There’s a powerful scene in “Bamboozled,” Spike Lee’s most difficult and underappreciated movie, in which the street-actor characters played by Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson, having been recruited into a scheme that involves staging a deliberately outrageous, racist pilot for a TV show, find themselves in the dressing room applying blackface. The camera lingers as the cork burns and the grease paint is prepared, and pulls back to show us the characters as they see themselves in the mirror, watching their natural brown hues turn to a shiny, oily black.
Blackface was both insult and injury. Used by white actors, it offered literal cover for the most offensive caricature; used by black actors, it represented a negation of oneself that was demanded to earn a living as a performer, and worse, the prerequisite of dehumanization in order to represent those portrayed as one’s own community, one’s own self. More than any law or repressive policy, it sent the message that black people were simply not human.
Over the weekend, I was shown a tube of grease paint of a make used back in the blackface heyday. A small, banal object, yet one invested with so much and so troubling a meaning. Well it turns out that just a couple of days earlier, the British daily The Independent ran this front-page image in honor of its “Africa issue” with half of the day’s revenues to help fight AIDS on the continent. The depiction is of Kate Moss, the decidedly non-black British fashion model and alleged onetime cocaine/heroin fiend, not only blackened but Blackened — bigger lips, thicker brows, fleshier cheeks. “NOT A FASHION STATEMENT,” the headline blares, while an inset on the sidebar promises a poster of the image inside.
Here’s a British term: BOLLOCKS! That’s also the view of Sunny from Asians in Media and Pickled Politics, our sister-from-another-mother site from across the pond, who puts it succinctly:
Could they not find a black model to represent Africa?
A particularly typical example of liberal guilt “we-feel-sorry-for-you” racism. You see they would have liked to to put a black model on the front but she just would not have sold as many copies. So they used a druggie.
It would have been better for the Indy to not even bother.
Hannah Pool in The Guardian has more:
You can just imagine the meeting. “Let’s do an Africa issue,” says Well Meaning Executive Number 1. “Great, who shall we get on the cover? Iman? Naomi?” asks WME 2. “Nah … too obvious. I know, how about Kate Moss? Let’s make her look African!” Cue much back-slapping at their own cleverness, followed by, perhaps, a lunch of jollof rice and curried goat to seal the deal. (…)
What exactly is this picture of Moss-as-African-woman supposed to portray? I suppose it is meant to be subversive, but what does it say about race today when a quality newspaper decides that its readers will only relate to Africa through a blacked-up white model rather than a real-life black woman? What does it say about the fight against HIV/Aids if that is the only way to make us care? And, as a black woman (born that way), what does this trick say about me?
Pool describes several other instances of “blacking up” in British entertainment and media today, noting that there’s something of a trend in this direction going on. It seems that the backlash against “political correctness” is such, in the UK at least, that any outrage is acceptable or even desirable, as if basic anti-racism were some kind of tendentious, dogmatic ideology:
Why has it become OK for people to black up? “People feel free to play with this stuff because they are operating in an environment where the criticism of being politically correct allows you to do what you want,” says academic Paul Gilroy. “The threat of being labelled politically correct creates an environment where we are scared to voice our objections.” Given the context, the Kate Moss picture is “empty nihilism,” he says.
Though we’ve long had our own backlash against “PC” here in the United States, the prospect of a prominent white actor or model appearing in actual or virtual blackface is, I’d venture to say, more remote. But other communities — whether ethnic, religious, regional — that have not achieved a certain degree of recognition and respect in the US should see this as a cautionary tale. The urge to appropriate, marginalize, and trivialize, with an amazing level of ignorance and insouciance, is apparently built into the workings of our consumer society. Ah, them crazy whitefolks, what will they come up with next?
Ah, thanks for the correction and thanks for the reply. Can’t argue with any doctrine of self-defense, myself.
Mr. Kobayashi – there’s nothing a billionaire can do about it? Huh. I can think of something he can do…..
Ever since JFK, pop culture and celebrities have appropriated the “I am …” to fit whatever agenda they have to push, regardless of what it really means.
i think gwyneth is smoking. too bad she’s racist cuz she doesn’t hook up with the brown 🙁
So how come you are so sure, unless you are all of the above?
