I don’t know if Irving Berlin knew or felt that blackface was racist at the time, because The Jazz Singer wasn’t Irving Berlin’s first or last interaction with blackface and the larger minstrel tradition it arose from. People who faced discrimination themselves – antisemitism in the case – still engaged in racist things, like blackface. The contrasts of The Jazz Singer and the first use of “Blue Skies” are emblematic of so much of how early and golden age Hollywood dealt with race. And one of those people was the greatest American songwriter in history, Irving Berlin. The movie on its face has the same problems as most films of its era: it was made by white people for a white audience and carried with it the inherent racism of Hollywood and its time. Explicitly and textually it’s not racist…but that’s only because there are no black people in it aside from one bartender in the club car in the “Snow” scene. I’m not going to mine for outrage and call White Christmas a racist movie. White Christmas ties directly into Hollywood’s checkered history with blackface, minstrel shows and the complicated legacy of one of America’s greatest songwriters: Irving Berlin. White Christmas exemplifies the best of classic Hollywood…but it’s also an interesting sort of rosetta stone for some of the worst tendencies of Hollywood’s golden age when it came to race: that rather than be inclusive of in anyway interrogate America’s racism, they just ignore it completely even when the now-classic songs have racists history. The 1954 musical is a classic for a host of reasons: the sparkling dialogue, the incredible dances with Vera Ellen, the comedy of Danny Kaye, the fantastic costumes by Edith Head, and the indelible voices of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney. If you ask me what movie I put on first thing in December to get in the holiday spirit I’ll tell you right away that it’s White Christmas.
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