You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  Because this is what I see: White folks putting on grotesque versions of my skin. My hair. What they perceive to be my mannerisms. They want to take their pick of my Black features and put them to work in the service of their jokes.

  Let’s call them what they are: nigger jokes. They’re not stupid enough to tell a nigger joke in the presence of Black people, because there will be consequences. But they can tell nigger jokes in the cultivated absence of Black power. That’s what lets them get away with it.

  * * *

  I can hear people defensively saying that comedy is about pushing boundaries. This particular performance is a satiric critique of blackface for the “benefit” of Black people. The intent is satire, you see. The irony is these people think they are taking on the mantle of Richard Pryor, furthering the boundaries of what is possible in comedy. But to be transgressive is to move beyond a boundary. They are in fact being regressive, shoring up old institutions of racism in comedy, revitalizing the tried-and-true formula of minstrelsy.

  Beginning in the 1830s, white actors toured America in wildly popular shows with their faces smeared in black cork, dressed in rags to play cruel stereotypes like Zip Coon, Old Darkie, Mammy, and Dandy, the one who put on airs like a white man, acting as if he was “a real person.” It’s why “Jim Crow”—the good-for-nothing fool that was such a stock character on the circuit—came to be shorthand for the post-emancipation segregation laws that codified the disciplinary power of white supremacy. These traveling shows weren’t just successful in forging dehumanizing stereotypes into archetypes that still fuel racial bias today; they made a tremendous amount of money and formed the foundation of America’s entertainment industry—the industry these contemporary white performers of blackface and I still share. Show business has had this song-and-dance fantasy of white superiority going on forever.

  The twenty-first-century iteration of blackface has the knowing nod of “Do you believe we’re getting away with this?” But that’s just keeping up with trends. Minstrel acts have always morphed to reflect the time and medium. The only reason minstrel shows stopped was now you could see blackface at the movies. The year 1914 gave us the early short film Coon Town Suffragettes, which managed to be on trend mocking both Black people and women seeking the vote. One hundred years later, on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the actress Kaitlin Olson did blackface with her actor husband, Rob McElhenney, who is also the creator and executive producer of the show. The excuse for the actors to do blackface is that the characters are doing a Lethal Weapon parody, with McElhenney playing Danny Glover’s role. On the set, while Olson went for a coal-black shoe-polish blackface with mammy red lips, McElhenney went for his version of “authenticity,” going to Autonomous FX, a prosthetic and makeup studio specializing in horror and animal effects, to have his blackface done. They provided a silicone nose—broad and flat for comedic punch—and a silicone forehead to better accent a short Afro wig.

  Olson was so proud of the blackface that she brought what she thought was a hilarious story about it to the couch at Conan in 2013. She and her husband were filming in blackface on location when she cut her leg. “Then we went to the emergency room and everyone’s staring at us,” she told Conan O’Brien. “After a while I realized they’re not staring out of concern, they’re like glaring at us. Finally, I looked at Rob and I was like, ‘Why are they . . . oh, right.’” The audience at home then saw the reveal of a shot of McElhenney in blackface. Conan’s studio audience roared with approving laughter. Olson continued, knowing they had nailed the visual joke of Blackness. “It was the blackface that they were glaring at. Then it made sense.”

  Olson and McElhenney were still very proud of their blackface when they both returned to Conan in 2015 with the rest of the all-white cast, including Danny DeVito, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton. To continue the “joke” away from the context of the show and in real life, they pointedly acted as if nothing was amiss when Conan showed another photo of them in blackface and asked if they received “any blowback.”

  “No, we were playing Black people,” said McElhenney, as if he didn’t get why this would be an issue.

  “How could you play Black people without getting fully black?” answered Olson. “We didn’t just do the face, we did the whole body.”

  In the face of this willful indifference for laughs, Danny DeVito offered to McElhenney, “By the way, she’s a lot darker than you. Look at that shot. She’s like really Black. You look like a Mexican.”

