He's a hell of an actor, so why not?
If Elba played Macbeth, would you make him look white?
Whiteface?
But is any such stage convention really necessary, though that sort of thing was the rule for many decades of the past?
Who does not know Macbeth is a Scottish noble with too much ambition and a too pushy wife?
If Idris Elba played him without any cosmetic effects, we could all just agree the excellent black actor on the stage, who looks like an excellent black actor on the stage, is all the same playing a white character.
And I guess that would be our new stage convention.
If a person of race X plays a character of race Y (and why not?) the audience just needs to be otherwise apprised of the fact than by cosmetic effects.
Damn few nonwhite characters in Shakespeare.
But lots of juicy roles that could open up for excellent nonwhite actors, if only we humans were adult enough to do it.
Lucy Liu as Lady Macbeth?
It makes me smile.
Lucy Liu as Macbeth might be too much of a stretch, without costume and cosmetic effects.
Still, not as hard as playing a Wookie or C3PO, I suppose.
Showing posts with label blackface. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blackface. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Sunday, February 3, 2019
Saturday, February 2, 2019
Is Northam Kavanaugh?
I agree now that he needs to go, partly because he didn't and partly because of his new claims of innocence, mixed with what I suppose is intended to be a pre-emptive confession of a different incident.
Live on MSNBC he is having a press conference.
He says now he never had a copy of the 1984 yearbook and never saw the page or the photo in his life until the other day when it first surfaced.
(Yesterday he said he is in it and put the photo on the page.)
He says that year in San Antonio he attended a costume party dressed as Michael Jackson and blackened his face for that party, winning a dance contest for something called "moonwalk", earning and apparently enjoying the nickname "Coonman," and he apologizes for all that.
He offers the helpful hint not to use more than a little shoe polish because "You can't wash that off." (!!)
He insists that he now realizes how offensive all that is to black people and apologizes for it, but insists the offense in what he confesses to is surely not equal to that of the photo of the Klansman and man in blackface in the yearbook, that he now denies is a photo of him.
He says he contacted people who would know and they said in that yearbook there were several photos on wrong pages, and thinks that explains how the photo got onto his page.
He says he will not resign.
He claims that his public record is anti-racist, reminding people he has called for state monuments to confederate leaders to be taken down and placed in museums.
(Placed in museums? Not publicly and enthusiastically destroyed?)
Joy of AM Joy has three other black people on with her (no whites), including Al Sharpton, all of whom reject Northam's every point, including the extent of moral difference he claims between dressing as Michael Jackson and bearing the nickname "Cooman" on the one side and dressing mockingly as a Klansman or the Klansman's victim on the other.
They are outraged he did not resign.
Meanwhile, all other Democrats are saying Northam's career is and should be over.
He may never get another black vote, and he was elected with 87 % of the black vote, the newsies say.
One of the guys talking to Joy is saying Northam should be impeached, Virginia's constitution providing for that in a manner similar to the federal government.
Though I don't actually see the crime here it might help drive him out, and anyway he should not be allowed to just walk away from this, now, and serve out his term as though none of this ever happened.
It's not over, and shouldn't be.
The whole thing, now, just seems way too Kavanaugh.
Justin Fairfax has so far not called for Northam to resign.
Live on MSNBC he is having a press conference.
He says now he never had a copy of the 1984 yearbook and never saw the page or the photo in his life until the other day when it first surfaced.
(Yesterday he said he is in it and put the photo on the page.)
He says that year in San Antonio he attended a costume party dressed as Michael Jackson and blackened his face for that party, winning a dance contest for something called "moonwalk", earning and apparently enjoying the nickname "Coonman," and he apologizes for all that.
He offers the helpful hint not to use more than a little shoe polish because "You can't wash that off." (!!)
He insists that he now realizes how offensive all that is to black people and apologizes for it, but insists the offense in what he confesses to is surely not equal to that of the photo of the Klansman and man in blackface in the yearbook, that he now denies is a photo of him.
He says he contacted people who would know and they said in that yearbook there were several photos on wrong pages, and thinks that explains how the photo got onto his page.
He says he will not resign.
He claims that his public record is anti-racist, reminding people he has called for state monuments to confederate leaders to be taken down and placed in museums.
(Placed in museums? Not publicly and enthusiastically destroyed?)
Joy of AM Joy has three other black people on with her (no whites), including Al Sharpton, all of whom reject Northam's every point, including the extent of moral difference he claims between dressing as Michael Jackson and bearing the nickname "Cooman" on the one side and dressing mockingly as a Klansman or the Klansman's victim on the other.
They are outraged he did not resign.
Meanwhile, all other Democrats are saying Northam's career is and should be over.
He may never get another black vote, and he was elected with 87 % of the black vote, the newsies say.
One of the guys talking to Joy is saying Northam should be impeached, Virginia's constitution providing for that in a manner similar to the federal government.
Though I don't actually see the crime here it might help drive him out, and anyway he should not be allowed to just walk away from this, now, and serve out his term as though none of this ever happened.
It's not over, and shouldn't be.
The whole thing, now, just seems way too Kavanaugh.
Justin Fairfax has so far not called for Northam to resign.
Can white people be Democratic office holders?
Maybe not all white people.
Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, are demanding the 59 year old white Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, resign.
The Lieutenant Governor who would succeed him, Justin Fairfax, is black.
Calls For Resignation As Va. Governor Apologizes for Racist Image In 1984 Yearbook
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam apologized on Friday for appearing in a "clearly racist and offensive" costume in his 1984 medical school yearbook.
The photo shows a person wearing blackface standing next to another person wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe.
Northam has confessed he is in this mocking and brutally crass, even cruel picture and put it on his page, though he has not said which of the two white guys he is.
Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, are demanding the 59 year old white Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, resign.
The Lieutenant Governor who would succeed him, Justin Fairfax, is black.
Calls For Resignation As Va. Governor Apologizes for Racist Image In 1984 Yearbook
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam apologized on Friday for appearing in a "clearly racist and offensive" costume in his 1984 medical school yearbook.
The photo shows a person wearing blackface standing next to another person wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe.
Northam has confessed he is in this mocking and brutally crass, even cruel picture and put it on his page, though he has not said which of the two white guys he is.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
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.
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.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Blackface
Olivier played the title role in a film of Othello in which they painted him black, stuffed up his butt, and had him walk in a manner somebody must have told him looked black.
Interestingly, a theme of the play is the racism of the whites around him, including Desdemona's father, and how the sense of social isolation it produces in him makes him all the more vulnerable to Iago's campaign to make him believe Desdemona has been unfaithful.
Olivier's Mahdi in Khartoum was of the same ilk.
Of course, he was brilliant in both.
I was advised ages ago that in Japanese theater if a Japanese actor played a white character he commonly did it in whiteface.
Theatrical conventions just are what they are.
The PC police who denounce these conventions as racist are the same sort of folks who not long ago denounced a white girl for "cultural appropriation" and racism, both, for wearing a beautiful dress of a traditional Chinese type.
Paul Simon got the same treatment for some of the cuts on Graceland.
Interestingly, a theme of the play is the racism of the whites around him, including Desdemona's father, and how the sense of social isolation it produces in him makes him all the more vulnerable to Iago's campaign to make him believe Desdemona has been unfaithful.
Olivier's Mahdi in Khartoum was of the same ilk.
Of course, he was brilliant in both.
I was advised ages ago that in Japanese theater if a Japanese actor played a white character he commonly did it in whiteface.
Theatrical conventions just are what they are.
The PC police who denounce these conventions as racist are the same sort of folks who not long ago denounced a white girl for "cultural appropriation" and racism, both, for wearing a beautiful dress of a traditional Chinese type.
Paul Simon got the same treatment for some of the cuts on Graceland.
Friday, February 17, 2017
More rules from the PC race commissars who put Trump in the White House
Why do you think Breitbart, Fox, and the like so love to publicize this stuff?
White people are not to be portrayed as, in any manner or sense of the term, rescuing people who are not white.
And such portrayals are to be scorned and greeted with contempt.
So, no more movies about Lincoln, LBJ, John Brown, John Quincy Adams, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and so on.
So when whites play the heroes in action films in which the people they save are not white, a line is crossed, blame and scorn are distributed, guilt assessed, and apologies demanded.
Tom Cruise better be damned careful, is all I can say.
But if you must have white characters fighting to save nonwhites, that is permitted if you portray them as intellectually, morally, or otherwise inferior to the nonwhites, as Jonathan Kim explains.
Also to be scorned and blamed is whitewashing, perhaps by the same people who wanted Idris Elba to be the next James Bond.
Olivier played Othello and the Mahdi in blackface.
Brilliant, both times, though his efforts to have a black walk and black glutes in the former were a bit comic.
If Elba played Macbeth, how would you make him look white?
Whiteface?
Update 2/6/19.
But is any such stage convention really necessary, anyway?
Who does not know Macbeth is a Scottish noble with too much ambition and too push a wife?
If Idris Elba played him without any cosmetic alteration, we could all just agree the excellent black actor on the stage, who looks like an excellent black actor on the stage, is all the same playing a white character?
And I guess that would be our new stage convention.
If a person of race X plays a character of race Y the audience just needs to be otherwise apprised of the fact than by cosmetic effects.
Update 2/6/19.
But is any such stage convention really necessary, anyway?
Who does not know Macbeth is a Scottish noble with too much ambition and too push a wife?
If Idris Elba played him without any cosmetic alteration, we could all just agree the excellent black actor on the stage, who looks like an excellent black actor on the stage, is all the same playing a white character?
And I guess that would be our new stage convention.
If a person of race X plays a character of race Y the audience just needs to be otherwise apprised of the fact than by cosmetic effects.
Friday, April 22, 2016
A remake of Ben Hur
What a strange idea.
Did you know Charlton Heston was the only actor ever to play a Mexican in blackface?
Orson Welles, Touch of Evil.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
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
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
Thursday, March 19, 2015
What is Iago's tribe?
Good God the souls of all my tribe defend
From jealousy!
From jealousy!
Was Iago a Jew in some early draft of the play?
Reading Othello.
I never saw Fishburne in the role but will yet.
He is a fine actor.
I have a tape of Olivier, who is also fine but plays the role in blackface and, looking with today's eyes, perhaps made a silly and embarrassing to do of acting the part of a black man.
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