There are so many dimensions to Black culture, and so much history informing what we have become, that it is particularly frustrating to see in 2015 the same kinds of appropriation and limitations we’ve been dealing with for hundreds of years now. This is about one aspect of that history, the genre of blackface, specifically focusing on how white supremacist, queerphobic and misogynist discourse have added additional layers of complexity to intercultural interaction then and now.
Separating Authenticity form Artifice
When I was a kid, I used to make these “press-on nails” out of red modelling clay--thick, heavy, and covered in fingerprints, they were all too clearly fake-upon-fake. And it was just as clear that I didn’t care--I knew I was expressing something real, but I also had an image I needed to keep up. With the clay I could say to myself quietly “someday,” without spoiling the image I needed to maintain: modest, pious, not "too grown” and certainly with no plans to become the magnificent androgyne I am today.
To even begin finding my way to that real something I was trying to express, however, I had to work hard--still have to. And I hate to say it, but a lot of that is because of race. So much of my idea of what I could become came filtered through the TV and movies that I inhaled as I could, where most of the faces that looked more like mine felt a lot more like “never” than “someday.”
Some of that was due to the general scarcity of gender identities and sexual/romantic orientations represented on screen at the time for any race, but most of it had to do with US history. So little of Blackness was/is represented on screen, and there are reasons for that extending beyond the monolith of “inequality.” To call it inequality seems limiting--it wasn’t just about fair distribution of roles, it was about the forgery of a forgery of representation that these roles offered, carrying the legacy of blackface among other things.
I had some idea even then about the history behind these tropes of Black identity, but I had filed that these things under Bad Things in the Past and only recently have begun to understand the long-lasting effects. These things tend to repeat themselves again and again until they are confronted.
So, this is a sort of non-confrontational confrontation, to hopefully complicate the approach we take to intercultural interaction. My intent is to explain the significance to me of, for example, something like Taylor Swift rapping about “hella good hair” when she obviously has not idea one about what “good hair” means to most of the people who are the reason she can access that art form at all, much less participate. I’m not hating on her or her work (or Harry Styles’ hairstyle, for that matter); I’m just tired of seeing people with a ton of social capital using our words wrong and still getting a ton of credit in one of the few fields in which Black people have a decent chance of advancement.
But it’s mostly personal--my interpretations of a culture that is as varied as the number of Black people in the world, past and present, and my own history of shame and resentment and awkwardness, interacting with people and not knowing where to begin when people that I genuinely like start getting all “yeah gurl!” on me. It’s not inherently offensive to me on its own--it’s the apparent lack of (interest in?) a complex understanding of Blackness that is the real disappointment.
I’m not here to ruin anyone’s modeling clay manicure; I’m just not about to let you go on believing it’s the only way you can express yourself.
Appropriation in a White/Black US Context
Many of us who are marginalized and derogated in this world ruled by inequality are familiar with the experience of feeling very tangibly the wall between what is allowed for the upper castes and what is allowed for us. We have an acute sense of what the right to unencumbered existence must feel like, because we spend most of our time right on the edge;pushing as close to that “do not cross” line as we can.
In the case of white/Black historical dynamics, that line has been etched into laws, some of which are still under fire. The central theme of all these laws was the idea that Black people must be contained and controlled, even after the abolition of slavery and segregation.
What we have is not just cultural appropriation, but an attempt at cultural domestication. Describing white-Black cultural identity theft as appropriation is limiting because it blurs that “do not cross” line. Appropriation is me coming into your house and stealing your things, then declaring them to be better now that they’re mine. That certainly is part of it, but it is far from the whole story. Domestication is me coming into your house, taking you and everyone else there home as livestock and pets, and trying to keep it that way for the next few centuries.
When we do take into account that subtext of “you are mine”/”no I’m not” rather than only “what’s yours is mine”/”no it’s not” it helps make much clearer what is at stake in intercultural interactions along this dynamic. It is also essential for understanding the origin and popularity of blackface--not so much cultural theft as a means of laying out rules for what Black culture was “allowed” to be.
