Why is the term ‘blackface’ in the news?
On Monday evening, Social Democrats TD Eoin Hayes issued an apology for wearing brown make-up on his face and hands while dressed up as former US president Barack Obama for a Halloween party some 16 years ago.
In his statement, Mr Hayes said: “What I did was completely inappropriate and a huge mistake. I condemn racism in all its forms and do not condone that behaviour under any circumstances.”
The term “blackface” commonly refers to when a person, typically with white skin, paints their face darker to resemble a black person.
More generally, why is ‘blackface’ so problematic?
Apart from the fact that it is a deeply unfunny and lazy costume idea, it is steeped in racism with direct links to those who celebrated and mocked the enslavement of an entire race based purely on the colour of their skin.
RM Block
According to the US National Museum of African American History and Culture, the “comedic performances of ‘blackness’ by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up cannot be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core”.
What do they mean by that?
The museum points out that “by distorting the features and culture of African Americans – including their looks, language, dance, deportment and character – white Americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis”.
And where did the term come from?
So-called minstrel shows started appearing in New York City in the 1830s with white performers using shoe polish to imitate enslaved Africans on the plantations to the south. The father of blackface was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who developed his Jim Crow character in 1830. He took the name from a slave song called Jump Jim Crow and the name went on to have an equally miserable role as a catchall name for segregationist laws passed across the southern US after the civil war.
Did we not have black and white minstrels here too? Were they not selling us tea? Surely Lyons isn’t a racist tea?
Lyons tea is undoubtedly not racist but it is a fact it sold tea here using dancing minstrels for decades until the 1990s.
To be fair, it was probably inspired less by Jim Crow and more by the two-decades long run of the equally problematic Black and White Minstrel Show, broadcast on the BBC until 1978. It’s still a marketing campaign steeped in shame, mind you.
But the end of 1970s was the end of it, was it?
No. Blackface performers faded from popularity and acceptability but, as the National Museum of African American History and Culture notes, blackface “as caricature persists through mass media and in public performances”, particularly Halloween costumes in colleges and universities.
But it hasn’t been a feature of mainstream media for a long, long time, right?
Wrong. Just five years ago, the British comedy series Little Britain – which was wildly popular in the mid-2000s – was removed from streaming services over its repeated use of blackface, with the BBC saying that “times have changed” since the programme first aired.
But surely not everyone caught wearing blackface or wearing it for entertainment purposes is racist?
The National Museum of African American History and Culture does point out that “those facing scrutiny for blackface performances insist no malice or racial hatred was intended”. And while that may well be true, it is a miserable trope steeped in racism and there can be no one anywhere that doesn’t know that by now.
