Within this racist construction, though, white bodies remained “normative,” “intelligent,” “civil,” “nonthreatening,” engaging in “mere entertainment” and they implicitly and explicitly reinforced deeply problematic and false “racial differences” between black and white bodies. As the scholar Ronald L. Jackson argues, “ The darkened face, created from the moistened debris of burnt and crushed champagne corks, insolently signified that Whites did not want to see Blacks for who they really were culturally, but, instead, … an iconographic image, a scripted racial body inscribed with meanings and messages Whites enjoyed seeing, ones that were self-affirming and insular.”

On this score, American whiteness embodied and embodies an epistemological and ontological divide that it takes as “normative,” as “common sense.” And it tells a self-redeeming and self-congratulatory history that is itself indicative of white power and privilege.

As the feminist and white anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh writes, “When I am told about national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my [white] race made it what it is.” At the base of this narrative history are lies and distortions; indeed, more broadly, there is an entire underside of white modernity that consists of enslaved and dehumanized black bodies and often forgotten indigenous bodies across the Americas that were brutally slaughtered and decimated. To use the poet and theorist Vincent Woodard’s terms, blackface in particular can be described as an expression of “consumption rituals” and “consumption practices.” In short, the black body and bodies of color are the subject of white consumption.

To conjure the performance of blackface, whites had to engage in a magical trick that involved profound self-deception. White theatrical spaces of blackface performance were forged to confirm the “truth” that white gazes beheld. White people gathered within such spaces to have their worldview proven beyond a doubt. White audiences, through their attendance and their laughter, helped to “validate” the white racist distortions as true. They laughed at those who were deemed fundamentally different from themselves, and that laugher helped to sustain the illusions they had projected, their creations, their myths, authored by an arrogant white race who dared to assume they knew black people better than black people knew themselves.

Imagine whites in blackface on the stage: The actor “throws forth” all of the lies and distortions onto the black body. Here is where the combined performance displays a kind of consumptive process. The whites in the audience embrace and internalize the projections. They accept the putrid lies — the happy “darky,” the black “idiot,” the inferior “nigger”— that fill them with self-certainty about their “superior” status. They deny that they have created these lies and that denial sustains their white “purity” and “innocence.”

Black people are not the horrible and derogatory racist myths that so many white people have depicted, whether through blackface or other white American pastimes. I know who I am. Blackface tells me absolutely nothing about myself, but it does tell me about whiteness, and its grotesque projections. But what if blackface reveals something far too weighty and threatening for white America, something that would require a bigger and tougher America to confront? What if blackface is clear evidence of the emptiness of whiteness, the hollowness of its being as an identity marker?

Blackface is not a black problem. It is a white one, and fixing it is the job of white America. In her book “Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability,” the religion scholar Mary Elizabeth Hobgood writes, “For whites to construct an identity outside the racist construct, we would need to give up our socially constructed white selves and embrace the rejected parts of our humanity that requires scapegoats.”

I couldn’t agree more. Blackface is the white man’s burden, not ours.

George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Emory University. His latest book is “Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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