Al Jolson (L) and Al Jolson with Black Face (R). Jolson became one of America’s most celebrated entertainers by popularizing minstrel-style performances that mocked and appropriated Black culture—a legacy revisited in Jesse Jackson Jr.’s critique of racial exploitation in American politics (Public Domain Photos).
By Jesse Jackson Jr.
When my father was preparing to run for President of the United States in 1983, after registering tens of thousands of people in a southern voter registration crusade, he often shared privately and publicly a syndrome that he believed the American people were trapped in politically.
He called it the Al Jolson syndrome. Al Jolson who was born Asa Yoelson, Yiddish: אַסאַ יואלסאָן; May 26, 1886 – October 23, 1950), was a Lithuanian-born Jewish, American singer, actor and vaudevillian. Self-billed as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer,” Jolson was one of the United States’s most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1920s and the first openly Jewish man to become an entertainment star in the United States.
Music historian Larry Stempel said, “No one had heard anything quite like it before on Broadway.” Stephen Banfield wrote that Jolson’s style was “arguably the single most important factor in defining the modern musical.” Jolson has been referred to by modern critics as “the king of blackface performers.”
With his dynamic style of singing, he became widely successful by extracting traditionally African-American music and popularizing it for white American audiences who would be unwilling to listen to it when performed by Black artists.
In an essay written in 2000, music critic Ted Gioia remarked, “If blackface has its shameful poster boy, it is Al Jolson.”
My father put a twist on the legacy of Al Jolson when he critiqued its political significance. “Paint a problem black, then entertain white people with the problem, but at the end of the day, every so-called Black problem in America and solution is tied to a white person problem and solution, particularly if they were poor and in the working class.”
No matter how much Al Jolson entertained all-white audiences, at the end of the day, he had to wash the makeup off of his face and look at himself in the mirror, and there was the reality that he ultimately had to deal with: he was a white man.
Even carnivals during the Jim Crow era would place a Black face on a white man, who would sit or stand over a large pool of water, and if the target was hit correctly, the Black man would fall in the water, and everyone would laugh. The carnival lines for this activity were very long, and boy, did they have big fun. But once he got out of the water, he had to dry off his face and put his Black face back on, confronting the stark reality that white people were ultimately laughing at themselves.
Paint the problem “Black,” throw everything you can at it, and have big fun while hurting and laughing at yourself.
From as early as Barry Goldwater in the modern conservative movement, through Richard Nixon’s piano with its black and white keys, through Ronald Regan’s welfare queen, to Bill Clinton’s Sister Soulja moment, and his crime bill, through Al Gore‘s Willie Horton, to Joe Biden pardoning only his family and leaving millions of other families in felonization, to Donald Trump, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk and Russ Vought’s attack on diversity equity and inclusion (DEI). Their war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is ultimately going to destroy a lot of programs that have benefited all Americans, and mostly white Americans who have been the disproportionate beneficiary of these programs as well. Diversity, equity and inclusion benefited everyone.
In America, we are inextricably bound by a garment of mutuality: it is impossible to hurt somebody without hurting yourself.
With protests emerging around the country and opposition in state capitals throughout our nation, while some in the MAGA coalition have been chasing the racial bogeyman, they, in fact, have been chasing their own tails. Rabbit hunting can be fun until the rabbit has the gun.
Al Jolson became the “greatest entertainer in the world” by making fun of Black people. But behind the façade, he was a white Jewish Lithuanian immigrant who was welcomed in the United States due to the spread of fascism, antisemitism, Nazism and apartheid in the world. But it was “his racism” that tragically made him the greatest entertainer in the world.
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