Blackface is a practice with deep historical roots and complex cultural implications. It involves performers using makeup to portray a caricature of black people. This practice has evolved over centuries, sparking significant controversy and debate.
There is no consensus about a single moment that constitutes the origin of blackface. Some trace its origins back to medieval Europe, while others link it specifically to American minstrel shows of the 19th century.
Origins in Medieval Europe
Arizona State University professor Ayanna Thompson links the beginning of blackface to stage practices within the Medieval Europe miracle or mystery plays. It was common practice in medieval Europe to use bitumen and soot from coal to darken skin to depict corrupted souls, demons, and devils in blackface. Louisiana State University professor Anthony Barthelemy stated, "“In many medieval miracle plays, the souls of the damned were represented by actors painted black or in black costumes."
The journalist and cultural commentator John Strausbaugh places it as part of a tradition of "displaying Blackness for the enjoyment and edification of white viewers" that dates back at least to 1441, when captive West Africans were displayed in Portugal.
White people routinely portrayed the black characters in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (see English Renaissance theatre), most famously in Othello (1604). However, Othello and other plays of this era did not involve the emulation and caricature of "such supposed innate qualities of Blackness as inherent musicality, natural athleticism", etc.
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Blackface in American Minstrel Shows
In the United States, blackface became a popular entertainment during the 19th century into the 20th. Blackface was a performance tradition in the American theater for roughly 100 years beginning around 1830. In both the United States and Britain, blackface was most commonly used in the minstrel performance tradition, which it both predated and outlasted.
Lewis Hallam, Jr., a white blackface actor of American Company fame, brought blackface in this more specific sense to prominence as a theatrical device in the United States when playing the role of "Mungo", an inebriated black man in The Padlock, a British play that premiered in New York City at the John Street Theatre on May 29, 1769. The play attracted notice, and other performers adopted the style.
Early white performers in blackface used burnt cork and later greasepaint or shoe polish to blacken their skin and exaggerate their lips, often wearing woolly wigs, gloves, tailcoats, or ragged clothes to complete the transformation. According to a 1901 source: "Be careful to get the black even around the eyes and mouth. Leave the lips just as they are, they will appear red to the audience. Comedians leave a wide white space all around the lips. It makes the mouth appear larger and will look red as the lips do. If you wish to represent an old darkey, use white drop chalk, outlining the eyebrows, chin, whisk- ers or a gray beard."
In New York City in 1843, Dan Emmett and his Virginia Minstrels broke blackface minstrelsy loose from its novelty act and entr'acte status and performed the first full-blown minstrel show: an evening's entertainment composed entirely of blackface performance.
White minstrel shows featured white performers pretending to be black people, playing their versions of 'black music' and speaking ersatz black dialects. As a result, the genre played an important role in shaping perceptions of and prejudices about black people generally and African Americans in particular.
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Some social commentators have stated that blackface provided an outlet for white peoples' fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar, and a socially acceptable way of expressing their feelings and fears about race and control. Blackface, at least initially, could also give voice to an oppositional dynamic that was prohibited by society.
Early in the 20th century, blackface branched off from the minstrel show and became a form of entertainment in its own right, including Tom Shows, parodying abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Stereotypes embodied in the stock characters of blackface minstrels not only played a significant role in cementing and proliferating racist images, attitudes, and perceptions worldwide, but also in popularizing black culture.
Later, black artists also performed in blackface. Some of the most successful and prominent minstrel show performers, composers and playwrights were themselves black, such as: Bert Williams, Bob Cole, and J. Rosamond Johnson.
The songs of Northern composer Stephen Foster figured prominently in blackface minstrel shows of the period. Though written in dialect and politically incorrect by modern standards, his later songs were free of the ridicule and blatantly racist caricatures that typified other songs of the genre.
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In the 1870s the actress Carrie Swain began performing in minstrel shows alongside her husband, the acrobat and blackface performer Sam Swain. It is possible that she was the first woman performer to appear in blackface. Theatre scholar Shirley Staples stated, "Carrie Swain may have been the first woman to attempt the acrobatic comedy typical of male blackface work." She later portrayed the blackface role of Topsy in a musical adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by composer Caryl Florio and dramatist H. Wayne Ellis.
