Full stop.
Wearing bronzer and foundation 7+ more shades darker than your natural skin tone, exaggerating and bastardizing certain physical features, dress, music, vernacular in a Sambo-like fashion, whether it’s for Halloween, your yearbook page, for an office party, or a “fun” prank—is Intolerable.
Full stop.
I, too, am including you if you are a person of color engaging in such activities or a person who chooses to “disguise” herself and live fraudulently as an African descendant.
Guess, what? Still Intolerable.
Full stop.
I cannot fathom how any person can view the “coolness,” the creativity, humor or lightheartedness in Blackface minstrelsy. The act of dressing up and producing images and materials for public consumption (think Prada’s Otto and Toto and Gucci’s balaclava sweater) that evoke the history of Blackface as racist white entertainment– is antiblack racism at its foundation.
But why is Blackface as antiblackness a hard concept for some to grasp?
A few days ago I participated in a conversation with friends and some friends of friends I just met. We discussed the recent controversy behind Virginia’s Gov. Ralph Northam’s yearbook page and the previous weekend’s SNL skit with comedian Kenan Thompson who played an elected state official that has to explain to a room full of other state officials the inappropriateness of appearing in Blackface. The punch line: Blackface wasn’t appropriate in the 1980s nor is it now.
We chuckled a bit and drew parallels to our own lives and experiences, sharing instances where we’ve heard about and/or witnessed Blackface.
Then things got real.
A couple of folks in the group acknowledged Blackface isn’t a good thing, however, struggled to see its connection to connotations of Black inferiority. These individuals saw such performances as creative, artistic expressions that should be taken within the context of each situation and should be considered nothing more serious than that.
Full stop.
To be clear—Blackface is not and will NEVER be cool nor should it ever be considered a type of creative, artistic expression or performance. Such portrayals, although made to look deliberately unrealistic, is a racist over-assessment (caricature) of skin color, hair, body shape, speech and movement, and is intended to dehumanize and denigrate.
Reflecting on that conversation, I am reminded that we, as a society, are so invested in and entrenched within white supremacy that those highly exploitative and exaggerated portrayals of Blackness and the Black body in the form of Blackface is seen simply as a tiny blip in America’s moral psyche and consciousness.
As such, the Black body is still seen as a commodity—to be “tried on,” appropriated, consumed, and then discarded when all the “fun” has been had by those who don’t understand how they perpetuate the myth of white supremacy and are guilty of the crudest racism.
So, as I mentioned to the folks participating in the conversation: if you understand that Blackface today is a reflection of the vestiges of antiblack relations of slavery AND you still choose to support, engage in or think Blackface is “cool”—then you are complicit in the continual negative treatment and devaluation of African descendants’ lives and humanity.
For that, we can’t be friends….
