “unhoused,” a “burrito roll” to bring lunches to poor people, safe places for them to sleep, all at the local level– that sounds like subsidiarity to me, and that’s something I as a Catholic can get behind. So it’s a little disingenuous to say “those who defend this group say the Sisters give to charity” as if you doubt the veracity of the claim that they give to charity. They actually do give thousands of dollars to charity. That’s what the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are. They are an organization that dresses in drag parodies of nun costumes, and they raise money for local charities.

Men who (I presume) aren’t Catholic dressing up in parody nun costumes, isn’t the same as as white person dressing up to mock a black person, because, as I’ve already mentioned, “nun” isn’t a race. Nuns can be of any race. They can come from just about any race, culture or socioeconomic bracket, and they can have any number of diverse cultural experiences they may not have in common with any other nun. You could probably find nuns who thought the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were side-splittingly hilarious or just harmless.

We already know the answer. It would object. But on what basis? It would say blacks were slaves and therefore nothing that offends them can be tolerated. But not all blacks were slaves. In fact, some blacks owned black slaves in the U.S. and in Africa. Moreover, some Catholics were slaves, including St. Patrick.

This can get complicated. If only the New York Times would say so. Then it might adopt a principled stand for everyone, instead of protecting some while offending others.

“Catholic” isn’t a race either, Bill. This is going to astound you, but Catholicism transcends race and a lot of Black people are Catholic. Some are even Canonized saints. Some black people who were slaves, are canonized saints, in point of fact. So that Saint Patrick business is one of Bill Donohue’s signature non sequiturs.

The reasons it’s wrong to wear blackface is NOT because “blacks were slaves and therefore nothing that offends them can be tolerated,” for the record. Donohue is right that not only Black people have been slaves. Most every society in history has had slaves, and while it’s always been wrong, the conditions surrounding the slavery aren’t necessarily identical, from one society to the next.

The race-based chattel slavery of the American South was a particularly hideous and abusive, dehumanizing practice– far more than what Saint Patrick endured. That particular type of slavery was not inflicted on Irish immigrants or indentured servants from England, only on people who had at least one drop of African blood. And that slave labor was used to make the United States an economic force to be reckoned with globally; the US got rich through the uncompensated labor of human persons whom the law regarded as livestock. The actual people working to make us rich, didn’t get to share in that wealth. When they were emancipated, they didn’t get recompense for what had been done to them. They didn’t get a cut of the profits they’d created. They were expected to fend for themselves, in the very communities were they’d up until recently been considered property– and almost immediately after, laws were put into place to make sure that they never prospered or were treated equally to whites. Those laws have only been repealed comparatively recently in our history. Their effects are still being felt in our culture, just about anywhere you could look.

While all this was going on, starting in the 19th century, America was developing the art form known as the Minstrel Show. This was a musical revue put on by white people in blackface– that is, in exaggerated makeup to make them look like caricatures of African-Americans. They put on shows that portrayed Black people as silly, ignorant, decadent and lazy; and, perhaps most offensively, as happy. Working on plantations in the South was presented to Americans all over the country as a fun, easy job that silly African-Americans carried out while singing and eating watermelons and cracking jokes all the day long. Minstrel shows were popular in America for a very long time, and they’ve only fallen completely out of favor comparatively recently. As the tradition of Minstrel shows declined, the negative stereotypes and historical lies they perpetuated, played by white people in blackface or sometimes by black people in and out of blackface, continued appearing in American comedy long afterward. And whatever a white person has in mind, if he puts makeup on to try to look like a Black person, he’s going to look like he’s in Minstrel blackface. It’s too much a part of our culture now for blackface to evoke anything else. Expecting people to not think of that history when they see a white man in blackface is like expecting people to not think of Hitler or Charlie Chaplin when they see a certain type of mustache.

There’s really no comparison, in our culture, between blackface and people who aren’t nuns dressing up as parody nuns. Yes, Catholics have been persecuted at times in America, but not like that. Nuns in general weren’t forcibly brought to America as part of race-based chattel slavery. Nuns in America didn’t have their legal personhood taken away for economic gain because they were nuns. They didn’t have their names, cultures and religious practice forcible stripped from them to dehumanize them. There wasn’t an entire popular art form developed to make jokes at the expense of nuns and convince everyone that nuns deserved and enjoyed their dehumanization. Sure, they’ve been caricatured, but not like that.

The drag nun costumes of Charles Busch and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence may not be unproblematic, but they simply aren’t comparable to blackface. The mere fact that he thought this comparison up shows that Bill Donohue is uneducated on his own country’s history. And it’s very a very bad witness for Catholics, who are called to always seek solidarity with those suffering injustice and to bear it with as much dignity as possible when we ourselves are victims of injustice, to carry on in this way in public.

Donohue needs to grow up.

(image via Pixabay)

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