So it's impossible, now? Well, not much of a loss. I guess.

MAGA Brats Defend Blackface, So That's Where The US Is Today

Is that really what the MAGA kid was talking about?

He seems to be referring to kids painting their faces different colors at sporting events, using white (actual white, not white "flesh color", as it used to be called), black, or blue face paint.

Much as people have been known at soccer games to face-paint the Union Jack onto themselves, or red white and blue stripes, or other colors representing other countries or even players.

So, no, not blackface, not really.

Just black face paint on a white face.

And while we're on the subject, when people talk about Idris Elba playing James Bond they ask the question why Bond has to be white.

They don't ask the question how a black actor can play a white character.

White actors used to play black characters in blackface, which was in legitimate theater just very heavy makeup on every inch of exposed skin making the skin appear as black as you please.

Examples include Laurence Olivier playing Othello in one great film, and the Mahdi in another (Khartoum).

White actors made similar cosmetic adjustments to their appearances while playing Indians - a whole bunch of white actors in The Plainsman and Drums Along the Mohawk.

And likewise when playing East Asians.

Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan, for example, and some other fellow playing Mister Moto, two Asian private eyes who were always much smarter and more decent than any of the white guys in the room.

But that wasn't about race, anyway, but just the usual the private eye is smarter than the cop thing, a convention older than Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Lestrade.

But anyway a white actor can't do that now, and so far as I know there was never a similar stage convention in the United States to signal audiences that a non-white actor was playing a white character.

Did white actors in Elizabethan England use blackface? I don't know.

As I understand it, in Japan, Japanese actors used to use something like whiteface to play white characters.

But that convention might have been abandoned.

Anyway, the result, it appears, is that there is no conventional visual cue to inform otherwise ignorant audiences that an actor of race x is playing a character of differing race y.

And not every character can all that readily be of just any race.

Consider Othello. Or Aaron of Titus Andronicus.

Both recently played brilliantly by black actors, of necessity.

But no loss, really.

We are long past the days when a casting director might plausibly say to himself the best available actor to play a tremendous black character is a famously brilliant white guy.

By the way, women have played men, and men women, using cross dressing and heavy makeup.

Don't recall if that nowadays raises a fuss, though the practise seems to continue.

Doesn't seem to.

But surely it is no more necessary than using white guys in blackface to play Othello?

So I guess something is lost, really, with the loss of black face.

Artistic freedom for the artists.

And the related innocence, for audiences and critics.

What should be condemned and have been lost was not whites using blackface, but whites using blackface for racist parodies and scorn.

Update.

As for the smug look on that kid Sandmann's face, if you were a 17 year old kid in his position maybe your expression wouldn't be winning, either.