The morning after the VMAs, I had the morning shows on in the background as I got ready for work.  That was how I happened to have the distinct displeasure of starting off my morning with the image of Miley Cyrus strutting and twerking across the stage.  At the time, my reaction to her performance was filtered through two lenses: the fact that the morning shows reproduced only a limited view of her performance, and my own personal perspective as a white woman.  The segments reproduced on the morning shows did not include Ms. Cyrus’s interactions with her backup dancers, so even though, as a scholar of African American history and culture, I am familiar with the long history of whites’ “love and theft” of black culture (or their mistaken perception of black culture; Eric Lott’s phrase) I did not see her performance through a racial lens.  Thank goodness several other social/media critics did. (http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/jody-rosen-miley-cyrus-vmas-minstrel.html; http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/miley-and-minstrelsy-rosen-responds-to-critics.html; http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/if-miley-cyruss-twerking-is-racist-isnt-janis-joplins-singing-also-racist/279162/)

Why is it legitimate to liken Cyrus’s performance to blackface minstrelsy?  Because of her own comments indicating her attraction to what she called “hood music” and her claim that she feels a deep personal connection to Lil’ Kim.  To fully understand the connection, however, one has to understand the long and purposeful misrepresentation of black women in American history.  During slavery, one (of several) stereotypes assigned to black women was that they were oversexed.  The abuse a black woman suffered at the hands of her master, overseer, or any other man could thus be blamed on her rather than him.  The stereotype of the sexually aggressive woman was given a name: Jezebel, after the Bible’s Queen Jezebel, who, because she supposedly followed false gods and particularly because she dressed in finery and wore makeup, was branded a prostitute.  Long after slavery ended, the stereotype continued, and remains with us today (watch just about any mainstream hip hop video, many/most of which are produced by white corporate interests).  (For more on the Jezebel character, visit The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia here: http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel.htm.)  Ms. Cyrus’s hypersexualized performance and her treatment of her black backup dancers, joined with her professed connection to black culture (a version of black culture that, I would suggest, is highly selective and misunderstood), encourages a continuation of the association of black women with aggressive sexuality and promiscuousness. 

I found myself talking about Ms. Cyrus’s performance with my Harlem Renaissance class the other day.  Why?  And why is this relevant to a blog about Civil Rights?  Frederick Douglass and other black writers in the slavery era understood, when they produced their narratives, that the image of blacks in the popular (white) mind was interpreted through various racist assumptions.  Harlem Renaissance artists in the 1920s similarly understood this.   The public images that blacks tried to create for themselves often sought to correct the negative stereotypes because these writers and artists understood that so long as they were seen only through prejudiced white eyes, they would never be seen as intelligent contributors to American culture, nor would they be seen as deserving of the vote or skilled jobs that paid a living wage.  They understood that civil rights and a group’s representation in popular culture are intricately connected.  So long as we continue to represent African Americans through stereotypes that emphasize hypersexuality or athletic prowess (which presumably comes at the expense of intellectual pursuits), we maintain an atmosphere in which it continues to be difficult for African Americans to be seen as equal citizens, deserving of all of the rights and responsibilities granted to any other American citizen.