[DCRM-L] Cataloging American songsters, and other racist material

[Bob Kosovsky]

Hi Erin,

It's a problem that I and many others have wrestled with for years. There's
no LCSH term for racist material - or even one that comes close.  And even
what you find is sometimes inappropriate.  Example:  portrayals of
performers in blackface.  We know that until the end the 19th century,
blackface performers were white.  Yet you'll often find the heading:  *African
Americans* $x *Songs and Music*.  I feel it's incorrect to apply this
heading to racist, demeaning or negative content.

What I've done in the past is have one heading for *African Americans* and
another heading for *Stereotypes (Social psychology)** $z **United States. *At
times I think I've added a third heading (which I can't recall at the
moment). Clumsy yes, but I've yet to find something better.

More recently (for this songster project), I've been able to use *Minstrel
music* $z *Texts *- both the subject and genre headings indicate that this
is work performed by people in blackface.  Those headings avoid the issue
of whether the content is problematic, perhaps leaving us to suggest that
*all* minstrel music is problematic (I believe it is, even if it's
instrumental music parodying or fantasizing about how African American
might have played - no texts needed).

When it gets to images, that's also something that makes me feel
uncomfortable.  Fortunately there's a heading *Blackface entertainers*. The
heading for Blackface itself provides a good number of scope notes
explaining the social context of blackface and minstrelsy.   Another
heading would appear to be *African Americans* $s *Caricatures and cartoons*.
I add the stereotype heading to that too.

[Excursis:  Having done a digital project involving over 1,000 pieces of
sheet music of the 1890s, I was always very puzzled why suddenly beginning
in 1895 there is an explosion of racists covers.  Then recently someone
suggested a possible explanation:  The Supreme Court's Dred Scott case
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott> was decided in 1896, so the
arguments would have occurred in 1895.  I've yet to hear a better
explanation.]


Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D. -- Librarian, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
Music & Recorded Sound Division
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts - Dorothy and Lewis B.
Cullman Center

40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023

www.nypl.org


On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:14 PM Erin Blake <erin.blake.folger at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This is a follow-up on Bob Kosovsky's description of the American
> songsters he's cataloging in the "Machine-press special collections"
> thread, where he wrote "if anyone doubts the racism rampant in the second
> half of the 19th century, one need not go further than a typical American
> songster."
>
> I'd love to learn more about how catalogers are surfacing racist content
> as a genre in special collections. Most of the resources I'm finding relate
> to archives or to subject headings, but the items I have in mind aren't
> technically "about race" they're simply "racist."
>
> With songsters, you can get pretty far in surfacing racist content by
> transcribing all the titles into the table of contents: researchers can
> search for well-known derogatory keywords in direct quotes. But I'd love to
> have a genre term that would convey something along the lines of  "655 _4
> $a Deeply disturbing racist material that would have been considered
> perfectly ordinary by most middle-class white Americans at the time" when
> the ostensible subject is simply "650_0 $a Country life."
>
> I'm particularly interested in how to bring racist content in prints and
> figurines to light, given that there's usually nothing to transcribe, so
> keyword searching for directly-quoted derogatory terms won't help. There
> are also times where the racist content is technically just a minor part of
> a generic "background" ... but I don't want to omit mentioning the
> background racism when summarizing the visual content in the 520. Not only
> is it currently a topic of great interest to researchers, but ignoring it
> would make me complicit in treating it as unremarkable.
>
> Thanks for any thoughts and ideas....
>
> Erin.
>
> ______________________
> Erin Blake, Ph.D.  |  Senior Cataloger  |  Folger Shakespeare Library  |
> 201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC, 20003  |  eblake at folger.edu  |
> www.folger.edu
> <https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/-t5RCjRgpBtArRXC7R7_2?domain=urldefense.com>
>   |  Pronouns: she/her/hers
>
>
>
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