Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War opens with an essay on Harry Belafonte. Describing the Civil Rights marches, Sharlet paraphrases Belafonte:
After that day in Montgomery, Klansmen murdered a mother of five who was driving back to Selma. “After every great victory, a great murder.”Sharlet:
Then it clicks. The code. The murder is the blackface. It’s the cork. It’s the minstrel show, the act replayed, second time perverse. (p. 31)I think Sharlet’s right to link the murders to blackface. It seems to me that blackface is a dramatization of the desire to obliterate. Under the black skin there is no Black person; there’s a White one.
That’s the Great Replacement in the white supremacist fever-dream.
Sharlet, Jeff, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, New York, Norton, 2023
