Saving Blackface
Some White people can’t resist doing it, because they don’t have to
“My Dad dressed up like Lionel Richie once,” a former co-worker told me as we sat in front of our computers at an open work desk. “Check your Facebook.”
I browsed to my Facebook page and saw that he’d tagged me in a photo: A closeup of his father dressed as Lionel Richie, and by dressed I mean blackface.
I laughed in disbelief.
“Where was this?” I asked.
“My parents threw a Halloween party back in the eighties. People always said my dad looked like Lionel Richie because he had bushy hair and a thick mustache, so he said why not?”
He showed me some retro photos of his father, sans-blackface, and he did resemble a White Lionel Richie. However, Lionel is a light-skinned Black man, and my co-workers’ father wasn’t that much lighter than him already. He was already dressed in Lionel’s style, so there was no need to darken his face; people would’ve known who he was supposed to be without the makeup.
As a Black person, my next question was obvious:
“Were any Black people there?”
“Yeah, his Black friends from work were there and they didn’t mind. They thought it was funny.”
