Blackface

Blackface is the practice of light-skinned performers using burned cork, shoe polish, or theatrical makeup to portray a caricature of dark-skinned people, e.g. African-Americans, on stage or in entertainment. Scholarship on the origins or definition of blackface vary with some taking a global perspective that includes European culture and Western colonialism. Scholars with this wider view may date the practice of blackface to as early as Medieval Europe's mystery plays when bitumen and coal were used to darken the skin of white performers portraying demons, devils, and damned souls. Others date the practice to English Renaissance theater, in works such as William Shakespeare's Othello and Anne of Denmark's personal performance in The Masque of Blackness. Blackface became a global phenomenon as an outgrowth of theatrical practices of racial impersonation in theatres across the British Empire, where it was integral to the development of imperial racial politics.

However, some scholars see blackface as a specific practice limited to American culture that began in the minstrel show; a performance art that originated in the United States in the early 19th century and which contained its own performance practices unique to the American stage. Scholars taking this point of view see blackface as arising not from a European stage tradition but from the context of class warfare from within the United States, with the American white working poor inventing blackface as a means of expressing their anger over being disenfranchised economically, politically, and socially from middle and upper class White America.