• 3 days ago
From fashion brands to celebrities to politicians — blackface keeps reemerging. Here’s a look at its history and why it’s still very offensive.
Transcript
00:00African-Americans in blackface were seen as people who stole, who were lazy, who were ignorant,
00:06who could not be redeemed by education or freedom.
00:09It's overdue for people to really be aware of its history, and it's not neutral, it's not simply a costume,
00:17but really tapping into this larger history of dehumanization.
00:30Blackface is one of our first original American cultures.
00:47My name is Blair Kelly. I'm a professor of history and an assistant dean for interdisciplinary studies at North Carolina State University.
00:55It was wildly popular with white audiences and was really a way for them to learn about black enslaved people.
01:05So there are these stage performances, but those stage performances aren't trying to capture the humanity of African-Americans.
01:11They are really trying to make light of this terrible situation of making humor out of the dehumanization of black people.
01:20And so largely these vaudeville performers who take burnt cork and smear it on their faces with grease paint
01:27and distend their lips and eyes the way that they believed black people looked
01:32and performed as if they were black men, women, and children in a plantation south.
01:37And this popular sort of performance style taught America to mock blackness.
01:43Black family life was mocked. Black children were seen as disposable picaninnies who would be eaten by wildlife
01:50or discarded or unknown by their mothers and fathers.
01:58The figure Jim Crow, who ends up becoming the most famous character that's portrayed in Blackface by a man named Thomas Daddy Rice,
02:06you know, we call it Jim Crow segregation.
02:08Oftentimes people are really unclear as to why we do call it that.
02:13It is because Jim Crow was moving to these integrated spaces and making a mess, being loud, being smelly, being inappropriate
02:23on the nice train car, in the hotel, on the streetcar.
02:29And so when segregation was put in place to control the first emancipated people in northern states, in Massachusetts, in New York City, in Philadelphia,
02:41they called it Jim Crow segregation to keep Jim Crow out of those nice white spaces.
02:49As much as minstrelsy was supposed to be a joke and entertainment, it was influencing policy.
03:00If we don't think about the cost that slavery, that segregation, that lynching, that racial violence exacted on black populations over time,
03:15if we don't think about the cost that removal had on native populations, indigenous populations in this country,
03:23if we don't think about the processes of dehumanization and colonization in our own time, what are we doing?
03:31So there's a way to get in this conversation now, there's a way to do better now, if you know what happened.
03:40Folks have been talking about diversity for a really long time.
03:43It shouldn't be just tokenism, rather the knowledge and the experience that you gain when you put different kinds of people in a room
03:51when you're creating a cultural product.
03:53It would be a simple conversation to say, are you trying to make a blackface turtleneck?
03:58Is that the intention here? To really have some honest brokers in the room who can say,
04:03this doesn't look right, or this is offensive to me, and let's try something else.