White Gloves and Blackface

Many iconic cartoon characters in the United States have a distinctly similar aesthetic trait in common, which is large white gloves. This facet seems innocuous, but examining the cultural zeitgeist of the era these figures emerged from, reveals a more poignant narrative surrounding racial bigotry.

Before delving further into this theme, it should be stated that myself and my colleagues in the field of art history and education do not think or suggest that these cartoon characters should be banned or physically revised. It is in no way an effort to shame or discourage those (myself included) who enjoy classic cartoons. As artists and educators, we are asking folks to be engaged in critical thinking and conscientious consumption of media forms. Discussing the racist origins of something so widely consumed and innocently enjoyed, is merely bringing up a symptom of systemic racism that is ingrained in our nation’s fabric. Cartoons have a role in this, and realizing it is important because it highlights the need for art, education and history to be reflective of damaging past and present ideologies. Those who are unaware or willfully choose to ignore and not learn from uncomfortable aspects of history are destined to repeat them.

When early cartoon motion pictures came to fruition, there was no color film, so characters were depicted in black and white. Physical features were rounded and simplified in order to make recreating them repeatedly for animation purposes less time consuming. This is known as “rubber hose and circle” aesthetics; and while this methodology made creating storyboards and animation cells easier, it also made it harder to see details like hands due to the grainy quality of film from that era. White gloves became a graphic solution that enabled viewers to differentiate a character’s hands and hand expressions from their darker bodies.

The white gloves did not originate out of thin air, however. Cinema studies educator, Nicholas Sammond notes, “Mickey Mouse isn’t like a minstrel; he is a minstrel.” This is especially obvious in the 1933 animated film, Mickey’s Mellerdrammer, where Mickey and his friends perform a minstrel show version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Mickey et al are portrayed wearing blackface as well as other stereotypical racist features including exaggerated lips and kinky, coiled hair. He also wears his signature white gloves.

Sammond’s book Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation provides ample examples that connect imagery, gestures and narratives from mainstream cartoons with live action minstrel shows from the early nineteenth century.

Minstrel shows were theatrical performances involving white actors wearing blackface makeup, which lampooned Black people as having garish qualities. This racially motivated form of entertainment was an effort to sustain white nationalist hegemony, and tamper abolitionist efforts. Performances involved a cast wearing dark makeup and white gloves, acting in a highly exaggerated and clownish manner, symbolizing how white supremacy typecasts Black individuals.

A way to ensure that illogically biased tropes and mindsets are not ingrained in our collective culture is to raise awareness by learning about visual culture and its role in proliferating certain distasteful ideologies. Having a subtle element of bygone Jim Crow times like white gloves in cartoons, reminds us that the arts are not immune to envisioning and upholding white supremacy.

As our progressive viewpoints evolve due to factors including honest and critical access to cultural history, we might be able to view these features as relics; reminders of a disturbing past that we have striven far from. Indeed, certain animators are taking responsibility for their genre’s role in racial profiling. Cultural critic Lauren Michele Jackson mentions examples of contemporary cartoons that challenge harmful minstrel tropes through pluralistic character design and an embrace of quirky physical and personality traits rather than a lampoon. She writes that: “unlike their predecessors (live-action and animated), whose fantasies about unruly, unproductive bodies were moored to racist mythology about an untamable black race, today’s cartoons are textured by a diverse cultural and formal reservoir that imagines new definitions, new possibilities for difference across color, shape, and sound.”

The ability to transform harmful stereotypes into empowering displays of diversity is a major reason why learning about uncomfortable history is beneficial for all of us to collectively thrive. The evolution of cartoons from their burlesque minstrel origins to a celebration of the marginalized, non-normative and diverse elements of humanity, indicates that culture is constantly in flux and that we are learning from our restrictive past by offering visions of a more open-ended present and future. Raising awareness about discrimination within history and culture, while exhibiting accounts and concepts of plurality and heterogeneity is not indoctrination, it is education.

We can keep the gloves on when it comes to cartoon character design, but when it comes to taking on bigotry and bias due to a white colonialist hegemony, the gloves must come off.