“If you’re looking at the history of British attitudes…”
The answer is in your post.
There is a difference in context between domestic slavery and Jim Crow in the US and a hsitory in living memory of anti-miscegenation laws, effeorts to stop blacks voting, separate but equal, all-black and all-white armed forces etc- which leaves a particular history and creates a particular context, and that of the UK which had no domestic slavery and no Jim Crow and did not legally discriminate against people of colour (societally yes, but under law, no.)
I remember being amazed when I live in the States reading about a marriage finally being recognised by the state because the people were of different races.
Certainly Brits were engaged deeply in the slave trade, but the domestic social and legal attitudes were never as deeply engrained and deleterious as in the USA.
This does not excuse the UK, but it does provide a different context.
No, the Epiphany. There’s only three guys, who traditionally have come to represent Northern Europeans, Southern Europeans/Mediterraneans/Middle East and Blacks respectively; that is, the “three parts of the world” as they were known to the Romans of ancient times.
And as for “black”, it’s dark brown greasepaint, not “black like these letters”.
The Magi? There’s no historic reason they need to be Black and Nordic, just (completely misguided) tradition. They’re fictional characters, just use plain Spanish people, FFS.
At my school nativity, the Magi were all Coloured. But then, so were Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Shepherds and Angel Gabriel. And we didn’t white any of those up.
I move between the United States and the United Kingdom. My view of the relationships between people of African origin in each country is different. In the US their rights seem to be better protected formally, yet ther is still a noticable segregation socially. In the UK there is less formal protection, but better social integration.
This is particualrly noticable with inter-marriage which seems much more common in the UK. Recent US ads have begaun to reflect society with mixed race families, but this caused a furore in the US which would be unknown here.
Not saying that things are perfect in the UK, but it certainly seems that socially and personally, relations between the various racial groups are different in each country and this changes attitudes to matters such as Black face.
Your “furore” is basically imaginary, seeing as how 15% of all new marriages in the U.S. (as of 2010) were interracial and mixed race families are commonplace here.
I can’t find comparable statistics for the U.K., except for a reference to the 2001 U.K. census reportedly showing 2% of all marriages were interracial.
Got stats to back up your contentions? Or are your personal observations your cite?
To start with, British statistics do not include Latino as a race.
It is noticable that many marriages between people of African heritage and those of European heritage tend to more often involve those of African heritage who are not the result of internal slavery- many marriages are between recent immigrants from the Islands or Africa itself.
The Cheerios ad which headlined some time ago seemed anachronistic here as we have had such ads for 20-30 years.
The reason that people claiming African heritage has increased so quickly is not new immigration, but mixed race marriages. Every tenth child in the UK lives in a mixed race household, and in London this is probably over 50%.
I have a cite from 2010:
“Half of all men in Britain who have Caribbean heritage and are in a relationship already have partners of a different race.”
“The same is true of one in five black African men, one in 10 Indian men and women and two out of five Chinese women. One in five children belongs to an ethnic minority - a far higher proportion than among the adult population.”
“Today’s study, commissioned by the EHRC and seen exclusively by the Observer, shows that 9% of children are of “mixed or multiple heritage” - that is, they live with parents from different ethnic groups, or they are themselves of mixed ethnicity. Over the past 14 years the number of children of Caribbean heritage with one white parent has risen from 39% to 49%. Among the Indian population it has increased from 3% to 11%, for Pakistanis from 1% to 4%, and for Chinese from 15% to 35%.”
Now although many self-identifying African Americans carry European genes, these are more often the result of interesting relationships in the 17th and 18th century than from recent inter-marriage.
So I look to you for statistics to show that between 20 and 50% of African American men in relationships are with a European partner, and that nearly one in ten children in the USA lives in a household with one African American and one European parent, or that their parents were in such a household.
Yes, we do indeed have to agree to disagree on this.
One thing I would say is I never said anything about “lazy reductionism”; about only copying skin tone.
I just don’t see how in the abstract it’s racist.
For example, if I am making a batman costume I may stuff it with fake musculature. We wouldn’t call that muscle-ist to alter my body to look like that.
Now to that you may argue that there’s no history of persecuting people for their muscles. But that’s exactly my point: it’s the history in a particular society that makes it offensive, not that there’s something inherently special about skin colour.
Have been informed by Pjen that I’m not going to get an answer to this question, which is a pity, because it really goes to the root of the problem in some ways - is Blackface still racist if it’s at a great remove from the people being mocked, whether that’s physically distant American slaves (Minstrelsy) or temporally distant Moors (Morris) ?
But it’s not ‘only’ copying skin tone - it’s using one (usually very dark) skin tone to stand in for an entire continent’s worth of skin tones.
It’s precisely because it’s an abstraction that it’s racist. You’re reducing an entire group of humans to their skin tone.
Let me ask you a question - is it racist to use “big noses” as a shorthand for Jews?
I’m afraid in the modern world, there’s no such thing as “a particular society” any more. You shouldn’t get a pass on Blackface in, say, Italian Vogue today, even if they didn’t have a Minstrelsy tradition in Italy (I wouldn’t know if they did)
The whole construction of race is fascinating and far more complex than some simplistic people would like to believe.
I am currently working on a project on Early Philosophy which involves considering Near Eastern and, Greek and roman concepts of modes of describing people. It is obvious that they used different criteria to us and were far less concerned about physical features and skin colour than modern society is. This does not make them better or worse as they had their own scapegoat groups based on other characteristics.
“Race” however it is defined has some uses as it is aligned with genetic heritage and genetics can be useful and telling. I am a nurse and if someone presented as a youngster with sudden breathlessness on exerciseand muscle cramps, their genetic inhertiance would increase or decrease the likelihood of the problem being SIckle Cell Anaemia. If the person presenting seemed to have African heritage or were Mediterranean in appearance, then one would investigate SCA more quickly than if the person were fair skinned and blue eyed. This is science and technology as applied.
We are entering a new era in Medicine where genetics will be seen as increasingly important as we understand which sets of genes (often inherited in groups of people socially defined as belonging to an ill-define ‘race’) We already target several racial groups with programs that are linked to our expectations and knowledge about disease processes likely to be found in their group, thus concentrating resources in the interests of all. This will only increase as we understand more of the mysteries of the genome.
This is not racism, but racialism. One is objectionable, the other is valid and there is a social continuum between them.
It’s around 10%, actually. Not including the ones in relationships with Asians, Indians, Latinos, etc… But, you need to take into account there are fewer African-origin people in England, so the likelihood of one encountering a White dating/marriage partner as opposed to another African-origin one, is much higher.
I mentioned two distinct phenomena; “blacking up”, and genuinely trying to copy a skin tone.
The former I implied is always racist unless it is not meant to represent black people at all (e.g. if someone was genuinely trying to do a coal-miner outfit, or venom or something).
I agree with you that an extreme caricaturing / generalizing of skin colour and features is, definitely, racist.
The latter (“genuinely trying to copy a skin tone”), by definition, is not “a single very dark tone”. And that’s the thing I am saying is acceptable, with a caveat.
Yes of course, and again that is a caricature.
If however we’re accurately impersonating a specific individual that happens to look like that then IMO it’s OK…with the same caveat of needing to be sensitive of the history of a specific society.
Again, I didn’t say blackface should get a pass, far from it.
But on the all-one-society point, I am living in China right now. Most people I meet here are pretty oblivious to black racial stereotypes. They may ask questions about my skin or hair (I’m mixed-race btw) that in Europe would not be considered acceptable, but no offense is intended and the questions come from a kind of innocent curiosity.
