This and that
Iceaura said:
The meme combination of black clown playing white on stage and the evil Joker is effective, IMHO.
It's no wonder it caught on, pretty much always taken as racially loaded of course. Because it is.
Perhaps it speaks to the priorities of Obama's opponents more than anything else, but I am more and more amused by the "reverse racism" of the image:
The thing about the whiteface is that it's sort of paradoxical. There is, somewhere in the annals of American cinema, this hilarious scene where a black butler is frightened by a ghost. They essentially did a stop-motion animation in which pieces of clay or putty were applied to the actor's face; you could see each new piece in the frames—he was scared white by a ghost.
And while those roles are oft derided in the modern day for their appeals to stereotype, I do find interesting the idea that a black man becomes white when he's scared senseless.
Likewise, the Obama whiteface. If we must drag race into this, we should also consider the value of making Obama white in order to depict him as a sociopath.
(#2341389/67)
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S.A.M. said:
Isn't Obama 50% white? Whats wrong with being white?
American history includes the one-eighth standard of
Plessy v. Ferguson (Homer Plessy was one-eighth black, therefore he was black and had to travel in the train car reserved for blacks), and the "one-drop rule" by which having "one drop" of black blood made you black.
It's only as Obama advanced toward the presidency that many Americans scrambled to redefine. Yes, Obama is half white, but that's never cut it before in the American race discussion.
(Interestingly, the lone dissenting vote in
Plessy was cast by
Justice John Harlan, who had, in his lifetime, owned slaves; it is a
fascinating dissent. The 7 to 1 vote set a fifty-eight year precedent known as "separate but equal" that would not be undone until the famous
Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous decision of the Warren Court.)
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Notes:
"John Marshall Harlan". Wikipedia.com. August 19, 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Marshall_Harlan
Harlan, J. John M. "Dissenting Opinion". Plessy v. Ferguson. Supreme Court of the United States. May 18, 1896. Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. August 19, 2009. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0163_0537_ZD.html
