Please stop equating blackface with whiteface

In case you missed it, the world was once again subjected to the wit of white people thinking it’s hilarious and harmless fun to don blackface. According to Times Live, two white, male Stellenbosch University students painted their faces brown, dressed up like Venus and Serena Williams, and posted photos of themselves online.

The report notes that this is the second such incident in as many months.

From “Africa-themed” parties in Australia to American celebrities donning blackface for Halloween to South African students… white people are clearly not done with blackface, so this won’t be the last time we see this. And South Africa still has a long way to go to eradicating the consequences of its troubled racial history, so it probably won’t be the last such incident there, either.

Anyone who wants to know why blackface is offensive to black people only needs to ask a black person, or read the Wikipedia page on the subject. However, the typical response of the defenders of blackface suggests this is too much to ask.

That typical response (like the ones below) goes something like: It’s not meant to hurt anyone; it’s just a bit of fun. Besides how is this any different from black people in whiteface?

So, #BlackFace is taboo, but #WhiteFace is okay? I am offended by this!! #Libtards are such #Hypocrites pic.twitter.com/fxrTGj1JZQ

— Eric West™ (@EricJWest) September 24, 2014

With those in blackface always just “having fun”, the internalised belief seems to run: we’re good people, so we can’t be racist. And we live in a post-racial world, so anyone offended by this must surely be too sensitive. No doubt those European football fans who throw bananas on the pitch while making monkey chants to express their feelings about black players are also just having fun in a post-racial world.

It’s curious how nobody ever suggests Jews are too sensitive whenever a Jewish person points out where someone has crossed the line by making an offensive joke about Jews. Neither has it escaped the notice of black people that the only people entertained by blackface today are usually white people (and other non-black people who have been exposed to American pop culture), just as it was in the nineteenth century when white people donned blackface to entertain other white people at the expense of black people.

Julianne Hough in blackface for Halloween. It keeps happening, black people keep explaining why it’s offensive, and yet it keeps happening. One characteristic of white privilege is the power to determine the dominant narrative.

What defenders of blackface gloss over is the fact that blackface cannot escape its history. It’s a history of one group of people exercising power over another group. And blackface today is still about power. When white people don blackface, make excuses for it and dismiss black people’s objections they are saying: we decide the dominant narrative and there’s nothing you can do about it. They are saying we choose to ignore the fact that blackface influenced how white people saw black people in the nineteenth century, and in our more connected globalised world how it influences the way people everywhere see black people even today.

But it takes a wilful blindness to history not to mention a lack of empathy to ignore what the practice was created to convey, the environment in which it was created and everything it rehashes for black people every time someone dons blackface: slavery, colonialism, segregation, oppression, the devaluation of black existence, the institutionalisation of racism (even in the legal systems then and now), inequality and white privilege, and the desire to maintain white privilege while pretending we are now all equal.

That history and everything associated with blackface is why it cannot ever be equated with whiteface. White people as a whole have never been subjected to the system described above for the benefit of black people.

So, to those who keep trying to pretend that blackface is no different from whiteface, and that it’s nothing but a joke that black people are too sensitive to see, please find another absurd defence with which to entertain your delusions.