That makes sense, but the earliest descriptions of the tradition as ‘moriske dance’, even if they are making a link to Moors, are written descriptions of something already extant - writers of the time (and later) quite often mislabelled the origin of things that were new and/or exotic to them (I can find unrelated examples of this phenomenon if required).
If we accept that, at some point in its history (but not definitely its origin), Border Morris was regarded as some sort of mimicry of dark-skinned people, does that necessarily contaminate it for all time?
But we didn’t have any black people. Once we got black people, we started casting them. And what costumes? Placards, really?
The white guy representing brown people was representing his own racial group. He’s white by our definition, not white by the definition of the people who think Jessica Alba, Simon Peres or Adriano Celentano aren’t white. The glow in the dark dude wore more makeup than this one, since the local population wasn’t available in those colors (we do have people that white now, and we do cast them).
Thing is, I watched (on YouTube) a few bits of the last ever B&WMS* and I (apart from the face paint and the name) I couldn’t put my finger on anything else identifiably racially-typed. Without the name and the face paint, it would just be a bunch of barbershop types performing slightly camp song and dance routines.
*I realise it was stylistically different (and more stereotyped) in the earlier days of the show.
Not if all traces of racial mockery/caricature are excised AND real efforts are made to educate people about the origins/history vs the current state e.g a poster set up at performances. Then it becomes a teaching moment.
Let me tell you, I’m no stranger to possibly-excuseable minstrelsy: here in Cape Town we have a thing called the Coon Carnival/Cape Minstrel Show/Kaapse Klopse - in this case, it’s Coloured Capetonians (so, often former slave descendants) putting on a Minstel Show. And yes, there are all the arguments about heritage, culture, carnival and inversion being permitted forms of rebellion, etc. But ultimately, it’s a minstrel show, strongly influenced by non-indigenous American minstrelsy, and I, as a Capetonian Coloured and descendant of slaves myself, find the whole thing an embarrassment at best. A horrible, unthinking, self-inflicted racist relict with no place in the modern world outside archival footage, at worst.
The first time I saw a black person in person was in Dublin, in 1983.
The first time I saw a black person in person in Spain it was a tourist in Madrid’s airport, in the mid-1990s.
The first time I saw a black person in person in my home town it was in 1999, a vendor in the weekly street market. For a long time we were mainly recipients of “tertiary migration”: foreigners would go to Madrid, Barcelona or the plastic sea of Andalusia, from there to provincial capitals, from provincial capitals to smaller towns like mine. The immense majority (and by “immense” I mean over 99%) of the black people in Spain are immigrant or the minor children of immigrants.
All black people, although the clothing tends to be “orientalist” (think “1001 nights”), so if they hadn’t worn makeup they would have looked just like the people representing the Med and Middle East.
Theater makeup, to make his face more visible from afar.
Nordic, and I don’t mean Aretha. Blonde wigs for anybody who isn’t one.
So, this was like a parade-of-nations thing? So, the Eastern Asian people, did you paint them yellow? Were they given slanted eyes? Buck teeth like Micky Rooney? Were the Native Americans painted red? So why were the Black people…black? It’s not a common skin colour in Africa, I can assure you.
SO we cannot decide easily (even in this group) what forms of behaviour are racist and which are not. Maybe we should just all go to IMHO and emote?
The reality is that some racial reference will always be present in various aspects of society and it is a choice down to the individual whether that is stigmatised in any way. Additionally, rights of different groups need to be weighed against rights of other groups.
If we are faced with a group of Morris traditionalists who wish to black up and another group who are against any such imitative or declaratory behaviour, how are we to decide what is right and what is wrong? We cannot even decide that here, let alone in society which is generally less rational than here.
All such conflicts are a continuum.
My view is that at the extreme ends this behaviour should not be banned and that it should not pass without critical comment. In between then there iare gradations of acceptability to different people and different groups. Context will always be important. If the coconutters do their dance in low density Afro-Caribbean Lancashire, the context would be different from doing it in Electric Avenue.
Using one word (racist) to describe bejaviours that run from actions that are illegal, dangerous and personally threatening all the way to actions that are moderately distasteful or not even distasteful at all seems to me to be sloppy use of language. If racist is to mean something, then it must mean more than 'behaviour I don’t like"!
And as to suggestions above that any discussion of race, culture, ethnicity, geography, genetics and so on is always going to be racist, there goes any rational discussion of the matter.
I’m pretty sure we’ve done this lots of times on the dope.
My answer remains: in the abstract, painting yourself black for any reason other than to caricature black people is not racist. And trying to genuinely look like a black person (i.e. with brown tones) for a costume, or whatever, is not in itself racist either.
However, it’s necessary to be aware of the history and the connotations of a particular look in a particular society. Due to the history of the US I would advise against doing either of the above things there (outside of film and TV).
Agreed. See my example of Kali, who is sometimes represented as black (sometimes blue, which is, of course, smurfist. :))
This is where we differ. If it’s a White person doing it (or an Asian, whatever), it is inherently racist. That’s my opinion.
Note I’m not talking about an elaborate latex mask a-la Mission Impossible, here. That’s OK in a theatrical (or even pageant, Nava) context. Just painting yourself brown as shorthand for “Black person” isn’t. It’s not just lazy reductionism (reducing everything essential about Black people to their skin colour is, IMO, racist in-and-of-itself), it’s ignorant of the rich variety of Black skin tones (and how many non-Black dark-skinned peoples there are), and lastly (but not least-ly) it’s also got a really, really bad history, which you can’t just ignore.
…and that’s just actual Blackface. When you jump to looking at European artistic representations of Africans, it gets worse. Everything from Tintin in the Congo to Gollywogs…
Although other nations are not excused, there is a difference in context between the USA (where minstrel shows originated and whose shadow falls heavy on the country) and other countries where it is distasteful but not so historically resonant.
History is important and history holds the USA to account in its domestic politics for longer and deeper than many other countries.
There is a serious difference in the experience of Afro-Carribbean populations in the UK and those in for instance, the UK.
Every Afro-Caribbean here chose to live in the UK (or their ancestors so chose) - we are now in the fifth generation of mass flow of immigrants from the West Indies. Although the UK was a major mover in the Slave Trade originally, it withdrew early and slavery was never legal in the UK itself. There is no history of Jim Crow Laws here, only of levels of interpersonal discrimination common in any mass immigration (it happened to the Irish in the generations previous to the Caribbean immigration.) Such people were never valued a 3/5 a white man here!
If you’re looking at the history of British attitudes towards Africans, you can’t consider only Afro-Caribbean people in the UK itself. You also have to consider the whole history of British colonialism in Africa.
I’m not talking about the history of the treatment of Blacks, I’m talking about Blackface and Minstrelsy itself. It’s not just a US phenomenon, and has been in place in non-US territories like the UK, Australia and South Africa just as long as in the US.
And the treatment of West Indians is irrelevant, since the Blackface under discussion was usually mocking American Blacks.
I could go into whole reams about Australian representations of Aborigines as a separate sort of Blackface, or the Moor’s Head as a heraldic theme, etc. But for the purposes of this discussion, to say that Minstrelsy-type Blackface is just a US problem historically is, like I said, just bullshit.
tl;dr: why is it OK for Brits to mock US Blacks, as you seem to be saying, Pjen?