Blackface history month
It’s a virus that’s not quite latent, not exactly active, something we as a nation can’t seem to shake. Not least of all because we don’t really want to.
They stand side by side in the grainy photograph, facing the stark, blinding full-on light of a camera flash: the grinning stereotype and the hooded enforcer, two antagonists posing for a picture in a kum ba yah meet & greet from the bizzarro world.
The dapper grinning gent on the left is a white man wearing stage makeup or shoe polish, chocolate syrup or any number of other, temporary agents with which to darken his face. The person on the right is dressed as a full-hooded member of the Ku Klux Klan.
The photo is from the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page of Ralph S. Northam, who is now the Democratic governor of Virginia. Northam is either one figure in the photo or the other. He claims not to remember which one he is.
◊ ◊ ◊
The governor apologized on Feb. 1, a day after the right-wing Big League Politics web site published it. What followed were demands for his resignation; a leper’s shunning by Democrats across the country; and a noisy, still-smoldering debate over whether he should remain in office. His statehouse colleague, Virginia attorney general Mark R. Herring, owned up to donning blackface some time back in the 80’s (even as he faced some of the same blowback that the governor is dealing with).
William Faulkner, an astute social observer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, haunts us with nine words and their grasp of history and human nature, including the resurgence of poisonous caricatures he would recognize today, the meme of passive-aggressive racial intolerance historically known as blackface.
“The past is never dead,” he observed in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.”
Ralph Northam and Mark Herring know that. So do others in the political world. We can thank The Washington Post for its recent survey of politicians for whom blackface experience has been some kind of rite of passage, even from one phase of adulthood to another.
“We may be at a tipping point, because of what we’re seeing with politicians having actual consequences,” said Mia Moody-Ramirez, director of the American studies department at Baylor University, to The Post. “It’s heavily covered in the media. And it’s no longer okay to say, ‘If I wear these, I’m just being funny. People know my heart.’”
◊ ◊ ◊
If that was the end of it — if politics was the reliable water’s-edge boundary for the velocity of blackface into our modern culture — that would make its persistence at least semi-predictable.
But Northam’s unforced error re-opened the floodgates of blackface tolerance that former NBC Today show anchor Megyn Kelly previously opened last October, with on-air comments that questioned the social taboos surrounding blackface. It’s been re-emerging in the mainstream lately, and aggressively, in varying degrees from the frankly incidental to the glaringly obvious.
On Feb. 11, a line of shoes designed by the singer Katy Perry was withdrawn from her Katy Perry Collections web site after a growing chorus of complaints about one design that appeared to be in blackface style. The Perry collection may have been unfairly caught up in the recent controversy; the shoe’s design was originally offered in nine different colors — only one of which was black. If so, Perry’s work was an unfortunate victim of increased focus on a pervasive trend that’s not as innocently explained away.
About a week after Northam started navigating his scandal in Virginia, the Gucci fashion house quietly stopped selling a $890 black balaclava adorned with a mouth hole designed to look like a pair of bright red lips — this after customers and observers expressed outrage at Gucci stores and over social media.
Gucci, of course, began its All Apologies tour immediately. “We consider diversity to be a fundamental value to be fully upheld, respected, and at the forefront of every decision we make,” Gucci said in a statement that clearly didn’t dovetail with reality.
Prada did much the same thing in December, withdrawing from sale and apologizing for its misbegotten Pradamalia line of keychains and figurines that featured jet-black monkeys with bright red lips, products with an obvious lineage to traditional racist caricature.
“They are imaginary creatures not intended to have any reference to the real world and certainly not blackface,” the fashion house said in a Dec. 14 tweet. “Prada Group never had the intention of offending anyone and we abhor all forms of racism and racist imagery.”
Making amends, Prada announced earlier this month that conceptual artist Theaster Gates and filmmaker Ava DuVernay will direct a group intended to “elevate voices of color” and “advise the company as it invests in diverse talent development.”
