Blackface

[1] Scholars with this wider view may date the practice of blackface to as early as Medieval Europe's mystery plays when bitumen and coal were used to darken the skin of white performers portraying demons, devils, and damned souls.

[14]By objectifying formerly enslaved people through demeaning, humor-inducing stock caricatures, "comedic performances of 'blackness' by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up, [could not] be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core".

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.

[17] 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.

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.

"[44] 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.

Writes Eric Lott in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class: "The black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening – and male – Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them.

[59] Light-skinned people who performed in blackface in film included Al Jolson,[60] Eddie Cantor,[61] Bing Crosby,[60] 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. Stone in several of the Boston Blackie films.

[70] 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.

Kimmel repeatedly impersonated the NBA player on The Man Show and even made an appearance on Crank Yankers using his exaggerated Ebonics/African-American Vernacular English to prank call about Beanie Babies.

A 2012 Popchips commercial showing actor Ashton Kutcher with brown make-up on his face impersonating a stereotypical Indian person generated controversy and was eventually pulled by the company after complaints of racism.

A widespread Instagram post by the Slow Factory Foundation, an activist group founded by Céline Semaan Vernon, calling attention to digital blackface led to many critiques and criticisms about whether or not it was appropriate for non-Black people to continue sharing these images of Winfrey.

[150] These "colored" troupes – many using the name "Georgia Minstrels"[151] – focused on "plantation" material, rather than the more explicit social commentary (and more nastily racist stereotyping) found in portrayals of northern black people.

James Monroe Trotter  – a middle-class African American who had contempt for their "disgusting caricaturing" but admired their "highly musical culture" – wrote in 1882 that "few ... who condemned black minstrels for giving 'aid and comfort to the enemy'" had ever seen them perform.

From the early 1930s to the late 1940s, New York City's famous Apollo Theater in Harlem featured skits in which almost all black male performers wore the blackface makeup and huge white painted lips, despite protests that it was degrading from the NAACP.

The United Artists 1933 release "Mickey's Mellerdrammer" – the name a corruption of "melodrama" thought to harken back to the earliest minstrel shows – was a film short based on a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin by the Disney characters.

[179] Actors and dancers in blackface appeared in music videos such as Grace Jones's "Slave to the Rhythm" (1985, also part of her touring piece A One Man Show),[180] Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" (1982)[181] and Taco's "Puttin' On the Ritz" (1983).

The licorice brand Tabu, popularized by Perfetti in the middle of the 20th century, introduced in the 1980s a cartoon minstrel mascot inspired by Al Jolson's blackface performance in The Jazz Singer, which is still in use today.

[193] In the Netherlands and Belgium, people annually celebrate St. Nicolas Eve with Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas, accompanied by multiple helpers or "Zwarte Pieten" (Black Petes).

[194] The Moorish Zwarte Piet character has been traced back to the middle of the 19th century when Jan Schenkman, a popular children's book author, added a black servant to the Sinterklaas story.

[195] The Dag Sinterklaas TV series written by Hugo Matthysen in Belgium since the early 1990s provided a non-racial explanation: Zwarte Piet is black not because of his skin, because of sliding through the chimney to deliver presents.

[231] In March 2018, comedian of the year[232] Mariana Mazza (fr), whose parents are Arab and Uruguayan, celebrated International Women's Day by putting up a post on her Facebook page which read "Vive la diversité" (Hurray for diversity) and was accompanied by a picture of herself surrounded by eight ethnic variations, including one in a wig and makeup that showed what she'd look like if she were black.

In June 2018, theatre director Robert Lepage was accused of staging scenes that were reminiscent of blackface[236] when he put together the show SLĀV at the Montreal Jazz Festival, notably because white performers were dressed as slaves as they picked cotton.

[264][265] The director, Thomas Schendel, in his response to critics, argued that the classical and common plays would not offer enough roles that would justify a repertoire position for a black actor in a German theatre company.

[283] In March 2015 a music television program produced by the Fuji TV network was scheduled to show a segment featuring two Japanese groups performing together in blackface, Rats & Star and Momoiro Clover Z.

Soviet artists "did not quite understand the harm of representing black people in this way, and continued to employ this method, even in creative productions aimed specifically at critiquing American race relations".

The Black Act was passed at a time of economic downturn that led to heightened social tensions, and in response to a series of raids by two groups of poachers who blackened their faces to prevent identification.

This led to cross-cultural collaborations, as Giddins writes; but the often ruthless exploitation of African-American artistic genius, as well – by other, white performers and composers; agents; promoters; publishers; and record company executives.

[343][344][345][346][347] While blackface in the literal sense has played only a minor role in entertainment in recent decades, various writers see it as epitomizing an appropriation and imitation of black culture that continues today.

[12] "To this day," he writes, "Whites admire, envy and seek to emulate such supposed innate qualities of Blackness as inherent musicality, natural athleticism, the composure known as 'cool' and superior sexual endowment", a phenomenon he views as part of the history of blackface.