John Berryman has been criticized for his employment of white performance of blackface minstrelsy\u27s conventions and dialect in 77 Dream Songs because of the complex history of this tradition of blackface\u27s problematic performance of racial fantasy and because of Berryman\u27s designation as a white, confessional poet. However, when one observes the history of this tradition of minstrelsy, its initial reception, its transcodification into the white American racial ideology, and subsequent scholarly analyses of its implications, it is evident that Berryman creates an anti-model of minstrelsy which consequently becomes a minstrelsy of whiteness. Through this anti-model, which shifts the public gaze from blackness to whiteness, Berryman deconstructs each, eliminating the justification for unequal political power based on the faulty ideology of differenc