  More laughter.

  Their costar Charlie Day immediately jumped in. “The thing is, blackface, that’s like a generality,” he said. “That’s specific Danny Glover face, so you’re really only insulting one person.” The cast agreed the only person who had the right to be upset would be Danny Glover, and Glenn Howerton—also a writer and executive producer on the show—joked that Glover had called to ask why they didn’t just hire him. “I could use the work.”

  Why involve him and risk a consequence for your actions, when you can just take what you need?

  There is no upside to speaking up in a significant way about this. People like them will say I am not edgy. Not humorous. Not a team player. I am tying the hands of creatives. After all, Black comedians have made many jokes about Blackness and oppression and all the things that make up the collective Black experience. But they can do that without negating any of it, because these are jokes that are mined from their own lives. If it’s not their lived experience, they are simply interlopers. Their sole intention has been to do harm.

  Besides not appearing to be a team player, there is this reason not to speak up: Black people know that to do so is to enter a devil’s bargain. It is not just opening ourselves up to the PTSD that comes from sharing personal pain. That might be enough to silence people. No, it’s that we, the victims, will be portrayed as the assailants.

  Let me lead the uninitiated through it. Take a straightforward situation—you overhear a coworker calling you a racial slur, or, say, a celebrity producer repeatedly uses blackface on their show. In law, this can be called an intentional infliction of emotional distress—the tort of outrage. The defendant acted intentionally or even recklessly, and the victimized party is due damages for the emotional distress. Even if you, the victim, aren’t awarded monetary damages, some justice is expected, right? Your racist coworker can be fired, for example. The blackface perpetrators should at least lose some standing in polite society. Open and shut.

  Wrong. Almost immediately, the clear case is muddied by obscuring intent. Namely, they either didn’t mean to be racist or you took it the wrong way. Fine, we have all seen that happen. It’s the aforementioned “this knife did it, not me” defense strategy. Comedians don’t hurt people, jokes do.

  When that doesn’t immediately work, the next step is making the racist perpetrator just as much a victim as you. This isn’t just the sudden white-girl tears that can make any request for accountability seem like an assault. No, this is a proven plan of action that happens formally in HR offices and in the newsrooms that set public opinion. In this plan, the racist apologizes—sometimes in a letter, sometimes thirdhand, but there’s some statement—and you are asked to accept that and move on. You are reminded of the stakes: the racist’s livelihood and reputation are at risk. Are you going to take that from them? After all, the perpetrator has lowered himself to reason with you. Can you imagine how humiliating this must be to beg you for mercy? Hasn’t the racist suffered enough?

  Boom, we now have two victims. If you press on, ask for real accountability, you are now the bully. You find yourself asking the same question as the people who want you to be reasonable: Why did you even say anything?

  So, by speaking up about the harm of blackface, I am the bully. If I name names, it’s me who’ll hang. But there is one thing they forget. A cover-up can prove intent. I have been on enough cop shows to know that when someone hides the evidence, it’s because they know they are guilty of a crime and are afraid of the conse
quences. In fact, we are told these shows that used blackface define a golden age of television, one that will be studied by culture critics for decades to come. But if a historian who did not witness the racism they employed wants to study race in twenty-first-century America, or even convey a wholly accurate description of what these shows broadcast as popular culture, they cannot.

  Who does that serve? Certainly not some comedy-loving kid who wants to study the era and looks like me. They deserve the truth. My grandchildren won’t have a full picture of the life I lived and worked in. “Gramma talked about some fuckshit,” they’ll say in a phrase that Standards and Practices would flag. “But I can’t find it.”

  The grandchildren of these blackface artists won’t learn from their sins, either. They will be free, like so many people today, to enjoy their generational wealth without concern that it came at anyone’s expense. The crime simply never happened. The legacies of these shows will remain intact, the hands of their creators whitewashed clean.

