Dear father,

Yesterday, I went to see The Jazz Singer with George and Paul after our Scouts dinner. I very much enjoyed the movie, but I was really surprised when Paul told me that Al Jolson, the leading actor, was a Jew! I really couldn’t tell, though he did play a mighty convincing Negro! Tomorrow, we are having a ritual campfire, and I’ll finally get to learn how to use a bow and arrow! Please let mom know that I miss her, and I am hoping to see you two again come Monday.

Much love,
Eddie

Date: October, 1927

Questions:
1. Michael Rogin claims that blackface partly allowed for the merging of ethnic Jewishness with racial Whiteness, by exploiting Black racial Otherness. His argument invokes elements of Matthew Jacobson’s argument about the “whitening” of ethnic immigrants. Considering the history of Native American oppression in tandem with post-Civil War immigration history, how did the dialectic of “native” Self and “foreign” Other come to not only support the construction of America as white, but also the construction of other racial groups as foreign? How does our understanding of a specific case of racism (1920’s blackface) change when put into dialogue with a larger comparative history of racial oppression?
2. Several of our readings mention a couple irreconcilable tensions within American identity—namely, the “Black problem” and the “Indian problem.” Some antiracist activists and scholars are now calling for a reconceptualization of “whiteness” as the primary obstacle to racial justice—to ask people with white privilege the same question that met Du Bois so many years ago: “How does it feel to be a problem?” How might problematizing the category of whiteness work to resist oppression? What are some issues that might come from such a move?