Is this black face?

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Negative Zero

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I'm not Black, although I am Israeli, so I have no idea if this is black face or not. My characters are trying to cover up as many of their features as they can, so they're spreading mud on their faces. I was re-reading this part (I haven't edited it in about a year), and it made me kind of uncomfortable. I'm thinking I'm going to take that section out but I'd like a second opinion.
 

mirandashell

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Are they doing it to look like black people or are they sneaking around in the dark? Or maybe trying to make their skin cold so they don't show up on infra-red? I think we need more info.
 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackface
I know it's wiki but this should clear it up. If your characters were trying to camouflage themselves it's not blackface. If they were trying to look black for some reason other than a stereotypical play on blacks, it wasn't blackface.

If you have a reason to hide you identity you most likely are not looking to offend someone. If your characters are trying for the real blackface that is OK, your characters can be assholes, you are not your characters.

Just my .02
 

Negative Zero

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They're sneaking around in the dark and trying to hide as many of their facial characteristics as possible to avoid being recognized on camera. Sorry, I was in a rush when I first wrote this and should have included more detail!
 

Negative Zero

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also thank you very much for the detailed explanation. they're not trying for blackface, neither of them are white themselves (one is Rromani, one is Native American). they're just trying to get out of a heavily guarded city undetected
 

Negative Zero

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? no, they're not. I have a few Romani friends who aren't considered white at all. one of them considers herself white personally, but the other two don't. I just assumed that they weren't white, but I could absolutely be wrong!
 

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Romani aren't considered white in America?

The OP said he was Israeli, not from the US. However, the Romani aren't well represented in the parts of the US I've lived in. I'm American, and I always thought of Romani as mostly having light brown skin, dark hair and eyes, and also of being historically marginalized by the dominant cultures in Europe. This would likely mean they'd be considered people of color in the US. Note that this is a cultural concept as much as a description of skin color.

Do Romani self identify as white in the UK?
 
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mirandashell

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I don't know, I'm English. I'm just a little suprised given their origins. But what the hey, race relations in America are often a puzzle to non-Americans.
 

Negative Zero

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did some research. Romani people are actually a tribe originating from India, and are PoC! it's different than Romanian people. the slur "g*psy" is often used for Romani

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The OP said he was Israeli, not from the US. However, the Romani aren't well represented in the parts of the US I've lived in. I'm American, and I always thought of Romani as mostly having light brown skin, dark hair and eyes, and also of being historically marginalized by the dominant cultures in Europe. This would likely mean they'd be considered people of color in the US. Note that this is a cultural concept as much as a description of skin color.

I actually live in the US! my family comes directly from Israel, though, and I'm an Israeli Jew
 

mirandashell

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Romani people are actually a tribe originating from India, and are PoC!

Yeah, I saw that on Wiki. I just thought most of the Roma in America are Eastern European, seeing as they are part of a diaspora. Still, live and learn!
 

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I don't know, I'm English. I'm just a little suprised given their origins. But what the hey, race relations in America are often a puzzle to non-Americans.

My understanding is that Romani people descend from Northern India originally, though that was a really long time ago. It appears (from this side of the pond, at least) as if they're a pretty insular group that is still segregated from the European mainstream overall. I know that different countries have different definitions of what it is to be white or a person of color (and most of my British friends don't really like the term PoC as it's used in the US). In the US, one's identity as a particular race has a lot to do with culture and shared heritage nowadays, though we also have a history of the government legally imposing race status on different groups.

I don't know, I'm English. I'm just a little suprised given their origins. But what the hey, race relations in America are often a puzzle to non-Americans.

And vice versa.

As for the makeup of Romani in the US, I honestly don't know. I've never met anyone, to my knowledge, who is Romani living here, though (according to Wikipedia), there are a number in Southern CA (where I lived as a child).

According to Wikipedia:

Due both to the size of the American Romani population and the absence of a historical and cultural presence, such as the Romani have in Europe, Americans are largely unaware of the existence of the Romani as a people.[1] Due to the term's lack of significance within the United States, many Romani do not use the term around non-Romani: identifying themselves by nationality rather than heritage. The U.S. Census does not distinguish Romani as a group, since it is neither a nationality nor a religion

So I'm guilty of this blindness. I've probably met people of Romani heritage and not known it.

Back to the OP, though: putting mud or make up on your face to hide in the darkness wouldn't be going out in blackface. The latter is when one is deliberately imitating or mocking someone who is black.
 
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mirandashell

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Yeah, they are quite insular in Europe, mostly due to prejudice and isolation.

And yeah, Person of Colour has a different meaning here that is only related to skin colour rather than economic and social status, as it is in America.
 

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Yeah, they are quite insular in Europe, mostly due to prejudice and isolation.

And yeah, Person of Colour has a different meaning here that is only related to skin colour rather than economic and social status, as it is in America.

It's my understanding that the designation is more about how members of different groups self identify here--as distinct from what is generally perceived and presented as the cultural mainstream. Economic differences and our history of laws and traditions that gave some people more rights and freedoms than others have definitely contributed to this. It's complicated, and I'm not well equipped to explain it, being white.
 