  ACT TWO: BLACKFISHING

  When there is nothing about Blackness—on a Black person—that is our own to keep

  I follow a lot of Black women on Instagram, you know, being a Black woman and all. So, whenever I do a search, my Instagram’s Explore page is always offering up “discoveries” from accounts the algorithm thinks I should encounter. This morning the main page was a young white woman taking a pouty full-length side shot in the mirror. Her hair was in two thick braids, which fell down the back she had arched to accentuate the lift of her butt in Adidas sportswear. Her makeup was contoured to reshape her face, and she was wearing a foundation or bronzer that was several shades darker than her white hand.

  “Issa vibe,” was her caption.

  This was blackfishing, caught white-handed. There is a crime wave of non-Black people—mainly women—stealing the looks and features of Blackness for profit. While I know they do this to get ahead, I am so conditioned by growing up in this society that it is hard to comprehend how approximating Blackness could help anyone. From birth, Black women are told to change. When my daughter Kaavia James was just days old, I caught more than one person peeling back the baby mittens she wore to keep herself from scratching her eyes or skin. They needed to see her nail beds, because that would reveal what Blackness she would have to face. Understand, colorism from within the Black community springs from terrorism by the white community.

  They terrorize us into looking and acting like them. We will not be hired. We will not be chosen for love. We will not be believed when we are harmed. We will be stopped on the street and in cars by police. Our lives will be daily terror, but we can help ourselves, we are told, if we just move toward whiteness. Cut our noses, straighten our hair, stay out of the sun to not get even darker, lose our asses, starve ourselves to fit a shape that is unnatural to us. Shed our language and culture unless it can be used as currency in transaction with the white community. Leave our Blackness. Treat Blackness like a beauty queen who has to leave her small town for the better life she is meant to have.

  And to the victor go the spoils of what’s been abandoned. They mine it for humor, for art and music, and then when that is exhausted, they pillage our body parts and mannerisms once they realize those things can offer advantages. Curves, hair, skin tones, a “blaccent,” style . . . soon they are co-opting our whole-ass selves. These body parts and mannerisms were no good to the Black people who were taught to reject them. But if you’re white, the embrace makes you edgy, cool, and attractive. Soon they are taking our pain and oppression, “identifying with it,” and turning it into a currency that’s only worth something when it’s taken from us.

  Plenty of people are profiting from stealing our looks, but when we talk about blackfishing, the media goes to what they see as the extreme cases of those who have assumed entire Black identities over the last few years. There is Rachel Dolezal, who posed as a Black woman to secure a platform as head of her local NAACP chapter and then got a book deal; Jennifer Krug, a white woman from Kansas, who fabricated a story of being a Black girl from the Bronx conceived from rape so she could become a tenured professor at a private university; and Jennifer Benton, who became—I am not making this up—Satchuel Paigelyn Cole to steal a platform in the Indianapolis social justice movement.

  These women are extreme cases of the much more pervasive movement of blackfishing, where parts and portions of us are tried on for use. But they point to a larger issue: the reason that blackfishing is so prevalent and profitable is because of the prioritization of lighter-skinned Black women. This is true interracially, and, as Black women will tell you—and a lot of Black men will admit as fact—intraracially. There would not be such a space for blackfishing if lightness were not so prized in our community. Lighter-skinned women are seen not just as stereotypical status symbols in relationships, but as cleaner, more feminine, and more intelligent. Meanwhile, Black women whose lives and physical characteristics are rooted in their Blackness are always the last option. I have been told repeatedly that one of the reasons Black women celebrate my marriage is that Dwyane did not choose to marry a light-skinned woman when his wealth and fame gave him access to them. That is some shit.

  Those three charlatans—Dolezal, Krug, and Benton—were readily embraced by white and Black people as professors and activists because as light-skinned women (even fake) they were seen as a bridge to whiteness. It’s interesting to examine the Black folks that white people run to. They might be biracial or married to white people, but in some larger way, their lives center whiteness, the white gaze, and white acceptance.