Blackface and its Influence on Culture
You should definitely read up on the history of blackface, whether or not you have a general idea already, to give you a clearer understanding. It’s important to know it not just as something that came and went sometime in the past, but as a cultural/personal experience. This is all stuff I could find pretty easily online, like seriously, I used Wikipedia and sources linked there to find a lot of it, but I had to go looking for it. This is not what was in my books in school.
The caveat, and it is an important one, is that if you feel right now that you would have to choose between reading this and wanting to get out of bed in the morning tomorrow, take care of yourself first. Trauma in history is still trauma; still powerful and should not be approach casually.
I promise you dealing with this white supremacy issue between us will take work. But I can also promise that it will also be powerful--so powerful--to pull the thing up by its roots and be rid of it.
1. Blackface was a legitimized performance of white-constructed Black stereotypes targeted specifically for white audiences. These were not just stereotypes like “Hi, here’s a stereotype!” and that’s the whole show. Blackface was music and comedy delivered through characters that were stereotypes. It was popular, normalized. Like imagine if each of the Beatles were a stereotype of Blackness that some white people made up and they were called “the Darkies” or some nonsense--that kind of popularity. Everyone was into it. Even Pres. Lincoln was into watching blackface.
It’s easy in hindsight to just say “what were those people thinking?,” but for the people at the time it was normalized fun. Please do not sleep on this point. Racism doesn’t just walk around announcing itself as such. It’s usually not considered a big deal when it’s happening. That’s not to say it went without criticism, but as any media analyst today can tell you, folk don’t too much like having their fun interrupted. Keep this in mind should you ever be called out about your own racist actions. You probably aren’t going to immediately feel like “oh wow yeah, what I was doing was very obviously harmful.” Just be open to the responses you get.
2. Blackface was popular for a LONG time in the US, from 1830 to 1965. That’s before and well after the end of slavery in 1865. Imagine, 100+ years of “Darkiemania!,” spreading to other countries too. The world population was only 1/8 its current size when this thing started, and had grown to about half its current size by the time blackface lost its place, when the movement for Black human rights gained substantial ground with the passing of the Civil Rights Amendment. So. a lot of people grew up in a world where this was an accepted mainstream thing, many that are still alive. And for the record, blackface is not something that has at all disappeared, just something that is no longer as popular as it was then. I will use past tense here because I’m mostly referring to specifically the kind of blackface that was so popular, but this is not something we can just comfort ourselves by believing it is far behind us.
Notice that fairly recent end date of 1965, too. It was still going relatively strong when President Obama was born, for example. Maybe when some people in your family were born, too. There are plenty of people sitting in Congress now that saw this firsthand. And again, this was normalized entertainment when your representatives were kids. So, side note, if you usually don’t vote, or if you only vote, just...you know. Context matters.
3. Blackface defined specific cultural roles for Black people that helped reinforce white supremacist social order outside of entertainment. Black people have been living in what is now the US since 1619. For reference, that means when the US got its “independence” (laughable term for a slave-based economy, no?), Black people had been living here for 150 years, during which we lost our initial legal definition as humans and laws were passed taking away more and more rights until we were declared “property.”
At this point now, we’ve lived in the US for about 400 years, much of it spent working for nothing or close to it, bought and sold and bred like animals, violently policed, excluded from education, sent to fight for the US in war before we could even vote, harassed and “suspected” and prosecuted, incarcerated, on and on, so much of which still happens now, for an entire century of this we had this blackface thing to deal with, helping hold all this in place.
Think about the surrealism of living in a country that LOVES what you do, when it is *their* idea of what you can do, and isn’t afraid to show it—while simultaneously killing you off legally. (Like it does now.) Imagine you have to go to the store for your employer, and they hand you a list, and it’s like the one below, with the “mammy”-type character scratching her head cluelessly, saying “Reckon ah needs?” And again, this was legit at the time, like it might as well be Snoopy or something. And you kinda need your job and you definitely want to keep living, so telling somebody off is not necessarily the move you want to make...it’s just frustrating, disheartening, exhausting.
Little things like this, that people would have to risk a lot to refuse, helped/help keep hierarchies where they are.
