The growing political scandal in Virginia forces us to look at the legacy of blackface and ask: why is it so enduring?
“America is a land of masking jokers,” the novelist Ralph Ellison wrote in 1958 in an essay on American identity. “We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense, when we are projecting the future and preserving the past … the joke is at the center of the American identity.”
Related: Policies that harm black bodies deserve the same outrage as blackface | Shanita Hubbard
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DpksUQ
