Written by Dakota Fisher
Seeing white people, or anyone of non-African descent wear blackface is racist, degrading, and quite frankly, just ridiculous. Here are 5 of the many reasons why you shouldn’t do blackface this Halloween.
Racist: The year is 2016 and the fact that there are countless amounts of people every year doing blackface is absolutely disgusting.
Doing blackface is wrong. It’s very insensitive to people of color and tasteless.
History: It has been clearly established in American culture that blackface is in poor taste, degrading, and, for lack of a better word, taboo, yet this is still an issue, and the people that argue that it’s not are wrong. Blackface is drawn from a painful and oppressive point in American history and is ridiculously uncalled for.
T.D. Rice created blackface to appropriate black culture and degrade it. He mocked them when he performed in blackface during his minstrel shows in the 1800’s. The character he developed was called Jim Crow. Subsequently, he profited on mocking African-Americans for years.
Identifiable: It is 100% possible to portray an African American character or person without doing blackface. If someone puts on a black leather leotard, black high heels, pumps up their bangs and walks around, drunkenly singing “All the Single Ladies”, it’s not hard to discern that you’re dressed up as Beyonce without having your face painted an awful, and degrading shade of brown.
Reinforces racial stereotypes: Blackface, along with brownface, or any other form of face paint that is used in a way to make your skin look like a different race reinforces racial stereotypes. Making your face a shade of brown that is similar to that of people that live in the Middle East (although they come in different shades) and pairing the ugly paint with a turban and calling yourself a terrorist is not only offensive it also perpetuates the idea that all Middle Eastern people are terrorists which is just awful.
Other options: There are so many other things to dress as. Be a nurse, be a cheerleader, hell, be a lizard for all I care, but If you’re standing in the middle of the makeup aisle at your local Halloween store, eyeballing that brown face paint and find yourself thinking, “hmmmm should I dress as Osama Bin Laden this year?” The answer, I can assure you, is ‘no.”