[image is a wooden grocery list with movable pegs to select needed items. The top of the list has a picture of a “mammy” blackface character with the red lips and white eyes typical of that style, wearing a polka-dot headscarf, next to the words “RECKON AH NEEDS?” The image is captioned “When your boss is like ‘Heeere’s your grocery list! Teeheehee!!!’ SO cute, right?”]
4. The roles performed in blackface enforced very limited expressions of gender, none of which were positioned as truly desirable or admirable. [CW transphobia] This is one of the most dehumanizing aspects about blackface, in my opinion, as gender and sexuality are not only closely connected to personal identity, but also tend to carry a lot of connection to cultural identity. So, to be prescribed norms that essentially withheld any choice in this area was/is doubly harmful.
Black men in this genre came in three main types: the goofy yes-man, the bumbling criminal who went after white women, and the pretentious-yet-uninformed Northerner. They did sometimes have families, but the kids (known as “pickaninnies”) were there to run around and be wild and sometimes get killed off for comedic effect because SO EDGY RIGHT? And of course these men would be positioned as powerless to do anything about it.
Black women in these shows were played ONLY EVER played by cisgender white men. It’s possible that some of these men did not personally identify as cis, but the fact that they were all white and that these roles specifically excluded even white women seems to be saying something about what they were trying to communicate. This practice went on long after Black women were starting to get roles in films (though most of them were small parts at first). This was also happening during the time when the glamorous Hollywood starlet trend was going on--a stark contrast for Black girls growing up who wanted to be glamorous too.
One of these characters was essentially a walking punchline because of this gender issue: the disgusting-because-overly-masculine woman, which set up the (still persistent) construct that femininity and Blackness do not belong together. So while there certainly were/are problems with the way femininity was/is constructed generally, such flawed ideals were positioned as not at all accessible to Black people to begin with.
This, y’all, is why history matters. Because it’s not just about hate crime rates, it’s about institutionalized hate, about the stories people tell themselves as they target Black people who do not conform to binary gender norms, or do conform but in ways that are still stigmatized. When we are educating people on gender identity issues, we can’t afford to ignore the weight of history. When the dominant narrative adds and extra layer of “not for you” for Black people of all gender expressions, there has to be more in place than just “here is how to love the skin you’re in!” kind of help. (Seriously, go do an image search for “pretty,” “handsome” or “attractive” and scroll until you find a Black person. Then we can have some real talk about dysphoria.)
I want to also mention that for any CAFAB person who wanted to express masculinity or identified as transmasculine or male, there is (even now) an added obstacle because of this idea of Blackness as a subtraction from identifying as a woman to begin with. That is, how do you find a way to express your personal identity when you don’t have a choice to begin with—if every Black woman is masculine by nature, then where do you go from there? None of this has disappeared, y’all. We got civil rights but the media and the zeitgeist still carry forward these stereotypes.
As for the other two roles for women, both were positioned as undesirable in other ways: there was the kindly matronly one (the Mammy/Big Momma/Madea/etc. type), who also helped reinforce the stereotype that size=personality type, for an additional layer of harmfulness, made irrelevant by her naivete. Then there was the fashion-model biracial woman, who was positioned on the edge of desirability, but, and again don’t sleep, was ONLY seen as physically desirable because of her whiteness (again, still persistent). Her Blackness was the thing that gave her exoticism and sass, an extra edge, something that was intriguing but ultimately undesirable. So basically she could be the romantic lead because her whiteness made her pretty, but her Blackness gave her an attitude that was not submissive and demure thereby negating her viability as a partner.
It could almost be kind of progressive, a Black woman character that was a little bit of a badass, on stage in 1830, but the story punishes her for her resistance to the submissivess=femininity norm. Sigh. I’m just tired of this story, and I’m tired of the combination of right-on politics and racism (ouch, I know, but what else can I call it?) that ignores and/or reduces the importance of these kinds of issues. What I want to see is a critique of “traditional” constructs of gender that does not sweep right past the influence of tropes like these and land on “traditional”=white, while still acknowledging the dominance of white culture.
