I have never seen anyone in black face. Have you?

[BigmanPigman]

Have I lived in a liberal bubble since I have resided in CA, NYC, and Phila throughout my life? I would have noticed and remembered if I saw that since it is so foreign and bizarre to me. I have always associated it with old movies and the South.

[jodymarie aimee]

1. don't you remember the big scandal when

Ted Danson wore it when he was dating Whoopi.....

[True Dough]

5. Vaguely

What was Whoopi's reaction? Did she condone it?

[KWR65]

23. She dumped him. nt

[True Dough]

24. Well,

can't say I blame her!

Thanks.

[jodymarie aimee]

29. actually if you google the pic

she loved it..she is smiling up at him...nobody else loved it...later on Ted dumped her and she was broken hearted..she was very much into him..

"Whoopi hates Mary (Steenburgen) and the reason is simple — she married Ted Danson and Whoopi didn't. They made plans to wed as soon as he could get a divorce, but under pressure from his parents, he dumped Whoopi, say sources, shattering her heart."

[BigmanPigman]

10. Oh yeah, I remember that.

I have never seen anyone do it in person. If I had I would have noticed and remembered it.

[jodymarie aimee]

15. Joni did it more than once..

Joni Mitchell –– yes, Joni Mitchell –– not really apologizing so much as giving her reasoning for wearing blackface multiple times

"When I see black men sitting, I have a tendency to go—like I nod like I'm a brother. I really feel an affinity because I have experienced being a black guy on several occasions [like the time I wore blackface on an album cover]."

[X_Digger]

19. 1993, yup. n/t

[True Dough]

2. Only on TV and via the internet

and I plan to keep it that way! I have a small circle of family/friends and I can't imagine a single one of them ever putting on black face and thinking it's humorous.

[appalachiablue]

3. Never, ever and I went to college in Va., grad school in DC.

Just appalling...

[GWC58]

65. Can't say I've ever seen it, at least live.

I’ve never understood exactly why people put on black face. Also the white lipstick like substance to accentuate the lips. Whatever the reason it is repulsive!! 😡

[Squinch]

4. I grew up in a city outside NYC that was actually famous for its racism. I have seen many

hateful things. I have never seen anyone in blackface, and I have never seen anyone in a Klan costume.

[ZZenith]

6. I have. At a Halloween party in El Paso, Texas around 1983.

And I remember thinking, “Holy shit, that’s racist. Fuck that guy.”

[John Fante]

7. Ted Danson took a lot of heat for wearing blackface

at a roast for his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg. This was back in 1993 IIRC.

Imagine doing something that's too offensive for a comedy roast, where anything goes. That's blackface.

I've never seen it in person.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

8. In real life, no, and I lived in Florida from 1970-2012.

[pnwmom]

9. Never ever. n/t

[Codeine]

11. In person? Nope.

And for context, I lived in Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada before moving to liberal California. We lived in Fontana, CA, one of the few places in the state with an active Klan population and I STILL never encountered this shit even once.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

12. Not in person

I grew up in the 60s/ early 70s and saw some old films with it.

[DURHAM D]

13. Yes. Halloween two years ago.

Three kids. Two girls about 6 and 8 in blackface and black wigs. Older brother about 10 in Klan robe and hood.

My street is only two blocks long and up the street are two black families. I gave the kids their treats and then went out in the yard and quietly talked to the mother. When I told her the costumes were offensive and about the families up the street she really didn't seem to understand. She just thought the kids were cute. After we talked for awhile she said thank you and she would go home and do some research. She was truly ignorant. They walked to their car and left the neighborhood.

[Anon-C]

31. Wow!

[wishstar]

14. I remember seeing a minstrel show performed by teachers at my school in upstate NY about 1962

I don't know exactly when, but I was a young child when the show occurred. Our school had always been integrated so I don't understand how adults thought the black face show was appropriate. By mid 1960's with Civil Rights movement, we realized that was demeaning and racist and should never have been done.

I also remember being shocked in junior high when a classmate returned from a trip to her grandparents in Pennsylvania and said she and her brother had found a KKK robe and hood in a trunk in the attic. This made sense because I knew her family were temperance league Baptists (who were also anti-immigrant fearing influence of immigrants) while I had Italian immigrant grandparents on one side and Irish immigrant grgrands on other side so the anti-immigrant sentiment was disturbing to me as a child.

