Campin_Cat wrote:
I don't really understand why black-face hurts people. I mean, it can't hurt someone, unless they give it power to hurt them. To me it's just like when a kid gets called four-eyes, or buck-toothed, or shorty----or any number of other things. One can let it roll off them, or they can wallow in it, and become hateful and resentful, and bitter, and be like "The world owes me", or whatever----and, quite frankly, that's what alot of people act like, nowadays, and it's gotta stop!
It'll never stop, however, until people aren't so quick with the "Aww, poor baby". It's just like a spoiled-rotten kid----the more you give 'em, the more they want. When one stops giving / giving into them, only then do they stop WANTING; and they get over themselves, cuz they know their whining isn't going to get them, anywhere.
As I've said, before, I LIVE for the day when a company is told that what they've said/done was wrong, in some way, and they say "That wasn't the way it was meant", and then they DON'T pull their ad (or whatever). Yeah, they'll probably see a dip in profits, for a minute (not literal), and then something else will come-along for people to whine about, and it'll be forgotten.
You might not be aware of the history of minstrelsy as it relates to blackface. I learned about it through my study of the banjo. It was a kind of revisionist history that tried to romanticize plantation life, picturing it in a patronizing way, as if their music and dance were expressions of a carefree life under slavery. So it couldn't have been brutal and dehumanizing, because look- music.