Right on Mr. Kobayashi. I couldn’t have said it better than you in #49.
Hey desitude, I ain’t from the UK but I know this film would never get off the ground here in the US:
White guilt gets the best of white people some times.
Ew.
White Liberal Guilt exposed in all it’s ugly, misinformed, patronising glory.
We are not ‘all Africa.’ Standing in solidarity with AIDS sufferers does not equate to getting a cokehead supermodel to paint her face black, thicken her lips, flesh out her emaciated frame and call it a day. Oh, and there’s a poster too!
What the hell were the editors of the Independent thinking? They were right about one thing, it’s NOT a fashion statement.
It’s a statement indicating the nature of the insidious racism underlying Western society, particularly British society with is sizeable population of Black Britons, that they couldn’t find one African model to grace the cover instead.
I guess non-white people only make the cover when they’re some emaciated African kid or American-funded terrorist. I don’t know how this ever got to the newsstands without someone realising what they were doing. Maybe the Independent execs were too full of their meal of red beans and rice to see that ‘blackface’ is never a good idea.
just some perspective. about 8% of britons are non-white. about 30% of americans are non-hispanic and/or non-white.
t-Hype, I believe it was shown in the US.From the link you sent –
“White guilt gets the best of white people some times.”
No idea what you mean by this,
With regards to ‘Shoot the Messenger’, which t-hype highlighted – the problem isn’t as much that the writer wants to show that black people in the UK can also be to blame for their own problems (duh) but rather that the only time there is a programme about black people, there is a majorly negative connotation. The last time the BBC did a program featuring a black person talking about his community it was called ‘Who you callin a nigger?’ and had one guy (you guessed it) pointing out problems within his own community. There is nothing aspirational and negative/positive in the way, let’s say Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee was, for black people.
Of course this narrative now extends to Muslims – with most discussions about them framed in a context around terrorism or (lack of) integration.
With regards to the original post, someone above said: “it makes you think, intentionally or not.“
I think the paper’s aim was more to get a reaction, which is highly stupid given it was the rare issue focused exclusively on a moral issue that should not need to be made into a fashion statement. The Indy tries to get a reaction every day otherwise anyway with its screaming headlines. It has embarassingly become the Daily Mail for liberals.
i dont like the cover.. it’s racist.. a better cover would have been a whole lot of different faces of all colours & hues to form the shape of the map of Africa..
i dont like the cover.. it’s racist.. a better cover would have been a whole lot of different faces of all colours & hues to form the shape of the map of Africa..
how about bits & pieces of gwyneth paltrow assembled into a map of africa?
Well, at least there doing something, which is more than most. Bono, Gates, Buffet, Paltrow–these guilt ridden liberals that are being mocked as racists–aren’t going to solve any problems (that won’t happen until Africa liberalizes, especially economically) but maybe they can supply a bridge loan of sorts to this end.
Only Africans can save Africa, but one thing we can do is stop spending billions subsidizing our agricultural sector, which leads to chronic overproduction and the dumping of surpluses on global markets, making it imposible for africa to compete.
don’t hate on the paltrow. puleez.
Racist? I don’t really think so. But it is definitely patronizing. Especially coming from a white person. If it were me, I would have used 3 different models. One Black, one Indian, one E. Asian. THEN, I might have switched the ethnicities around. 3 different covers. So maybe have a black woman saying “I’m Chinese.” That way they could have spotlighted how HIV is affecting Africa, India, and China.
Whoever said this cover gets people talking is right. We ARE talking. But we aren’t talking about HIV… which makes me doubt the sincerity of the campaign.
From my experience, the general rule for most observers regarding mixed-race people… is that the person is associated with the racial group he most resembles. If Tiger Woods looks black, he is black. If Keanu Reeves looks white… Of course this just highlights the silliness and superficiality of most discourse on race.
Speaking of assumptions… I don’t buy the idea that the negative behavior described in this or other threads is inherently “white”… unless I was out of town the day all the other races transcended the limitations of human nature…
If white people putting black paint is offensive, then what do you think about the movie ‘the party’ movie? I liked the movie and the Peter Sellers.
