Why is blackface wrong

Read more: Dear white people, wake up: Canada is racist. The denial of Canadian blackface is not surprising. It is part and parcel of the ways that Canadian antiblackness attempts to erase the fact of blackness in Canada. This erasure results in the general ignorance and denial around Canadian slavery and its brutality.

Suggesting that Canadian blackface is not a problem is to perpetuate the myth that Canada does not have historical and ongoing issues with racism. An obvious problem with blackface is its representational violence — the way in which it openly ridicules Black people. In Blackface minstrelsy, performers used burnt cork or shoe polish to paint their skins completely black, leaving wide areas around the mouth that would variously be left uncovered, or painted red or white giving the appearance of oversized lips.

Overall, the makeup was a deliberate attempt to disdainfully represent Black people as outlandish. Once in blackface, minstrels would use exaggerated accents, malapropisms, awkward movements and garish attire to further ridicule Black people. Minstrelsy depended on, and produced, stereotypical portrayals of Black life.

Recent blackface incidents in Canada have depended on disparaging stereotypes. For example, at Wilfrid Laurier University in , those wearing blackface wore fake dread locks with KFC buckets as hats , and carried three-foot tubes representing massive marijuana joints. So it is clear that in both the past and present , blackface engages in representational violence by drawing on antiblack stereotypes.

As egregious as the representational violence of blackface is, this is not the only or even the most important reason that blackface is antiblack. In other words, Black life today continues to be entangled in social relations that are extensions of the antiblack relations of slavery. These relations attempt to place Black life outside the realm of the human as philosopher Sylvia Wynter argues , as life that therefore need not be afforded human dignity, and as property.

These relations subject Black people to profound violence. This is as true in Canada as it is in U. The much more central issue with blackface, then, is the way in which it reinscribes these relations. First, the very need to use garish make-up as part of the process of portraying Black people reveals an attempt to establish an essential difference between Black and white people.

It draws on the logic of biological racism, which argued that the physical features of Africans were visible evidence that Black people were inferior to white people on a presumed evolutionary hierarchy, and therefore that they could justifiably be enslaved.

Read more: 'I wanna be white! The performances would stereotype black men and women as ignorant, hypersexual, superstitious, lazy people who were prone to thievery and cowardice. The practice took hold in New York City in the s and became immensely popular among post-Civil War whites.

In fact, the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the South took their name from a character played by blackface performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice. Blackface performances were condemned as offensive from the beginning. Civil rights organizations have publicly condemned blackface for decades, saying it dehumanizes blacks by introducing and reinforcing racial stereotypes. Other white politicians and celebrities have faced criticism for blackface performances. Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan had to apologize in for a picture of him and his brothers singing in a blackface quartet in that came up during his run for U.

Senate in Similarly, a recent study found that a third of people believe it is not wrong for a white person to wear makeup to appear black. Blackface dates back around years and commonly refers to when someone — typically with white skin — paints their face darker to resemble a black person. Blackface in the early 19th Century was a practice in which black people were mocked for the entertainment of white people, promoting negative stereotypes. White actors, called minstrel performers, adorned their faces with coal-black makeup and outlandishly red lips, as well as wearing woolly wigs.

New media ushered minstrel performances from the stage and into theatres with popular American actors, including Shirley Temple, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney donning blackface, making it a form of family amusement. It's either seen as a devil or a danger - or as a way to take the mickey out of people. Such performances promoted demeaning stereotypes of black people that helped confirm notions of superiority based on race.