Blackface and yellowface makeups have always made me cringe.
I can live with a lot of movie fat-suits – though not the cheap fat jokes. But blackface and yellowface are different. It’s bad enough in a dramatic role that avoids stereotyping but when it’s done for fun in a “fakeover” show it’s really disturbing. It’s odd because I don’t see anything wrong in and of itself with an actress playing a character whose ethnic origin is other than her own (anymore than I objected to Rock Hudson playing all those straight roles) but…
The whole issue is entangled (possibly inseparably) with the issues of how non-whites have been portrayed in films and, for decades, the practical exclusion of non-white actors and actresses from the Hollywood system But it’s more than that.
There’s a lot of interesting information on the issues around yellowface and blackface and their ignoble history in the movies in Robert Ito’s ‘A Certain Slant‘ (Bright Lights Film Journal) and at Bambizzoozled.
So what about the forthcoming FX Networks show Black.White. which according to the press release ‘examines race with an extraordinary approach by putting new faces on an African-American family, the Sparks, and Caucasian family, the Wurgels’? The BBC did something similar, though far less ambitous, in a show called Trading Races a couple of years ago but I was deeply unconvinced that anything of value came out of it (or by the makeups for that matter).
But Black.White. does come with powerful backing from Ice Cube. The makeups are by Keith Vanderlaan, and the first publicity images showing Rose Wurgel transformed into a black girl looked convincing; I am less sure about about the more recent images showing the transformation of Renee Sparks into a white woman.
Hopefully, Black.White. will live up to its aspiration to be extraordinarily provocative, entertaining and deep. It’s a big ask. One thing that worries me is that if (maybe especially if) it is even half-way decent it will open the floodgates for a whole set of valueless black-for-a-day investigations like the recent plague of ‘investigative’ fat-suits.
