0:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Has it ever been okay to wear blackface? 0:04 [SPEAKER_01]: It's obviously a terrible thing, but are there exceptions? 0:09 [SPEAKER_01]: I ask because I think I may have found one while reading the other night and I can't stop thinking about it. 0:15 [SPEAKER_01]: For those of you who need a little background, blackface is a form of theatrical makeup that white performers have used throughout history. 0:23 [SPEAKER_01]: to portray and demean black people. 0:26 [SPEAKER_01]: The dark substance white performers would put on their faces with typically shoe polish, grease paint or burnt cork and the end result was as ridiculous and off-putting as you might imagine. 0:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Performers in Blackface mocked and ridiculed people of color as the history channel put it white performers and Blackface played characters that portrayed a range of negative stereotypes about African Americans including being lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, criminal, or cowardly. 1:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody was putting on blackface to play the part of an ultra-intelligent aristocrat, constantly outsmarting the people around him, or to play the hero, who saved the day and out the girl. 1:12 [SPEAKER_01]: However, you spin it, there's just no way to redeem blackface as an art form. 1:17 [SPEAKER_01]: and who would want to. 1:18 [SPEAKER_01]: It's an openly racist act of aggression against a marginalized people group, and it's not remotely funny. 1:25 [SPEAKER_01]: If you ever want to research this, you'll be surprised at what you find. 1:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The most jarring image for me was that of Shirley Temple, America Sweetheart of the 1930s. 1:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Looking out innocently, if a bit beleegered. 1:39 [SPEAKER_01]: through a face full of shoe polish. 1:42 [SPEAKER_01]: That's something so insidious could ever be so ordinary is just shocking. 1:47 [SPEAKER_01]: But even Shirley Temple wasn't as shocking as this other yet more famous example of Blackface and American history. 1:56 [SPEAKER_01]: And I actually think you'll find it forgivable if a bit misguided. 2:01 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1959, a middle-aged white man from Dallas, Texas, deliberately darkened his skin with stain and creams for the purpose of temporarily passing as a person of color. 2:13 [SPEAKER_01]: He underwent skin treatments with a dermatologist and set under sunlamps for hours at a time to achieve this desired effect. 2:22 [SPEAKER_01]: He then, and I'm crudging here too, 2:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Practice what he believed to be, quote, an African-American accent in order to perfect his performance. 2:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And he did all of this why, to fight racism, of course. 2:39 [SPEAKER_01]: You see none of this performance was intended for this stage. 2:42 [SPEAKER_01]: This was theater without the actual theater. 2:46 [SPEAKER_01]: In order to expose the systemic injustice and prejudice of American society. 2:52 [SPEAKER_01]: His name was John Howard Griffin, a journalist who often wrote about racial injustice in inequality. 3:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Frustrated with a lack of change in society, Griffin wanted to expose white America to itself from the other side of the collar line. 3:09 [SPEAKER_01]: To the eyes of a fellow, Carcassian, he wanted to bring white expectations and habits into the margins of society and have them thwarted 3:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Griffin's disgust with racism had been fueled decades earlier by his time in Europe during World War II, appalled by the anti-Semitism of the Axis Powers, he joined the French resistance and helped smuggle Jewish children away from the Holocaust and into Great Britain following this experience he became a journalist and committed his life to fighting the racist evils of his own country, which commitment ultimately led to the project he would be most remembered for. 3:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Having darkened his skin and shaved his hair, Griffin went undercover and became a shoe shiner in New Orleans. 4:00 [SPEAKER_01]: He tried to drink out white fountains and used white bathrooms, even the simplest of conveniences. 4:06 [SPEAKER_01]: We're suddenly off-limits, he said of his experience, quote. 4:10 [SPEAKER_00]: More than once I walked into a drugstore, where a black man can buy cigarettes or anything else, except soda fountain service. 4:17 [SPEAKER_00]: I asked politely where I might find a glass of water. 4:19 [SPEAKER_00]: though they had water not three yards away. 4:22 [SPEAKER_00]: They carefully directed me to the nearest black cafe. 4:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Now this was hardly a revelation to any American person of color, but it's shook, riffing up. 4:33 [SPEAKER_01]: It's one thing to know of something and another to experience it firsthand. 4:39 [SPEAKER_01]: One by one he explored the social disadvantages of his adopted pigmentation. 4:44 [SPEAKER_01]: in the attempt to critique and enlighten white America. 4:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Admittedly, this was a hair-brained thing to do, as well as a minefield of potential faux pas, but Griffin's heart was in the right place. 4:57 [SPEAKER_01]: He wanted change, and this was the best way he knew to go about it, granted. 5:02 [SPEAKER_01]: He was a journalist and was undoubtedly just as excited about the potential for good copy, but let's not be too cynical. 5:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Griffin knew his social experiment would also cost him personally, and to the end of his life, long after his skin had returned to its normal pigmentation. 5:19 [SPEAKER_01]: There were still many places in white society where it was unsafe for him to go. 5:25 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1964, just over a decade after the publication of his four ex-poze called Black Like Me, Griffin was stranded with a flat tire in rural Mississippi, in a group of white men approached him with what appeared to be tools to help him. 5:41 [SPEAKER_01]: They had something else in mind. 5:42 [SPEAKER_01]: They'd recognize the author from the television interviews and nearly beat him to death with chains, leaving him unconscious on the side of the road. 5:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Fortunately, he lived, but the recovery was a long one. 5:56 [SPEAKER_01]: His own hometown, Mansfield, Texas, also turned against him, and a dummy was made of him, and publicly hanged an effigy. 6:05 [SPEAKER_01]: In his book, Griffin describes what he calls the quote, hate to stare. 6:09 [SPEAKER_01]: He looks some whites give him, when they're tired of being polite. 6:13 [SPEAKER_01]: He says of this hate stare, quote, Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: You feel lost. 6:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Sick at heart before such an unmasked hatred. 6:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. 6:32 [SPEAKER_00]: You see a kind of insanity. 6:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Something so obscene, the very obscenity of it terrifies you. 6:40 [SPEAKER_00]: I felt like saying, what in God's name are you doing to yourself? 6:46 [SPEAKER_01]: As bad as Griffin had expected things to be, he was appalled at his experience. 6:52 [SPEAKER_01]: There were many white people who treated him with kindness and respect, but as often as not, he felt the hatred he described merely because of the color of his skin. 7:03 [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things he had not anticipated in his social experiment was the way he would be sexualized once people viewed him as a black man. 7:13 [SPEAKER_01]: Multiple times in the book, white men tried to engage him in sexual conversation and one of them even asks to see his genitalia. 7:21 [SPEAKER_01]: they treat him as an object, a novelty, rather than as a man. 7:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Even 60 years later, Black White Me is still worth reading. 7:31 [SPEAKER_01]: It's not perfect. 7:33 [SPEAKER_01]: There are times where it feels a bit contrived or patronizing, but it's a strange, interesting book, and a brave experiment, and one that you should never, ever attempt yourself. 7:45 [SPEAKER_01]: But rather than nitpicking, Griffin's methodology, we should appreciate his heart and his deep desire to combat the evils of society. 7:54 [SPEAKER_01]: He fought the Nazis in Europe, and he fought white supremacy at home, each in his own way, on his own terms. 8:01 [SPEAKER_01]: He was in some ways a resistance fighter to the end.
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