Blackface - friend texted me a story

[underpants]

Last edited Sat Feb 9, 2019, 01:22 AM - Edit history (1)

My old friends and I having been texting about this of course. We've known each other since little league football.

One of my friends said he attended a Lions Club fundraiser on the Peninsula (the county we know each other from) in which several parents of people we grew up with were in blackface. Performing what was basically a minstrel show. He asked his father because he didn't understand why it was supposed to be funny. His father, whom I've always thought alike Atticus Finch, explained that they were making fun of of people for the amusement of themselves.

This was probably in the late 70's maybe early 80's.

[Yonnie3]

1. I hadn't seen anything like that since '58

Pre-teen kids in blackface dancing and lip syncing in a "talent" show in Williamsburg, Va. I knew it was wrong then. Wrong in the sense that I would get my butt whacked if I participated. I was very young then.

Thinking hard, I recall seeing some black faced students at UVA in the mid-seventies heading into a fraternity. I wonder what future leaders, doctors, lawyers and captains of industry those fellows were.

[hlthe2b]

2. My parents told me about Al Jolson and the horrific stereotyped "collectibles" one saw in antique

stores growing up (and how offensive it was) when I was a kid. So there were many who were well aware of the nature of this derisive symbolism even in the 50s and 60s--much less in the 80s.

Still, having lived a good portion of my adolescence and early adulthood in the deep South, it does not surprise me that so many were engaged in this kind of behavior. Hell, I recall being accidentally blocked in traffic by a KKK rally in Woodstock GA, in the late 80s--just north of Atlanta, so there is a pervasive remnant that continues. One hell of a lot of Southern white men were likely at least exposed to this disgusting crap--hopefully few embraced it.