Is the Entertainment World Finally Burying ‘Blackface’?
by Bruce Chadwick
9-25-15
This week, the Metropolitan Opera ended its long-standing practice of having singers who play the ‘Moor’ Othello in Verdi’s opera Otello .. wear blackface ...
The history of blackface in American entertainment goes all the way back to the 1840s, when traveling minstrel shows became popular. The shows used all white casts. The singers would don blackface (burnt cork, greasepaint or shoe polish) and then appropriate (a wonderful word for steal) African-American songs and dances for their white show. The men would then dance across the stage, white bodies, black faces and white gloves on their now black hands (many wore wooly black wigs, too). Audiences in the 1840s, and for decades after, loved it. The movies did the same when they arrived in 1903. Film companies hired all white casts and had some of them put on blackface to play black roles. In movies, the blackface often looked crude, like someone had fallen into a puddle of mud. In The Birth of a Nation, hundreds of white actors and actresses wore blackface and portrayed blacks as fools, thugs and outright rapists ...
It was time for the Confederate flags to be brought down and it is now time for blackface to dance and sing its way off stage, too.
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160718
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What always gets me is now in modern film it is ok for all the beef nugget white he-man soldiers to black face up for "strategic operations" at night. However they do not "white face" up people of color in films for day light? Is this "acceptable casualties" or just an awareness they would have revolution on their hands?
I saw Lawrence of Arabia this week end, and as the film progressed Peter O'Toole's face darkened and his blue eyes had eye liner to make him more "white. Yet they made a concerted effort to show "how fair" he was when captured by the Turkish in what was implied torture and rape. And he certainly was so white from the neck down he glowed in the dark, rather like the Beatles first visit on the beach in Florida from the North Countries.
All this obsession with old views of race has to go. Finally.
Poor Richard having to endure that stupidity, although there WAS "black humor" present ( see how that works?). There is something about a blue eyed Jewish Boy in black face that is surreal and absurd.Rather like Joleson who I never understood.There was a whole lot of fear and fascination present that is still here
in Law Enforcement, and in Big Oil and Coal who enforce these immature anachronistic thought forms. Seeing change in this after all these years means the generation that produced profits from it are no longer with us in numbers. FINALLY