  I am thinking of two women who have found each other on the edge of my circle, a white woman who co-opts Blackness, taking the language and the cause, but leaving the oppression to others to deal with, and a Black woman she is in business with, who has told me that race is a state of identity similar to being transgender. Leaving aside how wrong that is about the trans identity—the idea that their identity is something to put on or take off at will—it revealed to me how that friendship and business relationship works. They are each issuing each other a pass to visit their respective worlds. “I will grant you access to Blackness and allow you to feel comfortable co-opting it, and in return, I will benefit from your privilege.” There is a give and take, but in this transaction, it is the white woman whose needs are centered.

  I have white friends. I say this to be funny, because that’s what racists always say, right? “I can’t be racist, I have a Black friend.” Have they been to that Black person’s home? Are they in a picture in that Black person’s home, or is this a transactional working relationship? If they feel that close, they should go ask their Black friend if they’re racist then. But I really do have white friends in my close circle, and they are that close because they do not use the intimacy of friendship as an opportunity for co-opting my identity. They allow themselves to try to understand the complexity and richness of Blackness, something I, and they, could spend a lifetime doing.

  And maybe that is what adds the insult to the violence of blackface and blackfishing. When an actor or actress does blackface, they choose the black shoe polish of dress shoes, because to be the Blackest of Black people is the joke. When women do blackfishing, it’s not the richness and diversity within blackness that they so covet, it’s the feeling of being exoticized and prioritized.

  Whether mined for jokes or access, we’re all just things in a pile to be grabbed. Black, with no difference from one to the next. And the bodies are piling up.

  ACT THREE: BLACK BODIES ON AUTOPLAY

  The enduring entertainment of lynching

  “If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the adage of getting news watchers hooked, and I would add that if it’s Black and bleeds, you can repeat that violence over and over without care. I don’t use “it” by accident. More and more, Black bodies are becoming commodities, disposable stars for a news cycle. It is ironic that these creators of scripted television only rushed to remove their offensive content in the summ
er of 2020, when American eyes were glued to the nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds that Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd until he was dead on the ground in Minneapolis. The same screens that show us as figures of fun and laughter will, in one short social media scroll, show our bodies brutalized and snuffed out in shaky videos from cell phones and police body cams.

  There are countless videos available for repeat viewing of Black people, young and old, being abused or murdered by police or people who feel they are in authority. Besides Mr. Floyd, there are videos of the shootings, beatings, abuse, and choke-hold strangulations of Eric Garner in Staten Island; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Oscar Grant in Oakland; Laquan McDonald, Ronald Johnson, Harith Augustus, and Jemel Roberson in separate Chicago incidents; Dajerria Becton in McKinney, Texas; Stephon Clark in Sacramento; Sandra Bland in Prairie View, Texas; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; Rose Campbell in Alpharetta, Georgia; Decynthia Clements in Elgin, Illinois; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; Jhasmynn Sheppard in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Dyma Loving in Miami-Dade County; Trayford Pellerin in Lafayette, Louisiana; Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia; Geraldine Townsend in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; Anthony McClain in Pasadena; Jazmine Headley in Brooklyn; Stephanie Bottom in Salisbury, North Carolina; Maurice Gordon on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway; Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado; Tye Anders and his ninety-year-old grandmother on their front lawn in Midland, Texas; Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin; Atatiana Jefferson, shot and killed through the bedroom window of her Fort Worth home, where she was playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew Zion; Izell Richardson, Jr. in Port Allen, Louisiana; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta; Tony McDade in Tallahassee, Florida; Sterling Brown in Milwaukee; Nika Nicole Holbert in Nashville; Dijon Kizzee in Los Angeles; Deon Kay in Washington, D.C.; Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York; Lymond Moses in New Castle, Delaware; David Tovar Jr. in San Jose, California; Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia; Caron Nazario in Windsor, Virginia; Lyndani Myeni in Honolulu; Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota; Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio . . .