For New Pittsburgh Courier
Dear Editor:
As a faculty member and advisor to the Black Law Students Union several years ago, four Black students approached me one Monday morning. There was a Halloween Party over the weekend and a White student came dressed in blackface and an Afro wig. The students were incensed and wanted the White student suspended from school and arrested! One may ask why was there such outrage and dismay by the Black students? Well a mini-history lesson is in order.
Historian Dale Cockrell once noted that poor and working-class Whites who felt “squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the White norm. Minstrelsy, comedic performances of “blackness” by Whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up, cannot be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core. By distorting the features and culture of African Americans—including their looks, language, dance, deportment, and character—White Americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis.
Halloween costumes at colleges and universities across the country continue to battle against students and professors engaging in blackface performances. In each instance, those identified for blackface performances insist no malice or racial hatred was intended. They believe that no harm was done, but they are wrong.
Blackface by Whites reinforces the idea that Black people are appropriate targets of ridicule and mockery and reminds members of society of stereotypes about Black criminality, and danger. This often serves to support implicit bias and discriminatory treatment and in areas from law enforcement to employment. The individual’s innermost thoughts does not change the impact blackface has on the people of all races or the way it reinforces stereotypes and the idea that blackness is, at best, a joke.
How funny is it to descendants of Jews to have a person dress up in a Nazi costume for Halloween? The Holocaust was not a joke for descents of Jews and slavery, humiliation and discrimination can never be found humorous to Blacks. A query that demonstrates the best explanation against the use of blackface is the answer to the question would these persons using blackface say to society “Yes, I’m Black”? Have we reached a point in society that race would not matter whether your Black or White? I think not because race is the wound in society that will not heal.
Robert Berkley Harper
Retired Professor of Law
Stanton Heights
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