What about girlface?

Rachel Dolezal defiantly maintains 'I identify as black' in TV interview

Rachel Dolezal, the civil rights activist accused of misrepresenting her race, declared on Tuesday that she still identifies as black – and that she does not “put on blackface as a performance”.

Speaking publicly for the first time since her white parents revealed she was not of African American descent, Dolezal continued to speak in the unapologetic tone of her Monday resignation as president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP.

Rebutting accusations from her brother and a legion of commenters across the world that she is guilty of blackface, Dolezal said resolutely: “I don’t, as some of the critics have said, put on blackface as a performance.

“I have a huge issue with blackface. This is not some freak, Birth of a Nation mockery blackface performance,” she said in an interview with NBC’s Today show, referring to the 1915 film that portrays Ku Klux Klansmen as heroes. 

“This is on a very real, connected level how I’ve actually had to go there with the experience, not just a visual representation.”

It is true that on some occasions white performers in blackface have mocked black people in a racist spirit.

But black performers have done the same.

Male performers have cross dressed on stage to mock women, no doubt sometimes in a spirit of genuine misogyny.

But women have played such roles, too.

In Shakespeare's day, women's roles were played by men cross-dressed and made up to look like girls.

Were they guilty of girlface?

Why isn't Bruce Jenner guilty of girlface?

Was Divine?

On stage and on film, great actors like Laurence Olivier wore blackface in performances that certainly did not mock, belittle, or deride blacks.

See, for instance, Othello and Khartoum.

Blackface as a stage convention is no more racist than cross-performing is sexist, but it is now impossible due to the triumphant racism the contemporary left inherited from the New Left, in which the latter was encouraged by the machinery of international communism, with which it extensively collaborated.

This is good and interesting, but sadly too short.

Cross gender acting

On the other hand, the Wikipedia article on Blackface is about 75% left wing race propaganda.

Blackface