Stereotyped blackface characters developed: buffoonish, lazy, superstitious, cowardly, and lascivious characters, who stole, lied pathologically, and mangled the English language. Early blackface minstrels were all male, so cross-dressing white men also played black women who were often portrayed as unappealingly and grotesquely mannish, in the matronly mammy mold, or as highly sexually provocative.
In some quarters, the caricatures that were the legacy of blackface persist to the present day and are a cause of ongoing controversy. and elsewhere.
Blackface in Film and Media
In the early years of film, black characters were routinely played by white people in blackface. In the first filmic adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903), all of the major black roles were white people in blackface. Even the 1914 Uncle Tom starring African-American actor Sam Lucas in the title role had a white male in blackface as Topsy.
D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) used white people in blackface to represent all of its major black characters, but reaction against the film's racism largely put an end to this practice in dramatic film roles.
From the 1910s up until the early 1950s, many well-known entertainers of stage and screen also performed in blackface. Light-skinned people who performed in blackface in film included Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne, Doris Day, Milton Berle, William Holden, Marion Davies, Myrna Loy, Betty Grable, Dennis Morgan, Laurel and Hardy, Betty Hutton, The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Donald O'Connor and Chester Morris and George E.
As late as the 1940s, Warner Bros. In Holiday Inn, Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds sang “Abraham,” a song honoring Lincoln’s birthday, in shoe-polish blackface.
The radio program Amos 'n' Andy (1928-1960) constituted a type of "oral blackface", in that the black characters were portrayed by white people and conformed to stage blackface stereotypes.
The conventions of blackface also lived on unmodified at least into the 1950s in animated theatrical cartoons.
In the 1976 action comedy Silver Streak included a farcical scene in which Gene Wilder must impersonate a black man, as instructed by Richard Pryor.
Trading Places (1983) is a film telling the elaborate story of a commodities banker and street hustler crossing paths after being made part of a bet. The film features a scene between Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Denholm Elliott, and Dan Aykroyd when they must don disguises to enter a train. Aykroyd's character puts on full blackface make-up, a dreadlocked wig and a Jamaican accent to fill the position of a Jamaican pothead.
Soul Man is a 1986 film featuring C. Thomas Howell as Mark Watson, a pampered rich white college graduate who uses "tanning pills" to qualify for a scholarship to Harvard Law only available to African American students. He expects to be treated as a fellow student and instead learns the isolation of 'being black' on campus. He later befriends and falls in love with the original candidate of the scholarship, a single mother who works as a waitress to support her education. He later "comes out" as white, leading to the famous defending line: "Can you blame him for the color of his skin?" Unlike Trading Places, the film was met with heavy criticism of a white man donning blackface to humanize white ignorance at the expense of African American viewers. Despite a large box office intake, it has scored low on every film critic platform.
"A white man donning blackface is taboo," said Howell; "Conversation over - you can't win.
Blackface in contemporary art remains in relatively limited use as a theatrical device; today, it is more commonly used as social commentary or satire.
Modern Incidents and Controversies
There have been several inflammatory incidents of white college students donning blackface.
Blackface and minstrelsy serve as the theme of African American director Spike Lee's film Bamboozled (2000).
In 2000, Jimmy Fallon performed in blackface on Saturday Night Live, imitating former cast member Chris Rock. That same year, Harmony Korine directed the short film Korine Tap for Stop For a Minute, a series of short films commissioned by Dazed & Confused magazine and FilmFour Lab.
Jimmy Kimmel donned black paint and used an exaggerated, accented voice to portray NBA player Karl Malone on The Man Show in 2003.
In November 2005, controversy erupted when journalist Steve Gilliard posted a photograph on his blog. Senate. It had been doctored to include bushy, white eyebrows and big, red lips.
A Mighty Heart is a 2007 American film featuring Angelina Jolie playing Mariane Pearl, the wife of the kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Mariane is of multiracial descent, born from an Afro-Chinese-Cuban mother and a Dutch Jewish father. She personally cast Jolie to play herself, defending the choice to have Jolie "sporting a spray tan and a corkscrew wig". Criticism of the film came in large part for the choice to have Jolie portraying Mariane Pearl in this manner. Defense of the casting choice was in large part due to Pearl's mixed racial heritage, critics claiming it would have been impossible to find an Afro-Latina actress with the same crowd-drawing caliber of Jolie.