His character in that movie was pretty much Inspector Clouseau with a suntan… and Sellers never got any heat for making the “Pink Panther” series. Of course jokes and stereotypes within a racial group are usually seen as a lesser wrong… more bad manners than malice… i.e. Americans ridiculing the French or the Irish… Indians making fun of Sikhs, etc…
If Tiger Woods looks black, he is black. If Keanu Reeves looks white…Of course this just highlights the silliness and superficiality of most discourse on race.
subjective. oprah winfrey asked tiger how he felt when people “saw a black man.” well, many americans might, but many asians “see an asian.” race is a genetic reality, but its perception is high subjective. many part-asian “whites” are clearly part-asian post facto.
I agree. A lot of other evils (including domestic environmental problems and inhumane excesses of factory farming) would be reduced by stopping or limiting obscene US ag subsidies as well. But where’s the movement to reduce them? I wish some celebs would take that on as their sexy cause.
Did they “see an asian” before he got famous? Razib, can you please define (clearly and in layman’s terms) what it is to be black? Also, can you define an exact moment when a person ceases to be a member of one race, and becomes another? Because you seem to have this idea that black americans are somehow not actually black… which I really don’t get.
“race is a genetic reality, but its perception is high subjective. many part-asian “whites” are clearly part-asian post facto.”
skin-reflectance (that wonderful metric I was introduced to, by, hmm, who was it?) is a genetic reality, race in so far as it limits the amount of privelage or lack thereof is purely social.
Ask the objects of this ridicule oh I mean ‘jokes’ how much of a lesser wrong it is…or how lacking in malice it is.
Perception does not equal reality. Lots of people think such conduct is harmless, but that does not mean they are right…
Did they “see an asian” before he got famous?
how am i supposed to know? they probably would have thought he was a low class thai, as lower class southeast asians (in thailand that means little chinese admixture) are stereotyped as dark-skinned. i suspect tiger could actually pass as cambodian, some of them have curly hair and are generally darker than other southeast asians.
Razib, can you please define (clearly and in layman’s terms) what it is to be black? Also, can you define an exact moment when a person ceases to be a member of one race, and becomes another? Because you seem to have this idea that black americans are somehow not actually black… which I really don’t get.
black? that’s socially constructed. e.g., many americans who are more than 50% white ancestrally are “black.” as for “racial membership,” on can assign with probabilities membership of a particular group for particular individuals depending on the information you have. but in any case, they key for genetics is thinking in terms of populations (this was darwin’s key insight, and reaffirmed by thinkers such as ernst mayr in the 20th century in relation to evolutionary biology). populations are quite separable given information. a lay person’s way would be to think of it this way:
you have three humans: a, b, c.
you are told, that
a has blonde hair b has black hair c has black hair
you know with a high probability that a is probably european (some aborigines are blonde). but what about b or c? black hair is common, so more information
you are told that b has straight black hair c has tightly curled black hair (you can define the tightness of the curl via a geometrical definition, or, you can define the shape of the follicle, as that correlates closely with hair curliness)
with c the high probability is now that they are african (some other groups, e.g., melanesians might qualify, but their numbers are small)
but what about b?
you are now told that b has an epicanthic fold. now you have narrowed down b to eastern asia.
with genetics the principle is the same. given a finite set of genes it is rather easy to ascertain populational identity because the intersection of particular alleles tend to exhibit population specific signatures. please see question 4 for a.w.f. edwards (a statistical geneticist) and question 7 for luigi cavalli-sforza. for more on my perspective, you can get my perspective by following the exchange here. also, the granularity is now being extended to europeans, as one can distinguish between northern and southern to a non-trivial probability.
for a readable exposition of race in a genetic context, i also recommend richard dawkins ancestor’s tale, starting on page 406. you can also read his essay here, but it seems to have gone behind the pay window. i recommend amazon search inside.
Epicanthic folds are not unique to east asians and are quite prominent in certain parts of Africa… Actually, there are many characteristics that occur naturally in people of other races without needing to mix.
If you can only clearly define race in terms of population means, then how do you precisely measure out an individual? I am not saying that Tiger is just black, but if you are going to nitpick about his race, you should have some guidelines for when an individual stops being one race in favor of another. Especially when that individual looks more phenotypically average for the race that he supposedly isn’t.
