Behind the anatomical measurements lay the assumption that the body was a legible text, with various keys or languages available for reading its symbolic codes…Although scientists debated which particular anatomical features carried racial meanings (skin, facial angle, pelvis, skull, brain mass, genitalia), they theory that anatomy predicted intelligence and behavior remained remarkably constant. As Nancy Stepan and Sander Gilman have noted, “The concepts within racial science were so congruent with social and political life (with power relations, that is) as to be virtually uncontested from inside the mainstream of science” (23 qtcl)

Supported by the cultural authority of an ostensibly objective scientific method, these readings of the body became a powerful instrument for those seeking to justify the economic and political disenfranchisement of various racial groups within systems of slavery and colonialism. As Barbara Fields has noted, however, “Try as they would, the scientific racists of the past failed to discover any objective criterion upon which to classify people; to their chagrin, every criterion they tried varied more within so-called races than between them.” Although the methods of science were considered to be outside the political and economic realm, in fact, as we know, these anatomical investigations, however professedly innocent their intentions, were driven by racial ideologies already firmly in place (23 qtcl)

A 1909 article about Lubin referred to these films as “startlingly realistic,” demonstrating the powerful ideological effects of these images. In an increasingly racially segregated culture, these cartoon images circulated among white audiences much more easily than did the actual bodies of those identified as “black.” Such images, in fact, served to justify segregation by depicting and reinforcing images of black bodies as infantile, savagelike, and laughable. Moreover, the very genre of all-black films tended to reinforce and naturalize the spatial segregation of “black” and “white” bodies. (49 QtCL)

Blackface was transformed from theatrical spectacle, then, to supposedly naturalistic makeup. The actor and the film did everything possible to make audiences forget that they were matching a racial impersonation. Maintaining and disrupting the fiction of blackness became the subject of white actress Norma Talmadge’s reminiscence about making The Octoroon.

As a form of protest against a director’s decision:

We [white actresses] got together in a corner and deliberately decided to do everything in our power to be thrown out of the picture. … So the three of us blackened only our faces and the front parts of our necks, and as the auction block revolved the camera registered the backs of our necks snow-white. Needless to say, we were immediately dragged off the set, bawled out in very inelegant lanugage, and sent home that day with no pay checks.

Talmadge’s prank reveals how important a naturalistic use of blackface was to the film and how ineffective it supposedly became when the audience could recognize the white body beneath it. In effect, where minstrel performers had used blackface to produce exaggerated and comic stereotypes of African Americans, the goal of many white movie actors in blackface was to “pass,” to act “black” in a mode believable to white audiences. The seeming authenticity of blackface performance on film depended on white audiences’ and actor’s assumption that race was a transparent visual sign. The naturalization of blackface on film was significantly related to the increasingly naturalized structures of racial segregation within American culture at large. (64 QtCL)