{"id":10100,"date":"2009-06-26T10:59:32","date_gmt":"2009-06-26T15:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=10100"},"modified":"2017-09-16T18:15:54","modified_gmt":"2017-09-16T23:15:54","slug":"is-blackface-is-okay-if-white-people-are-the-butt-of-the-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/06\/26\/is-blackface-is-okay-if-white-people-are-the-butt-of-the-joke\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Blackface Okay If White People Are The Butt Of The Joke?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re pleased to feature a post by Macon D.\u00a0\u00a0About himself, Macon writes, \u201cI\u2019m a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the \u2018white\u2019 part. I live in that heart of the heart of American whiteness, the ever-amorphous \u2018Midwest.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Macon\u2019s blog, Stuff White People Do<\/a>, is an excellent source of insights about race and racism.\u00a0 We thought this post<\/a> grappled nicely with the complicated phenomenon of (literal and figurative) black face, while addressing a difficult and contemporary form of humor:<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

\"chicagolakeoutdoor\"<\/p>\n

Chicago-Lake Liquors<\/div>\n
Minneapolis, Minnesota
\n(click here<\/a> for larger version)<\/span><\/div>\n

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On the absorbing and informative blog Kiss My Black Ads<\/a>, Craig Brimm responds to an ad campaign currently being run by Chicago-Lake Liquors, a store located in a largely black<\/a> area of Minneapolis, Minnesota.\u00a0 The images above are apparently billboards, and I’ve embedded below the three TV commercials also included in this campaign. (If you can’t view them, they’re also running now on the store’s site here<\/a>.)The ads include “black” language, gestures, body language and so on, as performed by white, middle-class men (why no white women?). As I understand it, the joke is that these white folks are making fools of themselves by imitating black people.<\/p>\n

Are these ads racist? Or are they making fun of racist white people? And if they’re “only” doing the latter, does that really make the contemporary blackface<\/a> here any more acceptable?<\/p>\n

Does context matter here, with Chicago-Lake Liquors located in a largely black area? Given that, perhaps the ads allow black people to feel superior in a way to these white people, by laughing at their silly efforts to get hip by acting “black.” Maybe, but that seems like a stretch.<\/p>\n

Speaking of context — while blackface is largely condemned in the U.S., because it perpetuates and solidifies racist stereotypes, it serves other purposes in some other countries. Take a look at these other examples; as a United States citizen trying to become more aware on a daily level of racism and my own whiteness, I have increasing trouble ever seeing blackface, literal or otherwise, as acceptable. And yet, I’m a strong believer in the meaning-generating significance of social, historical, and cultural context. Many things have different meanings in different contexts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, I do find the Chicago-Lake Liquors ads racist. Even though the satiric butt of their central joke is clueless white people instead of black people, their version of blackness is insultingly cartoonish. They also basically revive what amounts to an American white supremacist tradition that deserves to die, blackface minstrelsy.<\/p>\n

Still, I wonder — if we consider geographic, sociohistorical context, are some versions of blackface okay? Perhaps even, given its urban location, the contemporary American version in Chicago-Lake Liquors’ ad campaign?<\/p>\n

*<\/span> As Restructure! notes in a comment<\/a>, Ganguro is one of three such modes of teenage blackface identified in the video; Yamanba, which means “mountain hag,” is the name of the one that’s tied to a comic’s racist parody of an aboriginal Australian. Jonathan Ross, the narrator of the video, notes that when Ganguro appeared after Yamanba, “many thought it was simply an homage” to the comic’s “beloved creation,” but apparently it’s not.<\/p>\n

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Lisa Wade is a\u00a0professor of sociology at Occidental College<\/a>. You can follow her on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re pleased to feature a post by Macon D.\u00a0\u00a0About himself, Macon writes, \u201cI\u2019m a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the \u2018white\u2019 part. I live in that heart of the heart of American whiteness, the ever-amorphous \u2018Midwest.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Macon\u2019s blog, Stuff White People Do, is an excellent source of insights about race […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[253,256,1811,1821,1807,285,1760],"class_list":["post-10100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-humor","tag-nation-britainthe-u-k","tag-nation-japan","tag-nation-turkey","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10100"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71049,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10100\/revisions\/71049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}