Epicanthic folds are not unique to east asians and are quite prominent in certain parts of Africa… Actually, there are many characteristics that occur naturally in people of other races without needing to mix.
yes. but look at the heuristic, we already eliminated groups with curly black hair. the intersection of traits is the key. there is a great deal of variation between and within groups on traits where groups intersect, but, the overlap of traits tends to characterize groups.
If you can only clearly define race in terms of population means, then how do you precisely measure out an individual? I am not saying that Tiger is just black, but if you are going to nitpick about his race, you should have some guidelines for when an individual stops being one race in favor of another. Especially when that individual looks more phenotypically average for the race that he supposedly isn’t.
nitpick about his race? he’s 1/2 asian genetically. he’s 1/4 african. i don’t feel like there is any room to nitpick. tiger has been clear that his asian heritage is not to be trivialized. many americans, white and black, implicitly or explicitly reject this and hold to a rule of hypodescent. that’s their privilege, just as it is tiger’s privilege to accept the range of his ancestry and heritage (which includes therevada buddhism as a prominent locus from what i am to understand).
if you want “individual measurements,” you can go with kits like ancestry by DNA. i’ve criticized these tests before on methodological grounds, but, they give a rough measure of genomic ancestry for particular populations.
Especially when that individual looks more phenotypically average for the race that he supposedly isn’t.
unless you go by morphometric analysis, most of these ascertainments are subjective at the boundaries. human gestalt perception doesn’t have the precision and accuracy that genetic analysis does obviously (e.g., many melanesians “look african,” but are genetically as distant from africans as east asians, and far closer to east asians on the phylogenetic trees).
let me “unpack” the issues to their base. i reject the concept that there are platonic races with clear boundaries. there aren’t. rather, human populations are clusers of discrete genetic lineages. the substructure is elucidated by correlations across these lineages, but, our own conception of population lineages is a human construct. an individual is just a physical assemblance of genes for that one generation, so that itself is epiphenomenal. there are gene lineages where you can find that you are “more closely related” to a chimpanzee than your sibling (e.g., MHC). that is, if you trace the ancestry of your sibling’s gene, and your own equivalent, it maybe that the last common ancestor of your gene and a chimpaznee’s is more recent than that with your sibling. that doesn’t mean on average across genes you aren’t more closely related to your sibling than a chimp, you are.
to be clear here, if you wish a determistic criterion for relatedness, you would have to throw out siblings as valid term, as there is an expectation of 0.5 relatedness, but no guarantee becasue of sampling variance (this is why some siblings look more similar than others). the only deterministic relationship is between parent and child, who are guaranteed to be 0.5 related because of the nature of diploid inheritance (you can two copies of a gene, one from each parent).
Manju,
It’s not that simple (MS Word).
More at Dani Rodrik’s commentary page.
Also, from Michael Pollen:
I think a lot of hands on work in Africa needs to be done to maintain localized agricultural and keep industrialized agriculture at bay. As Americans, we can offer no advice on this matter because we tossed local agriculture aside in favor of corporate ag. The elimination of EU/US/Japan subsidies will not mean that the African farmer will suddenly have access to markets because distribution systems are too costly to develop, sustain and grow unless surprise suprise you are big, can absorb the costs, and have economies of scale. That’s why the “winners” in the developing countries are not te poor pictured in our weeklies but Brazilian corporate ag, Indian corporate ag, South African corporate ag. Africa needs to develop for Africans– not for our appetites. And, for the love of god, they certainly don’t need our cheap yet high-calorie sugars and fats processed mish mash laced with high-fructose corn syrup that would inevitably come in boatloads as we strongarm any negotiation for reciprocal access to their markets.
Desitude,
This is just my own subjective opinion so you shouldn’t interpret this as the definitive version, but I’ll do my best to answer your question. The earlier answers by Sunny and Razib should supplement the following.
Black people in the UK used to face the same racism-related problems as South Asians until the early/mid-90s; however, they had a much higher profile in the media and in the public eye, to the extent that at the time you would get the impression that they were the largest non-white ethnic group in Britain, not South Asians (it wasn’t until much later that I realised this wasn’t the case). They did, however, gradually have an increasing influence in British popular culture as black music — both British and, especially, American (and later “Ragga”/dancehall etc) — became more mainstream, with the corresponding influence on younger white Brits. This is stll the case.
