Talk:Thomas D. Rice
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The other changes were great, but references are important, especially when establishing facts. - Reboot
- Well, maybe, but those were "it happened in history" type pages, not pages on Rice, which is what we would expect from External Links. I think of Ext-Links as providing more detail, but those just had his dates mixed in with a lot of other stuff. I remember some better pages on Rice from when I was working on blackface, maybe I can find them again. Best regards, Ortolan88
[edit] Date of birth
It is different from the one at Find-A-Grave. Lincher 12:43, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
- That doesn't worry me much. Find-A-Grave is not a very authoritative source. - Jmabel | Talk 04:47, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Questioning "opened the doors for black comedians" statement.
That may not be an exact quote, but my point is Rice was white, not black, so I'd like to see the claim that he did something at all positive for black people through his very racist acts (not just in current terms, but as the article says but then backpeddles on, in the terms of the times)! I have no expertise nor extensive enough knowledge to correct or even positively identify problems here so I ask that those who know more attend to this. Thank you. --Fitzhugh 04:54, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
I think it is intersting that I quickly learned by looking elsewhere that he WAS white, and that makes the earlier version of this article quite interesting: it seemed to go to great lengths to "paint" him in a positive light (pun not intended, but appropriate, if backward!) Why not just say the truth, as I added: his show WAS racist, he WAS white, he mocked blacks in a nasty manner, and as such deserves no "credit" for opening the doors to black actors. Perhaps historically his shows played a role in developing a desire to see black actors demean themselves instead of white actors mock them, but does that mean Rice deserves accolades for shattering racist barriers? Hell no. I don't claim to know all about this, but really, this relativism is as offensive as it is ignorant. --Fitzhugh 05:11, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
- You're right on that Rice's act was racist, as was minstrelsy in general. I think what that line was supposed to mean was that minstrelsy opened the door for black performers, not Rice specifically. He was one of the earliest blackface dancers, but it does seem a bit of a stretch to extend the argument of "minstrelsy opened the door to black performers" to "Rice opened the door to black performrers", so it's probably not a good idea to include that in the article. An interesting book to pick up for a primer on this is Mel Watkins's On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock. He traces black humor from slave times, into blackface comedy (which eventually did get taken over to a great extent by actual black comedians) on into Vaudeville, early films, and so on. It's a very good book, and it makes you realize just how profound the influence of black culture on American culture in general has been and continues to be. — Amcaja (talk) 05:40, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] "highly racist"
I think the following excerpt attempts to address an important issue but lacks sufficient depth to be effective:
"As a white man playing highly derogatory imitations of black men, Rice's brand of entertainment was highly racist, though not necessarily thought of as such at the time."
This quotation smacks of an indignant historian who is in a hurry to label Thomas Smith as a racist, but has not taken the time to provide sufficient support for the assertions that his imitations were "highly derogatory" or that the entertainment was indeed "highly racist". Both uses of the word "highly" seem superfluous, especially without any qualification as to what differentiates "derogatory" from "highly derogatory" and "racist" from "highly racist". Furthermore it does not acknowledge the fact that the concept of racism as our contemporary society knows it was poorly developed at the time, and it was not merely that Thomas Rice's contemporaries did not "necessarily [think] of [his imitations]" as racist, as if they had failed to see the commonalities between features of his imitations and those included within some notion of "racism" that existed at the time.
I think that the article would benefit from a more explicit description of the characterizations Thomas Rice presented in his shows at least in enough depth for a reader to conclude that they were "derogatory" and I think that both instances of the word "highly" should be removed because they are both arbitrary. cmac 06:44, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
- I agree. Is there evidence that blacks saw this as "highly derogatory imitations of black men"? This sounds like a centuries-later characterization. The fact that blacks embraced this form is odd if they found it hightly derogatory. Mattisse 22:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
