The practice of using “Blackface” makeup in the American minstrel theater tradition of the 19th Century persisted well into the 1900s. White actors applying burnt cork, then grease and black shoe polish, donned the makeup and wore woolly wigs while depicting racist stereotypes. While every race was mocked satirically at the time, none were more disrespected than Black people.
Thomas D. Rice, a white minstrel actor, became an international star due to his blackface act. Rice, who was born in New York City, imitated Black speech inflections, songs and dance in his act. He is credited with popularizing blackface in America and for acting as the “Jim Crow” character of lore. There are several unfounded accounts that Rice created the character by imitating Black slave speech and songs. Rice was so popular that the character he played became associated with segregation laws that surfaced in the late 1870s and continued well into the 1960s.
With its popularity waning, minstrel shows continued to highlight blackface performers with actual Black actors starring in hammy roles while in full blackface dress. By the 1930s, protests from groups like the NAACP made the performances controversial, but there was still a demand for such shows across Europe and much of the South. By the height of the American civil rights movement, blackface was all but gone from the mainstream.
The practice of blackface made its way to Europe not just onstage, but also by way of a the long-running ‘Black Pete’ celebration in The Netherlands. Among Dutch people across the globe, the celebration includes white Europeans painting themselves with blackface paint, wearing bright red lipstick and curly Afro wigs. Though the celebrations has been denounced by Black Dutch residents it still continues.
In Spike Lee’s 2000 movie Bamboozled, Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover played the Black stars of a modern-day minstrel show, which became extremely popular despite its racist overtones.
In America, blackface continues its ugly tradition of mocking Blacks. Last November in Missouri, an all-white powder-puff high school football team in the town of Sullivan posted photos of the squad in blackface on social media. Naturally, the girls feigned ignorance to blackface’s poisonous history and said they weren’t being racist.
This past March in Elk City, Okla., city commissioner and mayoral hopeful Bill Helton was forced to apologize after video surfaced of him playing a stereotypical Black character named Pollyester Kotton. Helton, a part-time hairdresser, said he was imitating one of his clients.
Kim Kardashian’s half-sister, Kylie Jenner, was featured in a questionable photo covered in dark makeup. Although she claimed it wasn’t a mockery of Black culture, the teenage star still took some flack. After Ray Rice admitted to knocking out his now wife Janay Palmer Rice, some people thought it would be a good idea to don blackface for Halloween costumes mocking the couple. Those are just a small handful of blackface incidents in modern times many of which have been exposed via social media.
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