One quick example and I’ll leave this point [TW body hair]: There is so much power in making choices for one’s personal aesthetic that run counter to oppressive ideals of, for example, beauty as 1.necessary and 2. equal to degree of hairlessness. And I would never want to tell anyone what to do with their own body hair. What happens, though, is that when conversations around this issue happen, there is this “do whatever!” kind of affirmation that feels like a bit of a slap in the face considering how Blackness is already stigmatized as failed femininity--it’s a different kind of risk for us. It’s hard to explain all this to someone who is like “let’s all just grow our hair out!” without seeming like I'm trying to kill the buzz. I’m just saying when I have $2 and you have $100, asking me to spend one of mine like we are all the same is not so great.
5. The characters had in common, regardless of gender, a subservience to whiteness justified by their inherent lack of intellect. These characters were not just positioned as lacking formal education, they were posed as naturally and comedically unable to learn. First off, okay, even if we accept the preposterous idea that, as an entire race, we did have an intellectual disability, 100+ years of “those dumb whatevers, hahaha,” totally disgusting behavior on its own. But really, to propose that an entire race have a lack of average intellect, and then subsequently violently block access to the kind of education that would yield performance conforming to white supremacist standards of intellect, is massively shifty.
What is even shiftier though, is that this genre was (theorized to be) particularly popular because it helped assuage the white audiences’ fears about what would happen when Black people were “granted” freedom, and maintain an ethos of “we have to help them” to catch those who might have been opposed to the “they deserve this punishment” kind of appeal. I mean, the concerns were legit--we had some very real reasons to want to rebel, and some of us did so successfully. So, in terms of strategy alone, waging psychological warfare was a smart move--but smart as in really, really evil. It’s not the first or last time a nation or any authority figure has turned to deceptive discourse to maintain a potentially untenable power structure, it’s just...gross. It’s too high a price to pay. And now we have people fighting battles they didn’t even want to be in, trying to get an education, trying to redefine what education can be, trying to walk the line between conformity and self-expression that was drawn by someone explicitly trying to tell them they are less-than. You mad yet?
6. Blackface employed a distorted form of AAVE as a means of positioning the characters as unintelligent. Sooo first off, there are records of people who worked as slave traders intentionally taking prospective slaves from different areas with different languages and grouping them together in order to keep them from communicating with each other and possibly rebelling. And there are theories that AAVE arose as a response to this, as Black people picked up on the language of their captors and figured out how to communicate in spite of this mess, which to me sounds like greater linguistic ability and not less.
Regardless of its origin, however, AAVE is a legitimate way to use English that should be on par with any other, and it shares features with other world Englishes and other US accents and dialects. So I’m not about getting everyone to the point of practically de-legitimizing it by overly regulating who can speak it and when and all that.
BUT--again, history matters. In blackface, every time a character spoke, it was funny just because of how they were talking. Literally nothing you say matters if your every line is a joke. And when Black characters were speaking more aristocratic English instead of the broken AAVE, it was as a parody—exaggerated formality to send the message that no embodiment of the forms of aristocracy would constitute actual admission. Furthermore, the character speaking proper English would be positioned as the straight man to set up a joke for the character that did not understand such fancy talk. Like this:
Interlocutor: I'm astonished at you, Why, the idea of a man of your mental caliber talking about such sordid matters, right after listening to such a beautiful song! Have you no sentiment left?
Tambo: No, I haven't got a cent left. (source)
I mean it’s like, the joke in itself without the story around it is pretty innocuous wordplay. And again, this was just regular entertainment for plenty of people, and just like we do now there were almost certainly people who went to these shows and just sort of watched “around” the racism--like if you’ve ever watched any sitcom, you’ve probably had to sit through some blatant racism that may not personally support--you’re just trying to have a good time. I’m not saying “oh it wasn’t that bad,” I’m saying you still see now this thing where Black characters are positioned in relative status/degree of intellect in a story according to how “standard” their English is, and people don’t trip just because nobody is actually wearing blackface. But you know there are people out there who do like those jokes, very much--target audiences, you know?
