Blackface

Michelle Han Tran Professor Thibodaux ENG 1157 3 December 2015 White Chicks: Farce and Purposeful Revenge of the Whiteface Controversy? When many people hear of the Wayans Brothers movie White Chicks, they would inevitably picture the humorous scene where Terry Crews, being the physically huge, prideful jock he is, ironically does gestures and lip-syncs to Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” on his car radio. Everyone around me adores this particular movie with a passion, often quoting…

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances”. This is a hard lesson that many people learn throughout their lives. Author Danzy Senna exemplifies this with her characters in her novel Caucasia. The story is about a mixed raced family living in 1970’s Boston, Massachusetts. Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a Black father, Deck and a white mother, Sally. Both parents’ are on different sides of the Civil Rights Movement. The…

Originally called the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance began in the 1920’s in Harlem, which is a community that resides in Manhattan, New York City (Haskins, 1941). It created a new black cultural identity and it had an effect on African American literature. The Harlem Renaissance had such an effect on African American culture that it changed the way African Americans were perceived; it was said to be the rebirth of the Harlem Renaissance through its’ leading intellectuals and its’…

Many people perceive Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in many different aspects. One aspect through the novel is a sense of relatability between the author Mark Twain’s life and the characters life. Twain illustrates his perspectives on topics such as education, slavery, and freedom from society in the novel that go hand in hand with his personal experiences. Mark Twain reveals his battle with his inner demons of desiring freedom and his alcoholism through the characters of…

This was shown on such as pictorial sheet music covers, paintings, and minstrel shows in which allowed white actors to dress in blackface to play as the marginalized group as “happy-go-lucky, banjo-strumming simpletons for northern audiences” (Morgan, 171). However, Tanner paints The Banjo Lesson to alter the representation of African-Americans from negative to positive to introduce…

“What if America loved Black people as much as Black Culture?” ("‘Hunger Games’ Star’s Stunning Critique: What If America Loved Black People as Much as Black Culture?", 2015). Hunger Games star, Amandla Stenberg, issued a video titled, “Don’t Cash Crop on my Cornrows”, which addressed the cultural appropriation behind historical hairstyles such as braids and dreadlocks. The video continues to criticize celebrities “for not acknowledging the appropriation of black culture” (“African Student Union…

The operations of cloning have brought out an abundance of fundamental milestones laying concrete on rearing onto the likelihood for an acceptance of therapeutic cloning. There exists a manifold quantity for the, “applications of this technology in nonhuman animal models will undoubtedly contribute in a major way to vaccine development and the unraveling of teratological and genetic problems in human development as well as impacting wildlife conservation efforts” (Wolf, Meng, Ely, & Stouffer,…

derives from an actor by the name of Thomas Rice. Rice created this character after witnessing an African American man dancing and decided to mimic the performance as fun, he would perform in theatres as a character named Jim Crow and would be in blackface, this character became very successful and thus, not shortly after, the creation of laws known as “Jim Crow laws.”…

One of America’s longest standing traditions has been the white consumption of black music. One of the ways in which this tradition began was the adaptation of slave songs, otherwise known as spirituals, into popular culture. While there were many artists, both black and white, who translated spirituals into music more accommodating for white audiences, it was the Fisk Jubilee singers who helped popularize this music. As one of the first non-minstrel black musical group, the Fisk Jubilee singers…

Hamilton is the hottest musical to hit broadway in decades. It dominated the Tony awards and is completely sold out in every venue for the foreseeable future. This is an American story told in the American medium of the musical and features a diverse American cast. Hamilton is a nearly all black cast. Founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are played by black actors. These past few years have been celebrated as the best time for minority actors in Broadway history. “Tonys…