Blackface: All the Nope

There is no joke in dehumanization.

For hundreds of years in the United States, all manner of fuckery has been used to justify the Atlantic Slave trade, and the subsequent treatment of people of African descent. From the bible to debunked sciences to gross caricature, one common theme ran through all justifications:

They’re not actually people.

Once you’ve absolved yourself of any moral responsibility towards another human being, you can literally do anything to them, and it’s okay. You can own them. You can kill them. You can torture and maim them. You can rape them, and own the children of rape. You could count them as 3/5th of a person in the governing document of your burgeoning nation, and then later amend your constitution, with the proviso that anyone convicted of committing a crime would then be subject to imprisonment, and peonage. Then you could arrest them in droves.

Once you’ve absolved yourself of any moral responsibility towards another human being, you can literally do anything to them, and it’s okay.

You could portray them as lazy even though they were almost the entirety of your workforce; the literal backs on whom the economy was built. You could depict them as violent, justifying retaliation for even the slightest perception of disrespect. You could paint their men as clowns and their women as whores, warranting your emasculation and fetishization. You could bake this hatred deep into the systems and institutions of government, allowing it to morph and adapt over time. You could legalize segregation, write anti-miscegenation laws, and preach ‘separate but equal,’ all while knowing you would not tolerate the abuse you either doled out or gave tacit consent with your inaction.

You could poison their water, pollute their air, make them fight every day for the rights you enjoy as a consequence of being born, make them live under the constant threat of state sponsored violence, and deny them equal opportunity for economic advancement. You could steal and profit from their culture while demonizing them, dehumanize them when they beg you to accept the reality that their lives matter, all while quietly benefiting from a system hundreds of years in the making that advantages one group of people over another, based solely on the amount of melanin in their skin.

And every now and then, you could throw in a small reminder of how things used to be; a memento to simpler times before everyone had rights. A monkey reference. A watermelon joke. Or you could don blackface.

Because it’s just a joke, right?