Anyway, language communicates so much, and there is no rule that says, for example, a white person should never ever say “where you at?” as opposed to “where are you?” The point is to understand that white people can talk like this without it being construed as a deficit (and in fact will probably be considered “cool”), whereas a Black person saying “where you at?” gets either no credit or a stigma. Personally, I think it depends on what’s being said and why—if it gets to the point where it’s bordering on blackface, I will for sure let you know, but you also need to know that white privilege means having social power that makes it harder for people to confront you on things like this. We have to go against the grain to do so. And, you know, 100+ years of white people in blackface saying “ah reckon.” So if it seems like I’m too mad about a simple “how you been?,” one hundred years. Alright. Next one last one:
7. Blackface actually helped to provide one of the bridges into entertainment as a career for Black people. Again, history matters. But history is just a record of human behavior, and humans are complicated. Sometimes even our worst misdeeds lead to both negative and positive results, and the popularity of blackface does have some positive aspects to it.
It started as something only white people did, but eventually a small number of Black people did it too. Now, to perform in blackface shows, even people that were Black had to wear makeup to make them as dark as possible, which is a whole other discussion. But if you wanted to get on a stage at all, well, a chance is a chance sometimes. Frederick Douglass basically had zero time for all white folks involved, calling them out as thieves: “...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens” (source). But for Black people trying to get a job in the arts, he was like, okay but just please stop shucking and jiving. As he put it: “…cease to exaggerate the exaggerations of our enemies; and represent the colored man rather as he is… [thus] command the respect of both races.”
The thing is though, Douglass’ stance was also criticized as being a little elitist, because even though he was almost entirely self-educated, he was in a position of power at the time as a renowned orator and published author and as someone who held with the mainstream opinion that his particular type of (conformist) education was the best way for Black people to earn respect. I’m not saying he was all wrong, and I tend to agree with many of his views, it’s just that there is a reason we hear more about him in class than, say, Nat Turner. (Don’t get upset about Turner, now--this is not a call to arms, it’s just a call for equal time.)
The truth is, regardless of race, some people just have a really strong need to create, and to perform, to share our creations. Even if it means making choices that are ethically complicated. EVERYONE “sells out” out in some way to make a living, so…you know. We can and we should avoid participating in racist activity where possible, but let’s not pretend that everyone has the same choices about this participation. It’s a racist system, folks. Nobody can just opt out, and those with less power have less options.
Plus, you know, if those performers had waited for a plenitude of roles that represent us as we are in our full humanity and not as controlled by white standards…I mean....we still waiting on that. I mean, BET may have a CEO that is Black but Viacom still owns the network and they are the kind of corporation that hires people to edit Wikipedia pages in their favor. But , from it we get some chance to just BE (h/t Mara Brock Akil) and even have some representation of Black gender, sexual and romantic diversity that we don’t see on other networks.
So. Blackface may be something we really, really should be rid of by this point in history, but the most important thing is that we don’t mistake a downturn in its popularity for an erasure of its legacy.
Applying History to Everyday Life
How then, do we carry this context into everyday interactions as well as political activity? I want to put this history in the light of everyday life in the US, in order to widen the focus and see how more prevalent kinds of appropriation can affect interpersonal communication because of the history they builds. So, it’s storytime y’all!
Note: I “reversed” the race dynamic but kept it unequal in order to highlight the absurdity of some of the things we experience as Black people, and again I am focusing on a Black/white dynamic because that is where so much tension persists. It’s fiction, but I have borrowed from history--if I have crossed any lines into appropriation here please do not hesitate to let me know so I can adjust accordingly. [CW alcohol use]
--------- Holiday in the USAA --------
It’s March 17, 2015. Today is the kind of holiday where they don’t give you the day off--Kesate Birhan Day, actually, which is supposed to celebrate the first bishop in Ethiopia (who was actually not from there, but people just assume he was). It’s not really a religious thing though, and very much Americanized.
It’s traditional that people wear broken silver chains, usually cheap plastic ones, because Kesate Birhan was a slave as a child and was freed by the king who had once owned him and his brother. There’s usually parades and parties, and way too many people drinking way too much and wearing “Kiss me I’m Ethiopian!” T-shirts, using the only Amharic they know to say “Leh-TAY-nah-chen!” when they clink glasses.