[sagesnow]

42. I also remember a Minstrel Show being performed

in my hometown in Iowa in the 60's. One of the performers kept asking leading questions that would always start with "Hey, Mister Interlocketa..." The jokes didn't seem very funny and I had no idea that it was so racially insulting. There was a large John Birch Society here and I think most of them were also KKK affiliated. Sad place really.

[dameatball]

16. Yes, I have. Back in college there was a fraternity in a homecoming parade that had a bunch of

black faced guys on a float. I think they called themselves Fijis. Other than that I don't think I have ever seen anyone in blackface.

[Takket]

17. No, never, thank goodness.

[Yonnie3]

18. Once

I vaguely recall a "talent" contest at a school here in Virginia where several kids (not yet teens) lip synced and danced to Swanee River in blackface. I guess this was around 1958. What I mainly recall is being glad that my mother hadn't come because she would have raised hell and embarrassed me. She was ahead of her time and I was very young then.

[Dale Neiburg]

20. Yes, circa 1965

In an amateur variety show in upcountry South Carolina.

(At about that same time frame "The Black and White Minstrel Show" was popular in the UK on BBC Television. As the name implies, some performers wore blackface. Some traditional forms, like some traditions of morris dance, used blackface centuries ago, possibly originally as disguise.)

[Ms. Toad]

21. Not blackface, but yellowface -

The Mikado - at a liberal college in the late 70s.

Doing a quick search, it is still being performed in yellowface - and still creating controversy.

[eppur_se_muova]

22. Just this guy.

It was made clear in the show that Archie's club was seriously behind the times in finding blackface humorous, and that by wearing the makeup outside the club he was embarrassing himself -- caught enjoying something most people found inappropriate. (This was 1975, FWIW)

(Carroll O'Conner and Jean Stapleton as Archie & Edith Bunker in All In The Family, for those too young to know.)

Oh, and I grew up in AL in the 60's.

[Igel]

50. It pays to remember what AITF was.

It often portrayed things that were still common in much of the common as hopelessly backwards and outdated. It was one of the earlier shows to present something progressive as mainstream in the attempt to shame what was fairly common in some portions of American society. In some places the anti-Archie attitudes were the mainstream, in other places, not so much.

Where I grew up the ethnic slurs were typically anti-Italian and anti-Polish. (Most of the high-schoolers I know are surprised such terms ever existed--that's what happens when you let them die instead of teaching people how offensive they are, they just drop out of use and become lexicographer's entries marked "obsolete".) They were common among people who were age 10 up through 70, male and female.

AITF, however, showed them as the domain of a single out-of-touch male that everybody else looked down at. AITF was probably more change-agent than showing the most common state of affairs.

[irisblue]

25. Not in real life. I grew up in Metro Detroit area. An area HS principal

was tarred & feathered in April 71.
Source--https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2013/01/21/mlk-mark-sagor


snip....Dr. R. Wiley Brownlee, the high school principal, was in favor of formally recognizing Dr. King — but not everyone in the community agreed.

Willow Run — which is located 35 miles west of Detroit — had a long history of racial polarization and this issue exacerbated those tensions. (Consider that just four years earlier, nearby Detroit had been the site of some of the bloodiest race riots in our nation’s history, leaving 43 people dead and 7,200 arrested.)

snip--On his way home that evening, armed men in hoods forcibly pulled Dr. Brownlee over to the side of the road. They put a shotgun to his head and applied hot tar to his body, from his shoulders to his feet.

The crime, which was eventually linked to a group led by Robert Miles, the Grand Dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan"

More at article.
I can't get the NYT story, in their archives to C&P.

[muntrv]

52. Ann Arbor resident here. I read about that incident with

the Willow Run principal. Robert Myles also bombed a bunch of school buses in Pontiac to stop integration there.

[irisblue]

55. Metro Detroit& SE Michigan was/is/has a bad history with overt racism

[Croney]

26. No, and I grew up in Baton Rouge. I'm trying to remember if

I ever saw it in a Mardi Gras parade setting, and the answer is still no. Only in the old vaudeville acts on TV, and it would have been on our old black-and-white TV.

I can't speak for all Mardi Gras parades, ever. They can be outlandish for sure. But I don't think I ever saw someone in blackface on a float.

[EffieBlack]

27. No. But white people in blackface don't normally come around me ...

Not sure why.

Oh, wait a minute.

I know why. BECAUSE THEY KNOW IT'S RACIST!!!

[Blue_true]

28. Yes. I live in the South.

I have seen people in blackface, heard racist put downs, the works. Though that is not happening today like it did when I was younger.

Personally, I have never used racist name calling, if I am upset with a person of another race, I am upset with that person, not his or her race, that is how I maintain perspective.

