How Blackface Has Evolved In The Digital Era
The unnecessary provocation that many white people engage in, often without realizing what they’re doing
It was one of those moments where you’re mid-sentence, typing up a response to a reader’s comment when you realize: either this is going to be an obnoxiously long response, or I can just turn it into a whole separate essay… yeah… I think I’m gonna go with the 2nd option. So here we are. Doesn’t happen often but when it does, I find it’s worth it. Because if one person had the question, then maybe others did too.
Last month I wrote an essay regarding the racist tropes that came up in the murder trial of Ahmaud Arbury. Specifically, the “long dirty toenails” comment. I was attempting to explain some history of the Jim Crow caricature and the use of burnt cork (blackface) in minstrelsy. At one point, I quickly referenced the fact that America still does blackface. But I didn’t expand on that part beyond writing:
“…these troubling tropes still persist. They live on, in seen and unseen ways. In both overt racism and unconscious, implicit bias. And lest we think we’re better than that, consider for a moment that America still does blackface. But because Hollywood has modernized it, and thus, rendered it mostly unrecognizable (at least to White…
