My roommate Max told me about this webcomic over at the Top Shelf website called Cakewalk and it’s… unusual, to say the least. Go there and read the whole thing first. It’s not that long. Then come back here.

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Read it? Good.

Blackface obviously has a long, long history in the world of entertainment, as anyone who saw the Spike Lee movie Bamboozled knows. But here, creators Rachel Bormann and Nate Powell recontextualize it in the person of an innocent, yet clearly ignorant, pre-teen white girl in a tiny Midwestern town. What I found fascinating about this story is all the things that go unsaid, most importantly: why does Sara identify so strongly with a semi-fictitious, middle-aged black character like Aunt Jemima?

This was more than just a chance to play dress-up on Halloween for Sara; the final two pages make it plain that she really wants to be a black person, if only for a day – but precious little in the rest of the story offers anything in the way of a motive. That she is surrounded by people with racist attitudes (including her parents) doesn’t appear to offend her sense of morals; indeed, she comes across as fairly amoral throughtout the story. Dressing in blackface is something she does because she feels she can, and should do, in order to look like Aunt Jemima, so she does. Morality never enters into the picture for her.

I think it comes down to a common theme throughout American cultural history: white people like appropriating the characteristics of blacks and other minorities, and may even emulate those that appear in pop culture, from Bruce Lee to Michael Jordan to Jennifer Lopez to Beyonce – but actual, non-celebrity black people are for the most part kept out of arms reach, deliberately so in many cases (such as when Sara talks about her parents making her lock her car door when they drive through a black neighborhood).

Sara’s not around black people much, and when she is, it’s at a distance and detached from normal social interaction. When she passes Angela in the hallway (I’m assuming Angela is supposed to be black; the way Powell renders her doesn’t make it as clear as it should be), she feels something she cannot put a name to which might well be shame, but the feeling quickly passes. Clearly Angela is not part of Sara’s circle of friends; one wonders how different this tale would be if she were. Unfortunately, we don’t linger long enough on Angela to see how she feels about Sara’s costume, so we can only speculate. I would imagne that a black family in a predominantly white neighborhood would be conscious of race daily. One wonders if Angela tells her parents what she saw in school that day. One wonders what, if anything, her parents would do if she does.

And the one person who objects enough to Sara’s costume to take action, Mrs. Trankstill, doesn’t take the time to explain to her why what she’s done is wrong. It’s more important to squelch the embarrassing situation before it gets out of hand than it is to point out the error of the child’s ways – and sadly, that too, is far too often the case in many adult-child situations where the child does something out of ignorance.

Bormann writes this in a way that engages the reader’s imagination. Not everything is spelled out; she trusts the reader to fill in the blanks and allows for speculation, and it’s very much “show-don’t-tell,” which is quite satisfying. Powell, an Ignatz winner and Eisner nominee this year for his graphic novel Swallow Me Whole, gets the job done art-wise (except for the part about Angela). I like his use of hatching and cross-hatching.

Cakewalk is a gutsy attempt to depict the insidiousness of institutionalized racism in everday modern society, and it leaves me wondering what kind of person Sara will eventually grow up to be.