[COLGATE4]

30. Al Jolson

[stopbush]

32. Bing Crosby in the "Abraham" number in "Holiday Inn."

The scene is usually cut when the film is run on commercial TV, but it’s on the BluRay and was - IIRC - included in the Netflix streaming of the film in December.

[riverwalker]

33. Yes on halloween

A white woman dressed as Aunt Jemima.

[Tipperary]

34. I grew up in the south.

Never seen such a thing.

[Calista241]

35. There's pictures of my father wearing black face paint as camouflage in the jungles of Vietnam

But I’m not sure that counts as blackface. It was mixed together with dark green and other colors.

[Liberty Belle]

36. Halloween party around 1980, someone came as Richard Pryor with his hair on fire.

The comedian who happened to be black had been in the news for freebasing drugs and catching his hair on fire, suffering burns. He was the butt of jokes on late night TV.

At the time nobody criticized it because the costumed student wasn't making fun of race, but rather someone's foolishness.

It was poor taste, and I can't see anyone doing that today without being excoriated.

[MaryMagdaline]

37. No.

[NastyRiffraff]

38. Old (very old) Al Jolson movies

That's about it.

[McCamy Taylor]

39. A white man in black face playing a black man and a black man in white face playing a white guy

in the same skit. This was in the 1980s. At the time it seemed more like a comment on race than a racist insult.

[Lithos]

40. Yes

Back in the 80's...

[theophilus]

41. As a matter of fact I have. When I was growing up in a small Texas

town in the 60s our community would put on a "Minstrel show". Probably yearly but maybe not that often. They might have called it a "Negro Minstrel Show". I was pretty young. I remember that I enjoyed the entertainment and I still hum some of the songs that were performed by local business and education types, all white of course.

I know how fucked up those things were, now. But, yes. I have seen many folks wearing blackface makeup and putting on a show for the townsfolk at the local high school.

[MrScorpio]

43. I have never understood why white people sometimes wear black face.

I mean, other than as insult to black people of course.

I know that some of them describe it as harmless dress up. But what those people don't understand is that black skin isn't a costume, it's an existence.

We come in all shades and all hues. We have no choice in the matter. However, if given the choice, I'm quite sure that most of us would rather stay black. Hence why white face as a costume by black people is rarely an actual thing.

Now, I will say that we do love to play dress up ourselves. I, myself, have dressed up as The Devil from time to time. And on one particular occasion back in 1988, I dressed up in a snazzy, Korean tailored suit and tie, sunglasses and fashioned a red tail to wear on the back of my belt and carried a plastic pitchfork into Washington DC's Georgetown during Halloween.

Amongst the people dressed up as fuzzy dice, wicked witches and packages of M&Ms, I was one hot looking Devil, I must say. I was particularly proud of myself when a couple of young German ladies pointed at me and gleefully shouted, "Die Teufel, Die Teufel!" That put a smile on my face, as it was very clear that my costume was a hit.

See? THAT was costume and a bit of harmless fun. I took one of the most feared and hated figures in all of humanity and reduced him to a black guy in a nice suit. No red face and no insult to the Devil.

Considering to reaction, you might say that I garnered some sympathy for him instead.

[doompatrol39]

44. No, because I've always recognized it as being racist.

Imagine my surprise when I arrive at DU today to find out that it's NOT racist. Who knew? Or if it IS racist then someone else doing it makes it o.k. or makes theirs worse.

Amazing stuff here today.

[spinbaby]

45. Maybe on TV in the 60s

I don’t explicitly remember blackface, but there was a lot of racist stuff in old movies.

On a related note, I recently found copies of books I adored as a child—the Adventure series by Enid Blyton—and discovered they were appallingly racist.

[cyclonefence]

46. In the early 1950s my mother wore blackface

as part of a costume (bandanna on head--you get the picture) to accompany me on Halloween.

As late as 1963, my high school's marching band put on an annual fund-raising minstrel show in blackface.

West Virginia, not Alabama.

[no_hypocrisy]

47. Eddy Cantor in the Thirties.

[maxsolomon]

48. Not ever, not once.

And I grew up across the river from the South, in a city ringed by bigoted, segregated suburbs, in a city that had actual race riots as recently as 2001.

[sakabatou]

49. Not where I live

[Demit]

51. I guess you're too young to remember the Phila Mummers Parade in the 60s?

The comics brigades uses blackface. It was finally banned sometime during that decade.