When South Asians, particularly Indians, “went mainstream” in the UK from the mid-90s onwards, especially via the impact of Goodness Gracious Me along with some other factors (again, music, fashion, films etc), contrasts were drawn between the academic and professional success of desis compared to the local black population, especially considering that in many cases, members of both groups were not from affluent backgrounds and everyone faced racism within the majority population as a whole.
9/11 played a part in reversing this perception (and 7/7 more recently); black people were still viewed as having their own respective issues, but they were — and still are — regarded as being much more assimilated into Western culture as a whole (in terms of lifestyle attitudes, more liberal morality etc), which is viewed as a positive thing. Because they’re regarded as being significantly more Westernised, many white Brits these days are more sympathetic and accepting towards them than they are towards South Asians.
There is probably some conflation between black Brits and black Americans in a popular cultural sense — music, fashion etc being the major factors — so that also plays a part in how they are viewed.
Something else to bear in mind is that the inter-marriage rate between white Brits and black people is much higher than that between whites and South Asians — I can’t remember the exact figure, but I believe that 1/3 – 40% of black British people are estimated to be involved in long-term relationships with white partners.
There are, however, still some professions where black Brits are markedly under-represented, especially those sectors which are traditionally white strongholds; my own professional environment — the investment banking sector — is a striking example of this. There are black people here, but they are few and far between. I’ve always found their absence very noticeable indeed, especially bearing in mind that London itself has a huge black population.
Yes, the majority are from the Caribbean although there is also a sizeable percentage of African people. Immigrant families from Nigeria — which now includes a lot of British-born 2nd-Gen adults too — in particular are frequently highly-educated professionals. There are a lot of them in the medical profession, for example.
HMF is correct, although it should be stressed that “race” is about facial features too, not just skin-colour, even though there’s frequently an overlap between the two.
This is just small point I’ve been meaning to make for a while here on SM now — I’m not interested in getting into yet another debate here about race etc, especially considering the precedents on this blog. It should, however, considerably clarify my own previous comments on the matter.
Thanks, JoAT! I thought I was the only one who liked the sociocultural analysis going on underneath those baggy pants and Carlton’s dance moves.
Razib, your scientific particle-by-particle analysis of race is interesting but often doesn’t really answer questions of identity faced by multicultural people, or people of any culture struggling with their identity. Indigenous people are a prime example – if they’re 1/2 indigenous is it okay to identify then, or is 1/4 too little?
What of the person who is 1/4 indigenous but has been more exposed to indigenous culture and identifies strongly with this aspect of their genetic make-up compared to a person 1/2 indigenous?
I know it’s fun to divide things up into alleles, genomes and chromosomes, but things are messier than that. Discussing percentages misses the point of this post, which is really more about identity. Kate Moss isn’t ‘white’ solely because she’s genetically Caucasian and devoid of African blood. She seems to have little or no connection with African culture except for maybe a couple of Benetton ads from days gone by when people other than 15 year olds in Tokyo bought Benneton. I’m not saying cultural contact is everything and that Angelina Jolie’s now Namibian, I just think looking at race solely from a scientific lens misses the other side of the story.
There are white Namibians. They are decended from various colonial / colonist types who moved to Southern Africa, but they’ve been there for a while. They’re just few in number compared to black Namibians.
Razib: You mentioned that siblings are on average, approximately 50% identical genetically…but there is some variance around that number, some may be more and some may be less than 50%…fair enough…but are resemblance of facial features any real indication of this? I mean, you could have two siblings, one has a very similar face to yours, and one doesn’t…you might conclude that the one who resembles you has a higher % of genes shared with you…but that’s only for those loci which contribute to facial features, right? Maybe for other, less apparent traits, you might resemble the other sibling more (like for lipid metabolism, MHC, various enzymatic pathways, etc). In fact you might even have slightly more genes in common with the sibling who doesn’t resemble you, but it just so happens the other sibling looks more like you, right?
In other words…I look exactly like my dad…I don’t look like my mom at all. But I am equally related to both, it’s just that my dad’s looks somehow were more strongly expressed in me. I know the situation with siblings is different than with parents, but I’m using it as an analogy.
