Blackface

[Hoovie]

Jermyn, I greatly appreciate you thoughts here. Thank you very much!

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by houston

Griffin... Peter Griffin.

thank you. They never show his name in the Closed Captioning, or at least rarely; so I can't quite make out all of the consonant stops. To top it off, you can't read the lips of the cartoon characters either. What's with that? If they took a little more time with it, hired vast studios of Korean artists, then they could produce something that makes sense.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Jermyn Davidson

From what I know about "blackface", there was NEVER anything really positive about it. I read that it started from the beginining as white folks portraying blacks as buffoons and became even more demeaning when black folks put on on white face and then put on black face to depict blacks as idiots.

The whole history of it is disturbing.

You would be hard pressed to have me say anything good about that part of our history.

It is best left alone to disappear.



Then again, as some black folks have assumed "ownership" of the "n-word", they have taken a word so hateful and demeaning and turned it into a term of endearment-- a term I purposely go out oy my way to not use.

But what an example of turning yesterday's lemons into today's lemon ade!


Can the same thing happen with blackface?

Maybe, I'm just not sure I want it to. It's so insulting and it is painful to even think about the country I love with the past she has.

It was racist, however, from what I have read, at the start - it was a way to try and get "Black" music into "White" Vaudeville halls. Blacks were banned from performing - even in most Northern venues. Yet, there was a tremendous demand for "Black" musical styles. Most of the 19th century street car lines had legs that were planned specifically to go to "Black" entertainment districts where "Whites" congregated in large numbers to hear Jazz and other types of music (I'm thinking specifically of the old "Five Points" street car line in Denver. To this day, clubs, bars and musical venues line that now defunct route).

Seeing so many patrons hoping a street car and going to other parts of town (and spending their money elsewhere) led to "White" performers who respected and appreciated the Black music to don "black face" and to imitate that sound. This would have been even before Al Jolson and company.

Later, of course, the cruelty and mockery of "comedy" acts took over. No race was spared. To be fair, whites suffered from the abuse as well - and always have. Particularly downtrodden groups like the Irish, and later, the Poles.

[canam]

Everyone makes fun of someone !