Also in 2008, Robert Downey Jr.'s character Kirk Lazarus appeared in brownface in the Ben Stiller-directed film Tropic Thunder. As with Trading Places, the intent was satire; specifically, blackface was ironically employed to humorously mock one of the many foibles of Hollywood rather than black people themselves.
Once more in 2008, comedian Frank Caliendo, who is well known for his impressions, used blackface to do an impression of former NBA player and sports analyst Charles Barkley.
In the November 2010 episode "Dee Reynolds: Shaping America's Youth", the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia comically explored if blackface could ever be done "right". One of the characters, Frank Reynolds insists that Laurence Olivier's blackface performance in his 1965 production of Othello was not offensive, while Dennis claimed it "distasteful" and "never okay". In the same episode, the gang shows their fan film, Lethal Weapon 5, in which the character Mac appears in blackface.
The wearing of blackface was once a regular part of the annual Mummers Parade in Philadelphia.
Oluwa Mark Dancing Meme
In contemporary internet culture, the "Oluwa Mark Dancing" meme emerged, featuring a viral video of Timo Hendriksen, a white man, dancing in an African dashiki to Afrobeat music. The meme gained traction in 2023, often paired with object-label captions about being white in a Black setting. An exploitable greenscreen template of Oluwa Mark dancing was used in October 2023, most often paired with the song "Not Responsible" by Amon. Hendriksen was given the nickname Oluwa Mark in 2023, as the meme spread. Timo Hendriksen's dance videos became the subject of memes and object-labeling videos as early as 2021.
Oluwa Mark Dancing Meme
This meme, while seemingly lighthearted, touches on themes of cultural appropriation and the performance of identity, reflecting the ongoing complexities of race and representation in modern society.
The "Wigger" Term
The term is generally considered a derogatory term reflecting stereotypes of African-American, black British, and white culture (when used as a synonym of white trash). Robert A. Clift's documentary titled "Blacking Up: Hip-Hop's Remix of Race and Identity" questions white enthusiasts of black hip-hop culture.
A 2011 class-action lawsuit in the United States District Court for Minnesota alleged that the administration at a predominantly white high school showed a "deliberate indifference" in allowing a group of students to hold a homecoming event called "Wigger Day" or "Wangsta Day" since at least 2008.
The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery
The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery at Ferris State University was founded to display and preserve racist objects. The museum will function as a teaching laboratory. The museum is a team effort. I see my role as decreasing. I have other goals, other garbage to collect.
Visitors conduct research, mainly social scientists, also visit the museum. A trained museum facilitator is there for all tours. The museum aims to teach tolerance. The goal is to promote dialogues about this country's racial history. The museum has critics. That is to be expected.
The collection includes objects depicting stereotypes of black people. It includes images of black children climbing a fence to enter a swimming hole. The museum has many objects that show black people being thrown at, hit, or beaten. The museum also includes a plantation scene. In some instances, rocks -- at the black man's head to win prizes.
The museum also aims to tell of black scholars, scientists, artists, and inventors who thrived despite living under Jim Crow. Also, a "Civil Rights Movement" section will be added. Finally, there will be a room of reflection. The museum also has sections. Jim Crow was wounded in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, passed after (and maybe because of) President John F. Kennedy (1990, p. 234). One by one segregation laws were removed in the 1960s and 1970s. Jim Crow attitudes did not die; and in many instances, have resurfaced.
The new racial climate is marked by ambivalence and contradiction. Racial stereotypes, sometimes yelled, sometimes whispered, are common. The stereotypes perpetuate many of these images.
The Jim Crow Museum also has a Web site, an international resource. The site provides links to other universities and colleges. The museum is also creating a documentary about the museum. I bought my first racist object when I was 12 or 13. It was the early 1970s in Mobile, Alabama, the home of my youth. The museum wants to promote deep and honest discussions about race and racism. No topics are forbidden.
