‘Blackface’ costumes offensive, not funny
If anyone thinks it fun to wear blackface at a Halloween party and post pictures of it to social media, they might think again and educate themselves about the legacy of racism behind the makeup.
And if anyone poses for photos with revelers in blackface, they might pause to consider the offensive image being projected about African Americans.
Bess Williams, a Texarkana resident who is both African American and Native American, said blackface’s message is unequivocal.
“The message that people of color see when a white person dons blackface is nothing short of seeing the KKK in person. Wearing blackface sends an instant message to me that the perpetrator is blatantly throwing the KKK right there ‘in your face,’ ” Williams said.
“White people who decide to wear blackface aren’t doing anything but maintaining a racist legacy of dehumanizing and continually oppressing black Americans and then trying to excuse it through denial or pure ignorance.”
About this time three years ago, Williams was in news stories and on the frontline of protests in Blevins, Arkansas, when a school board member there was photographed in blackface at a Halloween party.
Blackface is rooted in demeaning caricatures that treated African Americans as less than human through racial stereotypes meant to dehumanize them and perpet
uate white supremacist, racist thinking. Grotesquely exaggerated features include large lips, goofy grins and jet black skin. They’re the type of hackneyed, disrespectful images we might find in old advertisements, product packaging or even sheet music.
Almost universally, blackface now is considered offensive.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam are two examples of politicians whose past use of blackface resurfaced and brought stinging criticism, and now that it’s Halloween week, photos of people wearing blackface are making the rounds, even in 2019, even in Texarkana.
“Blackface is degrading and has no place in a civilized society nor does it need to show its ugly head at holiday functions such as Halloween. This is what got Megan Kelly in trouble, claiming that she had never been taught that it was wrong to wear blackface on Halloween,” Williams said.
This past weekend, photos of local people in blackface surfaced on social media with party-goers celebrating Halloween “fun.”
It is difficult to know who guests are at a Halloween party and costumes make them easy to crash. A Google search for “what to do if someone shows up to your Halloween party in blackface” yielded only articles on why blackface is offensive, no salient advice.
“When it is worn — and I have recently seen people in Texarkana on Facebook in blackface — don’t tell black people to not be ‘offended.’ Because it is through their actions that I imagine the story of their friends, family, and their beliefs. Blackface speaks volumes and it is those actions to us that depict privilege and dominance,” Williams said.
Minstrel shows of the mid-19th Century onward included actors in blackface portraying African Americans as fearful, slothful, hypersexual and ignorant. They were portrayed as stupid and happy-go-lucky. The point was to ridicule an entire race of people. The use of blackface was perpetrated by white entertainers like Al Jolson and in movies like the D.W. Griffith version of “The Birth of a Nation,” a movie that helped stoke white racial paranoia and fired up Ku Klux Klan involvement.
Dr. Douglas Julien, associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, said putting blackface photos on social media highlights a lesson about how you can’t take it back if you do so.
“It’s a fine lesson for all students and people to learn, that you need to be judicious,” he said.
In addition, Julien said people must still be educated on why blackface is a really, really bad idea. The fallback reason people often give is that they didn’t know any better in the past.
“It indexes two things. One is, I think, it indexes ignorance … there is that sort of appeal in saying, ‘Well, I didn’t know any better,’” Julien said. He believes that’s truthful, to a degree. “I think in some ways it’s not that they didn’t necessarily know about it, they really didn’t think about what it is and they don’t know the history of blackface.”
Almost always in a costume like this, the idea is not to ridicule a single person, but rather to mock an entire race. After all, he said, people aren’t putting on blackface to be Martin Luther King Jr.
“It’s a situation of power and control that stems out of the antebellum South. That’s picked up by white performers in order to ridicule and dehumanize black folk and to justify Jim Crow segregation, rationalize violence and all of those things — that whether the white person who’s putting on blackface knows it or not, they themselves may be ignorant,” Julien said.
For those who have felt the sting of such treatment, however, they know.
Julien said it’s almost always false when people claim they didn’t want to make fun of others. It’s derision, although people may not think of it as racial derision.
“But it’s stereotyping at a very core level,” Julien said.
Julien, a scholar in African literature, recalled a line by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, who wrote that the whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify.
Julien noted the reason why people wore blackface was comedy, using exaggerations and stereotypes that mocked and ridiculed not a single black person but the entire race.
This exaggerated imagery appeared in more than minstrel shows. The stereotypes also made their way to images for products like Uncle Ben’s Rice and Aunt Jemima syrup. “And all of the sort of old racist tropes of black folk with big smiles,” Julien said. In minstrel shows, there was the overextended mouth with white around it. The white was there for two reasons.
“One, it was to let you know that the person actually wasn’t black because God forbid that they would be,” Julien said. The white also heightened the idea of a “wide, smiling ignorance” that became associated with something like watermelon.
But these images from the past keep returning in blackface now. It’s a great example of white privilege,” Julien said.
“The idea is that you don’t have to know that it’s racist,” he said. “You don’t have to know that it’s stereotyping, you don’t have to feel any shame in it, that you don’t have to participate in race in the same way that black folk or Asian folk or others participate in it.”
Language only codifies it. Julien cited the examples of a white lie (the good lie) and the black sheep (the bad one in a family). Such words are not necessarily racist, but they are connected to these issues of stereotypes seen in blackface.