Header image: KF in Dall-E
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91d9k96z#main
- In fact, criminal justice and race reporter for the Guardian, Jamiles Lartey, notes that poor and uneducated working-class whites, such as the Irish, who felt socially excluded from the Anglo elites, used blackface as a way of gaining social acceptance – that, they too, were white, desirable, and civilized above all else – which was completely opposite to what blackness meant in white society. In this regard, blackface has long been used as a tool to unify and promote white supremacy and also to celebrate a symbol of white power and white American patriotism.
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(Apr 2019) ‘Reasserting white power’: behind the psychosis that gave rise to blackface https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/01/reasserting-white-power-behind-the-psychosis-that-gave-rise-to-blackface
In his 2006 book Black Like You, Strausbaugh traces the roots of blackface minstrelsy to New York’s Bowery Theatre and young Irish performers darkening their skin in comic imitations of blacks on plantations.
The form would undergo one last tonal shift at the onset of the jazz age. Like the Irish before them, nominally white Jewish performers began blacking up to sing and dance in mimicry of black artists, for arguably many of the same reasons as a century earlier. “It became a way of proving one’s whiteness because, if one was becoming black through blackface then you weren’t black,” Leonard said.
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- Users and developers who do not identify with black and queer identities, but still partake in the creation and sharing of these Bitmojis are complicit in digital blackface because they are participating in cultural appropriation.