Blackface

Blackface is the theatrical practice of non-Black performers darkening their skin and using stereotypes to caricature Black people. It became central to minstrelsy and has been used in other performance traditions.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice: An American performer whose stage character Jim Crow helped popularize blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s. His Jim Crow performances helped establish blackface as a commercial stage attraction.
Daniel Decatur Emmett: An American songwriter and performer associated with the minstrel song “Dixie.” His minstrel career connected blackface performance with widely circulated songs.
Jim Crow laws: State and local laws that enforced racial segregation and disfranchisement in the United States, especially from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. The shared name with the minstrel character reflects the broader history of racial caricature and segregation.
Black vaudeville: A tradition of variety entertainment created and performed by Black artists, often within segregated venues and circuits. It offered Black performers a distinct stage tradition amid an industry shaped by blackface.
Cultural appropriation: The adoption or use of elements from a culture by people outside it, especially amid unequal power relations. Debates about blackface often examine who can represent another group and with what consequences.
Jim Crow (character): A stereotyped Black character popularized in nineteenth-century American theater and later used as a name for racial segregation. The character became one of minstrelsy's most influential blackface caricatures.
Bert Williams: A Black American comedian and performer who worked in blackface minstrelsy and vaudeville in the early twentieth century. His career reveals the constrained choices facing Black performers in a white-dominated entertainment industry.
Sambo (racial stereotype): A racist caricature portraying Black people as childlike, submissive, and foolish. This stereotype was repeatedly reinforced through blackface stage characters.
Blackface in Asian theater: The use of darkened makeup to portray Black people in some Asian theatrical and popular-performance traditions. It shows that blackface practices arose in contexts beyond American minstrelsy.
Racial caricature: An exaggerated depiction that reduces people of a racial group to demeaning visual or behavioral traits. Blackface is a theatrical form of racial caricature.

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