"Who Dat" Derives & Survives from Black Minstrel & Burlesque. Certainly racist by today's standards, the poster above advertises a musical presented back in 1898.
The first time I ever heard the “Who Dat” phrase, I was a graduate student at Tulane University in 1961. It came bellowing at me as a song phrase from a trio of French Quarter street singers and tap dancers who called themselves “Skeet, Pete, and Repeat.”
“Who dat be sayin’ … ‘Who Dat?’ … when I say … ‘Who Dat?’ … Who dat be … the question … of em all?” On the face of things, Skeet, Pete, and Repeat appeared for post-performance tips before their all white street crowds of that era as the very embodiment of Uncle Tomism, making fun of their own statures as men and human beings for the sake of getting money from an audience who craved demeaning affirmation of their bogus superiority over blacks.
Because of my work as an activist on black voter registration in 1964, and my natural affinity for jazz all along, I got to know a number of black families in New Orleans back in the early 1960s in ways that most whites did not experience during that period. It became a time of great joy, mighty sadness, and ultimately, of important awakening for me. The “who dat” phrase was little more than a small part of it, but it bore a deeper significance, one that Skeet, Pete, and Repeat “dug” a whole lot better than the politically correct white scholars who cried out against it at the time as the docile language of the old Uncle Tom, yielding post-Civil War, “spooked by the KKK” black male culture.
I hope I can give you the picture of what Skeet, Pete, and Repeat did with that little phrase on the streets, one they often used in performance as the wrap-up number on the last set of the evening at the Dixieland {Jazz) Hall on Bourbon Street. Allow me to try and summarize the view, even if I do know in advance that my words will fail in adequacy. It’s important for you to know what stirred me from the visual side to talk with the guys about it – and important to understanding what the fellows really felt they were doing with “who dat” in that routine.
Here’s the picture:
Skeet, Pete, and Repeal all dressed in garish looking, zoot-suit fitting suits with formal shirts and ties. All three men tap danced extremely well. They would all take stage (or outside on Bourbon Street in earshot of the music) in a line, tap dancing up a storm to “When the Saints Go Marching In.” They would all be smiling to the point of sheer deferential obsequiousness into the faces of their usually older white tourist audiences. As the song neared its end, Pete would start dancing in a rotating circular motion between Skeet and Repeat as the latter two dancers each placed an index finger on the top of their partner’s head as though he were a spinning top. The touch of those fingers on the head would always produce a dreamy look of abject stupidity on Pete’s face, one that invited the laughter of those people who needed help in feeling smarter by the sight of someone portraying himself as really so much dumber.
Then came the finale of the act and my introduction to who dat. The guys all returned to a line facing the audience and sang out in smiling harmonic unison as they continued to stomp-dance hard:
“Who dat be sayin’ … ‘Who Dat?’ … when I say … ‘Who Dat?’ … Who dat be … the question … of em all?”
“I said now, who dat be sayin’ … ‘Who Dat?’ … when I say … ‘Who Dat?’ … Who dat be? … It jus’ be us … that’s all!”
As I got to know Skeet, Pete, and Repeat a little bit, I had to activate my 23-year old brain and ask them one evening backstage at Dixieland Hall. “How can you guys do this routine night after night, putting yourselves down in front of white people when you’ve all got enough talent to blow them away without all this Uncle Tom stuff?”
“You don’t get it because you’re white too, young man,” Pete told me. “When we say ‘who dat’ to all them white people, no matter how we be sayin’ it, we really be sayin’, ‘you better be ready to come up with an answer to that question, folks, because we all of us here, men and people too – and we ain’t goin’ away. – Who dat? – Dat be us!'”
Who dat’s gone mainstream now, but the question is still out there to be answered by each us about ourselves on all matters, large and small, and about nobody else. We all have to sink or swim on the heels of what we each do, and fail to do, with our own lives.
And guess what? This weekend, millions of us will be frittering away our time as answers to the question about who dat be watchin’ the Super Bowl on Sunday.
Who dat? – Dat be us.
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