In other words…I look exactly like my dad…I don’t look like my mom at all. But I am equally related to both, it’s just that my dad’s looks somehow were more strongly expressed in me. I know the situation with siblings is different than with parents, but I’m using it as an analogy.
amitbah, there is sampling variance on the features that our innate psychology uses to recongize those as related to us (“similarity”). these traits are a small subset of our features (eyes, nose, height, color) and so sample from from the genome itself. so, they are not accurate in reflecting (between siblings) the full genomic correspondence. just because you look like sibling A rather than B has no bearing on whether A or B is a good kidney donor match (unless there is genetic linkage between say nose shape and immune profile, but i doubt this). since the number of genes is quite high the sampling variance isn’t that much…but, check out this review of a paper which analyzed it from the genomic angle.
i think gwyneth is smoking. too bad she’s racist cuz she doesn’t hook up with the brown 🙁
Just because she wouldn’t look at your ugly ass doesn’t make her a racist!!!
The issue with Tiger Woods is not his multiracialness or the way he “acts” but the fact that he will very quickly point out, when confronted about his African hertiage, that he is also Asian, Native American and White. He doesn’t seem to embrace his African ancestry and much as his other racial hertiage.”Cablanasian” as he calls it. I always felt it stemmed from his father who experienced alot of racism in the army and seemed uncomfortable with his mixed African ancestry.
I have never heard of this paper until they did this cover, so their objective of creating publicity and controversy has been fufilled. The equation is really simple Kate Moss darkened equals controversy. The greater the controversy, the higher the sales and more money towards AIDS charities.
If you want to talk about “black face” lets discuss Flavor of Love or essentially everything on BET. The minstrel show is alive and well even in this day and age.
I once worked with a German guy from Stuttgart who studied the history and culture of the descendants of Germans who went to Namibia a hundred years ago. He was doing an anthropology degree, and after the fifth beer, broke down with laughter telling me about some ritual they used to have over there amongst the German Namibian colonists, where they would get drunk and insert firecrackers on sticks up their anus (facing outwards) of course, then run around naked having races and stuff. It was a hoot. If there was a German word for that, it would be a greater word than the greatest word in the English language (callipygian) or even Schadenfreude , which as you know, has no English equivalent.
Tashie,
The answer is very easy. Let the people concerned make up their own minds who they identify with and how much they identify with them. Leave it up to them to decide.
I don’t think there is a definitive right or wrong approach to take; if someone ignores one side of their ancestry completely then they’re obviously in denial, but ultimately it’s the individual’s choice what they should do in such matters. They have to take that decision themselves and do what they think is right (even if they’re wrong).
Just my opinion anyway.
By the way a great film that delves into the blackface history is spike lee’s bamboozled.
I can’t remember the exact figure, but I believe that 1/3 – 40% of black British people are estimated to be involved in long-term relationships with white partners.
Jai, thank you for very interesting observations, as usual.
Another question: Would a Zadie Smith or the football player Rio Ferdinand be considered black or would such an identification be up to them? I ask this in light of the fact that the discussion has turned, once again, to “what is race?”
Jai…
It’s not always that easy for mixed individuals to identify with or all of their heritage, as referenced by some of the comments I’ve read on SM, someone will always take offense because they’re not insert enthnicity here enough, or they embrace one ethnicity more than the other.
Desitude,
Zadie Smith is considered black or mixed-race. I don’t know about Rio Ferdinand.
Remember that British society does not have the same “one-drop rule” concept of what constitutes black ethnicity as the US does. However, generally people of such mixed ancestry here do tend to identify more with their black side. I guess it depends a lot on what their basic facial features are like (it’s not just about skin-colour).
I can’t remember the exact figure, but I believe that 1/3 – 40% of black British people are estimated to be involved in long-term relationships with white partners.
see my links above. it is higher for black males.
AnjaliToo,
Unfortunately that’s true, but the person concerned shouldn’t let other people dictate to them who they should and should not identify with. It’s a fact of life that there will always be someone out there who will be offended by whatever one does.
As long as the mixed-race person doesn’t denigrate or unjustifiably disparage the ethnic group he/she identifies less with, I don’t see the problem.