Behind the Mask Museum of Modern Art Behind the Mask Museum of Modern Art Blackface

(CNN)It'due south been nearly 200 years since white performers commencement started painting their faces black to mock enslaved Africans in minstrel shows across the United States. It was racist and offensive then, and it's still racist and offensive today.

Among the recent controversies to erupt over blackface is a photo on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam'south personal folio in his medical schoolhouse yearbook. It depicts one person in blackface and another dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. After initially apologizing for appearing in the photograph, the Autonomous governor now says he is neither the person in blackface nor the person dressed as a Klansman.

Still Northam'southward case and others like it play out, it'south important for every American to understand what blackface is and why it's and so offensive.

The racist origins of blackface

Blackface isn't just about painting one's skin darker or putting on a costume. It invokes a racist and painful history.

The origins of blackface engagement back to the minstrel shows of mid-19th century. White performers darkened their skin with smoothen and cork, put on tattered clothing and exaggerated their features to look stereotypically "blackness." The first minstrel shows mimicked enslaved Africans on Southern plantations, depicting blackness people as lazy, ignorant, cowardly or hypersexual, according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Civilization (NMAAHC).

The performances were intended to be funny to white audiences. But to the black customs, they were demeaning and hurtful.

One of the most popular blackface characters was "Jim Crow," developed by performer and playwright Thomas Dartmouth Rice. As part of a traveling solo act, Rice wore a burnt-cork greasepaint mask and raggedy clothing, spoke in stereotypical black vernacular and performed a caricatured song and dance routine that he said he learned from a slave, according to the University of Due south Florida Library.

Though early minstrel shows started in New York, they quickly spread to audiences in both the North and South. Past 1845, minstrel shows spawned their own industry, NMAAHC says.

Its influence extended into the 20th century. Al Jolson performed in blackface in "The Jazz Vocaliser," a striking picture in 1927, and American actors like Shirley Temple, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney put on greasepaint in movies besides.

The characters were and so pervasive that even some black performers put on greasepaint, historians say. It was the just mode they could piece of work -- as white audiences weren't interested in watching blackness actors exercise anything but act foolish on stage.

William Henry Lane, known as "Master Juba," was one of the first black entertainers to perform in greasepaint. His shows were very pop and he's even credited with inventing tap trip the light fantastic toe, according to John Hanners' volume "It Was Play or Starve: Acting in Nineteenth-century American Popular Theatre."

Despite Lane'south relative success, he was limited to the minstrel circuit and for near of his life performed for supper. He eventually died "from something as simple and as pathetic as overwork," Hanners wrote.

Its damaging legacy

Such negative representations of blackness people left a damaging legacy in popular culture, especially in art and amusement.

Minstrel shows were ordinarily the merely depiction of black life that white audiences saw. Presenting enslaved Africans as the barrel of jokes desensitized white Americans to the horrors of slavery. The performances as well promoted demeaning stereotypes of black people that helped confirm white people's notions of superiority.

"Past distorting the features and civilisation of African Americans—including their looks, language, dance, deportment and character—white Americans were able to codify whiteness across form and geopolitical lines as its antonym," NMAAHC says.

Ignorance is no excuse

In modern discussion over blackface, its racist history is ofttimes swept under the rug or shrouded in claims of ignorance.

In a 2018 segment on "Megyn Kelly Today" about political correctness and Halloween costumes, the former NBC host said that when she was growing up, information technology was seen as acceptable for a white person to dress as a blackness person.

"But what is racist?" Kelly asked. "Because you do go in trouble if y'all are a white person who puts on greasepaint on Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid that was OK, as long equally y'all were dressing upwards as, similar, a character."

Her comments sparked widespread anger. She apologized, merely her show was ultimately canceled.

White celebrities, college students and even elected officials have made similar claims of ignorance over past and current controversies involving blackface.

But NMAAHC is articulate on this: "Minstrelsy, comedic performances of 'black' by whites in exaggerated costumes and makeup, cannot exist separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core."

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Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/02/us/racist-origins-of-blackface/index.html

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