As with many holidays, you have some mixed feelings about celebrating, since it’s technically about a person who helped to spread a religion you don’t even want to belong to in a country you don’t have any personal connection to and feel strange pretending you do. Still, you have lived all your life in the United States of Afro-America, and race is still a touchy subject to say the least--so you go ahead and conform a little even though you self-identify as white.
You try not to see your whiteness and/or your conformity to Black norms as a negative trait, but it’s tough.
White people occupy a social class beneath other minorities: Blackness is the standard and whiteness is deviance, lack, failure. Other minorities face their own injustices and stereotypes as well, but the pressures you face as a white person are sometimes overwhelming.
Simple things that most people consider neutral are kind of not, for you: People say casually “It’s not all black and white!” to say it’s not all good and bad. “Nude” color clothing is clearly brown. Celebrities and models are mostly Black, and so are the mannequins in the store. Even, say, a box of cereal is way more likely to have a brown face than a white one, unless it is specifically in the “non-ethnic” aisle of the store. If you watch TV, most of the white characters included are as Black-conforming as possible, and/or just there as a sidekick or plot device.
In spite of these images in the media, you try to love yourself as you are. But kids will sometimes stare at you in certain neighborhoods because of inherited features coded as unmistakably white-and-therefore-strange: skin like raw dough, blond/e hair that clumps together when wet, undersized nose and lips, cold blue eyes. It’s hard to remind yourself that appearance doesn’t matter all that much when you know that if your skin were just a little darker you would have a much better chance of at least starting conversations with people you might want to get to know better from that site you joined.
Anyway, it’s morning, and the third alarm on your phone goes off. You shuffle out of bed to spend a good 30 minutes trying to crimp and tease your hair into a close-enough Afro, hoping the humidity doesn’t flatten it right back down on the way to your car. You don’t even like wearing your hair like this, but you can’t afford another citation for failing to meet your company’s standards of “professionalism.”
You throw on the same broken chain bracelet you’ve worn the last four years so nobody pinches you for not wearing any, and head to the office.
You open your email to find this:
Sigh. You’re not a drinker, but company culture, networking, blah blah so you go anyway. One of your coworkers, a Black man seriously wearing a full beard of plastic chains is now trying to get you to do shots with him and continually calling you “dude” like that’s what every white person wants to be called. If he weren’t friends with your manager you might have told him exactly where to go with his holiday spirit, but since the powers that be are what they are, you do the whole “well I should probably go, so tired, yawn yawn yawn” thing.
You get home, switch on the oven, TV and laptop, change clothes, and feed the cat. The “Real Royals” is on, and you’re exactly in the right mood for some “reality.” There’s a whole series of these shows, which started with “The Real Royals of NYC (RRNYC),” about the Princesses Obama, daughters of Queen Michelle. There’s a bunch of spinoffs like “The Real Royals of Nihon (RR日本)” centering on Princess Aiko, the Princess Toshi; and “The Real Royals of Foforo Asanteman (RRFA)” set in the post-post-colonial New Ashanti Kingdom.
The one that’s on now is the only one with a predominantly white cast: RRBC, “The Real Royals of the British Commonwealth.” Its main star is Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge. Even though their lives are so different from yours, some of it is relatable and it’s just fun to watch. The made-for-TV-whiteness, homogenized and marketed for mostly non-white audiences doesn’t bother you because you know that this is just one aspect of your culture, but you do wonder sometimes if this is what Black people thing whiteness really is to every white person.
You put your leftover takeout in the oven to heat and open up your social media to see post from a friend of yours who is Black. This is someone you met at a Human Rights for All Races meeting a few years ago, and usually they post things that make you think “wow, they are super aware considering how much social privilege they have.” You imagine it’s partly because they have experienced marginalization based on their sexual orientation, just as you have as well.
You’ve had conversations with them where you felt like you were speaking truths about living as white in a Black world that no other Black person had even understood before. Like when you told them about the hair citation thing at work, their response was “I’m so sorry that happened to you! ‘Professional appearance’ is such garbage anyway. You should just let that straight hair flow!” So, okay, a little idealistic, a little bit implying that you can afford to just stand up for yourself like they could in the same situation, but they’re trying. They care. It’s just how it goes when you have friends with more privilege sometimes, they speak to you from their context because they can’t always imagine another one.
