My astonishment is perennially unabated that Joni Mitchell has somehow avoided peremptory cancellation despite her decades-long love for blackface and appropriation of Black identity.
If you're curious, here's a nice summary of her long-standing belief in herself as practically a Black man. I mean, sure, everybody thinks Rachel Dolezal was a crazy grifter, but Joni? She's an Artiste, y'see.
She was even publicly enabled in this belief and behavior. The late Black critic Greg Tate showed up at a Joni Mitchell symposium in 2004 to deliver a cringe presentation on how Joni is actually Black. For, you see, there are Black people who liked her. Charles Mingus. And Prince. And Prince is cool, right? Here's a choice quote from his hipster word salad: "[Joni Mitchell is] so black that we need consider her the Gnostic Mary Magdalene of Afro-bohemian post-soul culture." Which I'm sure he thought were lovely references and words to string together into a sentence, whether or not they made sense when thus assembled. And on the topic: "So black that when she turned up as a Black man on the cover of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, I thought brujo and not minstrel show." The Germans have a useful word for what I'm feeling: fremdschämen, "to be embarrassed because someone else has embarrassed themselves (and doesn't notice)."
So, when a well-known Black writer like Tate spends his credibility like a drunken sailor on shore leave, who's gonna question otherwise-undisguisable cultural appropriation? And trust me when I say that he is not alone among critics and writers in enabling and explaining away her behavior.
Mitchell's website, presumably out of a need not to appear to bury the controversy, features a number of third-party articles that discuss her use of blackface and even the accusations that she did so exploitatively. However, as Thomas Aquinas did in his masterpiece of begging the question, Summa Theologiae, by structuring all sorts of counterarguments and challenges to Christian doctrine and, mirabile dictu, then providing "logical" refutations of all the objections, all the articles I've seen on Mitchell's site that address this controversy seem somehow to come around to the conclusion that her blackface was okay because Reasons. Like, she's an Artiste. And Greg Tate liked her. And Prince.
When, as late as 2016, the BBC ran the article "When Joni Mitchell wore blackface for Halloween," Mitchell "declined to comment for this article except to reassert her often-repeated desire to begin her autobiography, should it ever appear: 'I was the only black man at the party'."
At any rate, tl;dr: Joni Mitchell: Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Followed closely by white privilege. She abused both of them.