More recently, the police chief of Baton Rouge, La., apologized after a 1993 photo was discovered showing two officers wearing blackface, supposedly as a disguise for a narcotics operation. On Feb. 11, Chief Murphy Paul admitted the actions were “inappropriate and offensive.” The photo was also reportedly featured in the police department’s 1993 yearbook above the caption “Soul Brothers.”
“The Baton Rouge Police Department would like to apologize to our citizens and to anyone who may have been offended by the photographs.” Paul also said that current department policy bans the use of blackface “under any circumstances.”
Mayor Sharon Weston Broome, a black woman and the city’s first African American mayor, said in a statement that “[w]hile this may have been department-approved 25 years ago, that does not make it right.”
Even Karl Lagerfeld, the late avatar of fashion innovation, couldn’t resist the backwardness of blackface. In June 2010, Lagerfeld photographed supermodel Claudia Schiffer adorned in blackface and wearing an Afro wig that would’ve rivaled Angela Davis’ legendary nimbus from the ‘60’s.
And it’s hard to forget what happened last March, at Kindezi Old Fourth Ward Charter School in Atlanta. That’s where a group of second graders recited Paul Laurence Dunbar’s moving 1913 poem “We Wear the Mask” … while holding masks of cartoon-like black faces with the exaggerated features that define blackface.
◊ ◊ ◊
Why is blackface such a pervasive … thing these days? The timing is obviously suspect. The new/recent blackface outbreak has so many examples, it’s almost as if some vast supremacist marketing plan was visited on the national landscape all at once. The towering indifference of the Trump White House to this (and other important social matters requiring the presidential perspective in the national conversation) suggests that’s exactly what’s happened. There’s a sense of tolerance, even a kind of permission for racial animus from Washington, a silence that seems to confer consent.
The fallout of the racial chafing that Trump exploits may have been distilled in a recent Pew Research Center poll, which found that 34 percent of Americans think it’s always or sometimes acceptable to engage in blackface for a Halloween costume.
The current blackface wave and its antecedents also suggest that, if our cultural norms were just slightly different, if the spirit of Halloween managed to work its way through the rest of the year, blackface would be more common than it already is.
But one needn’t have the psychoanalytical skills of Sigmund Freud to see that the act of disguising ourselves reveals a disquiet with our own identities, a discomfort with some part of our true selves — and, in the case of blackface, a desire to live vicariously (and briefly) as the exaggerated object of literal social derision.
“We are divided, contradictory creatures with an uncanny capacity, not only to disguise ourselves from other people, but to masquerade our own wishes and desires from ourselves,” psychologist Bruce C. Poulsen observed in Psychology Today in October 2012.
In truth, blackface has always been there, undead and bubbling just under the surface, and has been for generations. Not quite latent, not exactly active, a low-grade virus we as a nation can’t seem to shake. Ever. Not least of all because we as a nation don’t really want to.
We’re not trying to get that sickness out of this country because at some level we as a nation have deeply inculcated the idea that it’s innocent and juvenile and smirkingly rebellious and therefore not that big a deal when it happens. Why? Because fun. Because Halloween. We need to feel innocent about something.
No matter who it hurts.
As Black History Month 2019 comes to a close, it’s disconcerting to see just how much history is current events, how — thank you William Faulkner — history isn’t history at all. We don’t learn enough from our mistakes, and we may not be learning anything from our history. One-third of the country looks at blackface and sees nothing wrong, or nothing at all.
I look at the either/or Ralph Northams and the two Baton Rouge cops, that ridiculous fool’s shawl from Gucci and the crowd of cartoon faces at a charter school in Atlanta, and what follows isn’t fear, and sure as hell isn’t rage. It’s just a sorrow at what the mask of blackface reveals about those who wear it (with or without a grasp of its deeper connotations) and the nation for which they stand — that, and a sad but necessarily detached bemusement at just how tragically dumb a great nation can be.
