| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Is Blackface Ever OK? | ||||
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We already discussed the issue in class, but I think it raises some interesting questions that I wanted to ask on here. Traditionally, actors that painted themselves black were also terribly misrepresenting African Americans in order to entertain audiences. This "racial ridicule" (Coleman) involved exploiting stereotypes for the sake of comedy.
So what about the situations presented in this Daily Show clip? Apparently, the models that paint themselves black are doing so for the "sake of fashion" and to show the beauty of black skin. Is there a "beautiful women" exception for the rule about blackface? For me, the thought of invoking the exploitative history of the practice automatically makes the practice wrong to me. Also, why do these models have to pretend to be a different ethnicity in order to represent the beauty of different skin colors? I think a better approach would be for the modeling industry to use actually black women and open up a traditional idea of beauty to include other minorities.
Just because the supposed intentions of the fashion television show does not seem negative, I think its kind of insensitive and pointless to use black paint and pretend to be another ethnicity. Someone in class said that America's Next Top Model often has the models dress up in cultural outfits to "experience" another culture, but that is ridiculous. Dressing up in a costume is not a cultural experience by any stretch of the imagination, just like that newscaster in Germany could not have an authentic experience painting himself black . It's not a one-minute or one-day experience. Living in a culture or actually being a certain ethnicity is the only authentic experience, and I think it is not respectful to those people groups to assume otherwise.
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