Blackface is not just about minstrels or demeaning portrayals of African-Americans; ‘Red Indians’ are a pretty obvious example, and the Chinese and Japanese, for instance, probably find yellow-face portrayals equally insulting. Then, as in King Kong, there is the way in which ‘primitive’ tribal people have been portrayed.

A lot of people never realized that the islanders in K.K. were NOT intended to be Black people, those people were basically mutants who were a race all to themselves, they had nothing to do with Black people or Africa, it was the producers idea to escape any and all charges of using racist BF makeup, under the makeup there were actual Africans, Asians, Latinos, African-Americans as well as whites. I personally am Black and I hate black face because it conjures up memories of it’s original intent and that was to demonise and marginalize African-American people, but the producers cleverly managed to avoid that trap, and you you look at their skin color, it was a blueish, brownish, grey tone, not very Black at all.