,
7 tweets,
1 min read
Read on Twitter
Seems worth saying and repeating: The point of blackface isn't to make you look like a black person, much less to make you look like a SPECIFIC black person. The point of blackface is to make you look like a racial caricature.
If you, a white person, think you look more like any specific black person with cork or shoe polish on your face than you do with your own damn skin on your face, that's racism at work. Period.
A space alien from outer space isn't going to think that you, joe white guy, looks more like Kurtis Blow if you cork up. Because corking up isn't about copying another human being's appearance. It's about enacting a caricature. EVEN IF YOU DON'T KNOW THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE DOING.
So if you've got an "innocent" blackface incident in your past—one that you didn't think of as grounded in racism or racial caricature—you've gotta understand, and express, that yes, it actually was. Even if you didn't consciously realize it at the time.
Blackface is a cultural practice grounded in white supremacy. The belief that putting a bunch of crap on your face makes you look like a black person is belief that can exist only because of and in the context of racism.
What some public figures are describing as innocent blackface is actually—in the most charitable possible reading—actually ignorant, grotesquely and malignantly so. And naming it for what it is seems like a reasonable minimal bar in 2019.
(Also: Many people are going to be highly disinclined to adopt the most charitable possible reading. That's their right, and you're gonna have to suck it up. Sorry.)
