Blackface

Rare card · No. 30714

Blackface is the practice of performers using burned cork, shoe polish, or theatrical makeup to portray a racialized caricature of black people, e.g. African Americans, on stage or in entertainment. It is overwhelmingly condemned as a racist and deeply inappropriate act. Scholarship on the origins or definition of blackface vary with some taking a global perspective that includes European culture and Western colonialism. Scholars with this wider view may date the practice of blackface to as early as Medieval Europe's mystery plays when bitumen and coal were used to darken the skin of white performers portraying demons, devils, and damned souls. Others date the practice to English Renaissance theater, in works such as William Shakespeare's Othello and Anne of Denmark's personal performance in The Masque of Blackness. Blackface became a global phenomenon as an outgrowth of theatrical practices of racial impersonation in theatres across the British Empire, where it was integral to the development...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Strobridge & Co. Lith, Public domain