Just two weeks ago, in the midst of procrastinating for my upcoming midterms (in which, ironically, we were being tested on our knowledge about blackface minstrelsy and "modern" blackface), a family-friend of mine from Singapore retweeted the following image (which generated 1,393 retweets and 435 favorites):
As someone who is admittedly soft-spoken and avidly avoids confrontations, I surprised myself when I decided to respond to the person who posted the picture and call him out for performing a form of modern blackface by painting his face black and photoshopping an image of himself as a demonized caricature of a Black person. The four pictures clearly illustrates the user putting black paint on his face, before posing diabolically in the last two pictures, which are enhanced by the edited glowing eyes and blinding white teeth. In the last image, the user's picture is edited even further to make his hair draw similarities to the African American hair texture.
If this isn't blackface, I don't know what is.
I would even argue that while blackface was typically used to portray African-Americans as dim-witted, jolly and lazy (cue the Zip Coon and Happy Sambo), this user went as far as to demonize himself in blackface so as to portray Blacks as villainous and sinister.
The response I got was incredibly frustrating because of its small-minded nature and the users' refusal to admit the racist element of the post. Not only did I get numerous tweets from the user's friends, who jumped on the bandwagon to attack my gender and comments, but I also got many responses from the original poster trying to defend himself by repeatedly stating that his actions were not racist because he had just employed some "lighting and black&white filter" changes and that I needed to just "chill a little".
Side note: Can we just laugh at the habit that men have where they accuse women of being on their period every time they [men] are about to lose an argument? Just saying.
Eventually, after an excruciating hour of me screaming on the phone to my sister about the backwardness and stubbornness of these users, the original poster admitted that "yes yes it's racist but you are just being too sensitive" but "the intentions weren't there". *insert big sigh here*
Similarly to how UC Irvine's Asian Fraternity (Lambda Theta Delta) inserted a short slide about their innocent, non-racist intentions before performing extremely racially offensive actions, the Twitter user might not have intended to be racist towards Blacks, but he has grown up in a structure and society that already places people with darker skin tones at the bottom of the social hierarchy - making them equivalent with all negative adjectives. So while the poster might not have had racist intentions and could be described as innocuously participating in a Twitter trend #makeuptransformation (in which most people post supposedly funny pictures of what makeup can do to oneself), his upbringing in a society that shamed dark colored skin essentially led to his performing (apparently) innocent but racist actions.
Although blackface has certainly modernized itself in this situation, it remains a public spectacle and a form of entertainment just like in the days during and post slavery. Such is seen through how Twitter acted as a platform onto which this user posted this demeaning picture for likes and retweets. The way in which I received backlash from many of the user's friends who mocked me by commenting on the original poster's other [irrelevant] tweets, "THAT'S SO RACIST!!!!" draws attention to the "publicness" of the situation, in which everyone is participant.
Sadly, the picture is still available on the user's account on Twitter despite multiple attempts by yours truly to have it removed. Oh well, I tried.
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