Blackface returns! Score one for racism.
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A cultural memory of blackface: Burnt cork, red lips. Steppity-steppity-step, shuffle, slapstick. “Authentic” former slaves, dancing for the white folks. T.D. “Daddy” Rice, a white man in the cork and face paint, a national sensation in the 1830s, doing a dance he lifted from a Negro in Cincinnati. Fred Armisen is Illinois Sen. Barack Obama on “Saturday Night Live.” Robert Downey Jr. plays a pompous white actor playing a black soldier in a Ben Stiller movie, “Tropic Thunder,” due out this summer. Chuck Knipp does drag as a black Southern woman, Shirley Q. Liquor, the “Queen of Ignunce,” in clubs and on video-sharing sites. Comedian Tracey Ullman dons face paint to portray a black security agent, Chanel Monticello, in her new series on Showtime. For better or worse, Ullman goes for it all. In the opening minutes of the March 30 debut of her show, “State of the Union,” a mockumentary about a day in the life of America, she plays an undocumented Bangladeshi doughnut maker, a Jamaican caregiver (whose elderly charge tells her to get “your black hands off me”) and a mid-market Latino TV news anchor. That’s a white actress going brown, browner and light brown in about three minutes of airtime. Downey, whose reps declined an interview request, talked to Entertainment Weekly recently about his role: “If it’s done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don’t do it right, we’re going to hell.”
Via LATimes