Anyway, this friend had been applying for teaching jobs at a few of the Akee League schools, and has just found out they got a gig at Howard, one of their top picks. You’re really happy for them, because you know how bad they wanted it and how competitive those jobs are.
This, though, is what they posted about their success:
“I GOT THE JOB EVERYONE!!!!!!! Howard U see you soon!!! I do believe a spirited round of applause is due, old chaps! #clippityclap #hairflip #allidoiswin”
And then, to add insult to injury, this GIF:
[Image is an animated GIF of Kate Middleton, smiling widely and clapping, apparently at a sports event. She shakes her hair out of her face as she applauds.]
So. Okay. This Black friend is putting on a persona that is a fake-of-a-fake of whiteness to make a joke, while simultaneously celebrating something they achieved on their own but certainly weren’t hurt by their privilege that allows them to borrow Kate’s expression without losing social standing.
So where do you begin? How do you feel? What do you think? What do you do? Do you say anything about it at all, or let it go? Especially considering the significance of the friendship, and the fact that you are genuinely happy for them? And it’s not like you care deeply about the “Real Royals,” but given all this context, the 100+ years of whiteface and all the other far worse atrocities of racial supremacy and cultural colonialism, things you thought they knew about, what’s your move?
If you were the friend with more privilege who posted the original comment, what might you have done differently, if anything?
Since these kinds of discussions can be tense, it may help to think about and even write down what you might say--it sometimes makes it easier to find the words you want in the moment.
All this stuff is really complex--the important thing is to make informed decisions, learn more about what is potentially at stake, and to stay open to feedback. I mean, we need to be giving each other more agency and not less, especially those of us who have experienced systematic bullying and/or want to fight against it. We can’t afford to bully each other just because we don’t take the time to learn about each other’s history. We are losing each other to internal and societal pressures every day, and we need to do what we can to build each other up.
Let’s create an alternative model of social power and exchange of ideas, that doesn’t rely so heavily on hierarchy. Let’s actively appreciate each other as full human beings and learn from each other because we genuinely care.
This scene right here is what I’m talking about. Just look at what this Black woman has overcome on her path to self-love, look at the powerful reclamation of blackface tropes, and look at this community supporting her expression of this love. Turn off the analysis for a few minutes and just absorb. Let the experience move you, and let it stay with you as you navigate your interactions in the future.
If we can go on genuinely loving ourselves with all this nasty history still echoing around us, then surely there has got to be some hope left in this world.
[Video: Scene from “A Different World” (1991) episode title “Mammy Dearest.” The scene starts with two musicans and a voiceover, then pans to the stage where we see the speaker, a figure wearing all black and holding up a white mask with a wide smile. The speaker is reciting the first four lines of "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, available here. This figure moves off to the left with a sweeping hand gesture, and the character who had been standing behind them is now visible.
We see a Black woman dressed in a Mammy costume (without blackface makeup), who sings the first half of "Dixie" while stirring something in a large mixing bowl, smiling as she sings. She turns her back to the audience at the end of the song, and from beneath her skirt a character emerges, dressed as a "pickaninny," with full blackface makeup. She sings a line of "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" and does a dance while reciting her lines. She dances off to the right, and the music changes.
The main character is now facing the audience, but at the rear of the stage. From under the full skirt comes a woman dressed in "African" garb, and as she dances two other dancers dressed similarly come out and join her on the stage. The camera jumps between the stage and the musicians playing banjo and drums, and the dancers on the stage unfurl the skirt of the main character, which is revealed to have a tapestry of African art and is held up as a backdrop.
The main character is now revealed to have been wearing a long black dress with long sleeves, and no longer has a kerchief on her head. She raises her arms in a V shape. The two other main dancers flank her, now dancing in step with each other, as she steps forward and begins reciting “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” by Nikki Giovanni, which you can find here. She speaks with dramatic hand gestures for emphasis.
As she speaks, the dancers take fabric strips from the back of her skirt, including the red gingham from the mammy costume and a shiny gold fabric, and wind them around her, draping them over her outstretched arms. They place on her head a large fabric crown made of the same two fabrics right at the end of the poem. The audience applauds.]
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