Blackness in America is certainly more than tint - but the tint is what everyone, black, white and everything else, can readily see, and always does.Īs such, for a white actor to play a black person, brown skin ought be processed as part of the costume, just as any number of other superficial traits are considered essential to playing people of other social categories. Yes, we seek to see people for their character, but we are also primates with a visual capacity and an innate cognitive inclination towards taxonomy and xenophobia. In a society in which the default person is white, having brown skin is the key marker of being black. But as tempting as that analysis is in a geometric, complementary kind of sense, I don’t think it goes through. Many would, from this, conclude that we therefore must accept white actors playing black people without makeup. Crucially, we do not want them to wear whiteface when doing so: we congratulate ourselves on being able to see past the skin color to the Content of the Character underneath. In a truly modern America, black people should be able to play the default. As today’s White Privilege teachings instruct us, the default conception of “person” in modern America is white - default in the sense not only of numerical majority, which in America may be temporary, but also in terms of power and neutral social evaluation. One receives these portrayals as moving us into the future that the Civil Rights movement pointed us towards, at least before the late 1960s, where people are to be simply people. As I write, black Kyle Jean-Baptiste is playing Valjean in Les Miserables on Broadway, and it’s barely news. Again, one was to simply allow that Grandpa Vanderhof was white despite Jones’ race, and it worked. Recently James Earl Jones played the paterfamilias in a revival of You Can’t Take It With You, about a white family in New York in the 1930s. We were simply to accept that black actors can play white, or “white.” And one did. The casting also had her father and one of her brothers as a black actor, but it was obvious that this configuration had nothing to do with any reality of Depression-era Kansas - for example, white men would not have eagerly sought the hand of a black woman in that setting. Audra Mcdonald has played Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel and, more oddly, the lead in the musical 110 in the Shade about a rural woman worried that she may never marry, in a role played in the past by, for example, Katherine Hepburn (in the film of 110’s straight play progenitor The Rainmaker). This is true: in American theater today one is increasingly accustomed to seeing black actors playing white roles with no one batting an eye. Now, a ready objection might be that black actors playing white aren’t expected to wear whiteface. Faulkner told us that the past isn’t even past - but sometimes it is. Today you have to be a centenarian to have any mature memory of seeing a minstrel show, and precious few people are given to holing up with movies like Mammy. The question arises as to how long we insist that a gesture is offensive because it “recalls” something.
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