Blackface is the Story of White Identity

On one Monday night in college a friend called to tell me that he was holding a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party. The centerpiece of this was people drinking 40s of Old English, eating fried chicken, and playing N.W.A. He wasn’t from a fraternity, but a corduroyed hipster from a local indie pop band. This wasn’t the South; it was Eugene, Oregon. It wasn’t the early-1980s, it was 2006.

The recent series Virginia controversies, bookended by Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring both admitting to appearing in blackface during college, has inspired a slew of articles about change. This suggests that blackface, one of the most dehumanizing caricatures of black people imaginable, was perhaps just a tasteless joke in its time. Today our pasts are more easily accessible than ever, so the pundits are correct that a reckoning is taking place that they were completely unprepared for.

While anyone applying for competitive jobs online scrubs their social media accounts, it doesn’t take long to find artifacts that people would rather keep buried. I was in college when Facebook skyrocketed, and because it placed no limit on photo uploads you often see massive albums for individual parties, captured at all angles. Search for any holiday or theme party and you’ll find a slew of racist caricatures, from pale-painted Geisha costumes to wide-brimmed…