FaceApp’s ‘blackface’ filters raising fresh controversy
FACEAPP is an iPhone application that lets users apply filters to selfies that make their faces look older, younger, “hotter” and, for a brief time this week, blacker.
Also, more Caucasian, Asian or Indian.
How fun! Not really. FaceApp offered disturbing evidence that blackface was back. FaceApp was the clearest proof in some time that blackface never really left.
It was obvious enough – except, apparently, to FaceApp’s executives – to recognise that slapping slanted eyes on a user’s face and calling it Asian, or large lips on the same face and calling it black, was racist. Almost everyone who tweeted about the feature did so to complain about it, or at least to mock it, and the feature disappeared less than 24 hours after it surfaced.
More interesting than the fact that people complained was who complained, and how. Many of the people who were outwardly angry about the filters were white. But this was no feel-good tale of sensitivity and solidarity. To the contrary, many of those who denounced FaceApp are all too happy to play with racial tropes online. They just don’t recognise it.
Thankfully, it’s a rare inperson performance today that features a white actor made up as a minstrel. But what some call “digital blackface” is all too common on the Internet. — Washington Post