Modern ‘blackface’
First, French Vogue published a photograph of a white model painted black – raising the rather obvious question of why they did not simply use a model with black skin.
I suspect you will wait rather a long time to see Vogue using pictures of someone with another natural skin tone painted white.
And then, on a talent show in Australia, a group of young white men did an “impression” of the Jackson Five in black make-up, or blackface, that would not have been out of place in an Alabama minstrel show in the 1890s.
Interestingly, the American entertainer Harry Connick Jr was there as a guest judge and was thus able to explain to the Australian audience what the performance looked like to other eyes.
He said simply: “I know it was done humorously but we’ve spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons that when we see something like that we take it really to heart and I know it was in good fun but if I had known it was going to be part of the show I probably, I definitely wouldn’t have done it.”
It may seem strange to be marking Black History month (which in the UK, unlike in the US and Canada, is celebrated in October) by reporting breaches against good taste that seem to belong to another age.
It is 31 years since the BBC stopped broadcasting its own contribution to this unhappy genre – the Black and White Minstrel Show.
I asked Hilary Shelton of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to put into words what he must have hoped would be obvious by now.
He told me: “These tools were used in the past to dehumanise. In the US and Great Britain we share common experiences with race relations that make us a bit more sensitive to what it means to put someone in blackface, to put a caricature wig of an African-American on one’s head, to exaggerate the size of one’s lips or the size of one’s nose.”
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