[BigmanPigman]

53. I am glad to say that stopped before I was old enough

to witness it (born in '62).

[Demit]

67. I'm glad too.

We have an ugly history in this city, but I hope we're getting better.

[rampartc]

54. white members of the krewe of zulu wear blackface

as do many of their black members.

http://www.kreweofzulu.com/

it seems to be part of fraternity life, as are the goofy nicknames.

i do not want to rush to jufgement on the va governor. falling for doctored photos and edited video has caused trouble before.

[muntrv]

56. Dan Aykroyd in "Trading Places." Not in real life.

[TDale313]

57. In person? No, never.

[mainstreetonce]

58. 1960 something

Local high school musical Finians Rainbow
Almost the whole cast wore black face

[VMA131Marine]

59. Growing up in the UK

There used to be a show on the BBC called "The Black and White Minstrel Show"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_and_White_Minstrel_Show

It was exactly what you'd expect but it ran until 1978 on television, then for another ten years as a stage show.

I take it as a small sign of progress that this would be unacceptable now.

[YOHABLO]

60. I knew an acquaintance who went in drag as ''Oprah Winfrey'', for Halloween. In '86

[Vogon_Glory]

61. I Have. Primary School 1965 or 1966

It was a tasteless mockery of a Minstrel show done at a Dallas-area suburban primary school. The actors were older kids, fifth or sixth grade, if my memory serves me correctly. They are now members of the Geritol set.

I suppose with the hysteria currently running rampant here on DU, there will be calls to find them and rout them out, despite the very obvious fact that 1966 was over half a century ago and the perps were under 12 years of age at the time.

EDIT: For those taking offense at my recollection, it was a different time then, and certain behaviors would no longer be acceptable now.

As the saying goes: that was then, this is now.

[Chipper Chat]

64. I wore black face in a minstrel show.

In 1951. My elementary school put it on. My character,s name was Rastus Lee. There were musical numbers between the joke skits. I remember being fascinated by the jingle rounds in the tambourine I was given to play. There were 2 or 3 black kids but they of course didnt need makeup. My mom made my costume which was a red jacket with gold glitter stripes, black pants with stripes, and a bellman,s cap. . I remember it vividly but now I'm 78 and would never be part of such a thing again.

[mainstreetonce]

62. Halloween1950s

Boys in the neighborhood (Nj) used to dress as "bums" and darken their faces with coal dust.
I don't think they were pretending to be black,just dirty old men.

[kentuck]

63. Just my Dad...

He was a coal miner.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

66. No, but did see KKK - whole families with little kids dressed in robes @ 1980ish in Birmingham

They were lined on the side of the street collecting money. Remember screaming at them.

My friend told me once - that I will NEVER EVER know what it's like to just be walking down the street and see a car load of women immediately lock their door as you walk by.

It is still a sad fucking state of affairs. And worse, under Trump. We as Dems need to send the right moral message to society. Enough is enough.

[kskiska]

68. Then there's Rachel Dolezal

I wonder what she thinks.

[jalan48]

69. Ted Danson once.

[musicblind]

70. I have not and I grew up in North Carolina.

But, knowing the racist things some students said, I wouldn't be surprised if it happened and I just wasn't invited because they knew I wouldn't put up with that hateful sh*t.

Edit: Actually, there was one time in a nightclub where a huge Tina Turner fan dressed in drag and sang karaoke as her but DID NOT darken his face in any way shape or form.

[Amishman]

71. Yes, in college at a Halloween party in early 2000s

Kid was Chinese and had only been in the country for about three months at that point. He didn't get how offensive / unacceptable it was. A few of us quietly explained and helped him rig up an improvised replacement costume.

[NotASurfer]

72. Tropic Thunder

Robert Downey Jr, about ten years ago

Never actually saw the movie, remember the clips. Movie about the fictional making of a war movie, his character was a white Australian actor playing the role of a black sergeant

[Awsi Dooger]

73. I don't have a specific memory of it

But Halloween on the Las Vegas Strip is so bizarre I may have run into it without remembering. I was there for 24 years.

Other than Halloween...definitely not

***

BTW, a yearbook is not exactly a spot where a picture of someone else would wrongly linger for 35 years under your name without you being aware of it. Everyone quickly checks the yearbook, whether they intend to purchase one or not. Everyone knows that will be the official record, particularly a visual record, even if those photos doesn't resemble day to day life at all.

It is not credible to claim yes it is a picture under my name, but not a picture of myself. The yearbook staff is extremely careful with that type of thing. The odds of wrongful identification are comfortably below 1%.