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Negative Zero

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Thanks for the input, all of you! And for the really interesting conversation about the PoC classification differences in our differing countries! It's actually super insightful getting opinions from those who aren't in the US
 

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I don't know, I'm English. I'm just a little suprised given their origins. But what the hey, race relations in America are often a puzzle to non-Americans.
I think you meant assumed origins going by your later post, but it bears pointing out that just because someone can pass as white or another ethnic group, doesn't mean they are. There's many white-passing black people in the US and has been for almost as long as we've been here. And many people both in the US and abroad think Native Hawaiians and other Polynesians look Asian.
 

mirandashell

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I meant that the Roma in the US are most likely Eastern European since it's been over a thousand years since they left Northern India and moved through Europe and there was a lot of movement from Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. But I could be wrong. And like I said, race in a America is a puzzle to everyone else.
 

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I meant that the Roma in the US are most likely Eastern European since it's been over a thousand years since they left Northern India and moved through Europe and there was a lot of movement from Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. But I could be wrong. And like I said, race in a America is a puzzle to everyone else.

Is it really that much more puzzling than it is in the UK? Many of the issues and prejudices we've had here were inherited as part of our legacy as a British colony, though of course the Spanish and French (and other European cultures) also had a huge influence, and all of these European cultures looked at race somewhat differently.
 
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mirandashell

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Is it really that much more puzzling than it is in the UK?

I think it is, yeah. We don't really have the backlash from slavery that you do, in the sense that it's not as politically charged over here. Possibly because the actual slavery didn't happen here. Even though it was started by us.

The experience of racism is also different here, I think, because of the different ways our countries are, and have been, viewed by other countries. America is the country of Freedom. A chance to make a new start, have political and religious freedoms you can't have in your own country. And mostly you can. As long as you look white.

But we are an old country. Fairly stable, fairly well-off, very long history. From what people have said to me, I don't think they come here expecting freedom. But they do expect work, and not to be shot at, and not to be imprisoned for nothing.

Of course that last one does happen. But it's a lot rarer than in many countries, thankfully.

I think it just comes down to the two different histories after the Mayflower left. You were the New Ground. We were the Mother Country.

Of course I could be talking out of my arse as I'm white and therefore don't directly experience much racism. Although I have had a tiny taste of it, living where I do. Being called an n-lover by a total stranger on the street was never much fun.
 

Susannah Shepherd

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Is it really that much more puzzling than it is in the UK? Many of the issues and prejudices we've had here were inherited as part of our legacy as a British colony, though of course the Spanish and French (and other European cultures) also had a huge influence, and all of these European cultures looked at race somewhat differently.

It's a while since I lived in the UK (but I concur with Mirandashell based on my experience of being a white foreigner in the UK), but the US situation looks quite different to other former colonies too. I think part of the divide is that identity politics of all sorts (not just ethnic) seem so much more prominent in the US discourse, perhaps because it is such a big and diverse country. I live in New Zealand, another settler society, but the issues feel quite different here despite the fact that racism, both personal and systemic, does exist in both countries. A history of slavery makes a difference, and different patterns of indigeneity vs immigration makes a difference.

For me it's also part of a bigger group of related things that look weird to a non-American, particularly around the justice system: highly fragmented police forces (what's with 'campus police'?), politicisation of appointments (voting for judges ?!?!?), and different rules of engagement for use of lethal force by the police.

Sorry, OP, for hijacking your thread...
 

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The UK has different issues, but I would hesitate to label them less complicated. Though the UK doesn't have the same legacy wrt slavery that America does, it does have a very long and far-reaching history of colonialism. People I've talked to from current or former (non-Western) British colonies have extremely complicated feelings about the UK because of this, including a lot of anger. Disclaimer is that I'm speaking secondhand here, of course.
 
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mirandashell

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it does have a very long and far-reaching history of colonialism. People I've talked to from current or former (non-Western) British colonies have extremely complicated feelings about the UK because of this, including a lot of anger.

Oh god yeah! Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like we had no issues with racism or colonialism here. That's totally not the case. But they are different to America's.

That's what I meant when I said we were the Mother Country. I should have made that clearer.
 

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I'm not Black, although I am Israeli, so I have no idea if this is black face or not. My characters are trying to cover up as many of their features as they can, so they're spreading mud on their faces. I was re-reading this part (I haven't edited it in about a year), and it made me kind of uncomfortable. I'm thinking I'm going to take that section out but I'd like a second opinion.
Fellow Israeli here :) Anyway, camouflage isn't blackface, painting your face to "dress up" as a black person, is blackface. Blackface is a racist statement, camouflage is a safety measure.
 

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Do Romani self identify as white in the UK?

All the Gypsies (Romany, Irish, et al) that I've ever known identify as white. I grew up on a council estate that had many Gypsy families and two of my best friends at school were Gypsy, plus another friend later in life. In fact, I've been on the receiving end of anti-Gypsy racism on account of the way many people who didn't live on this estate referred to the whole estate as "the (nasty slur word for Gypsies that I refuse to type) estate" and any kid from that estate got called by that particular nasty slur word. I've been called that more times that I can count, even though I'm not Gypsy.

On the ethnic monitoring forms over here, Gypsies are listed as a white ethnicity, i.e. "white: Gypsy/Roma".

Also, not all Gypsies are Romany Gypsies and many use the word Gypsy to describe themselves. If Gypsy's become a slur word then it's because of people using it as such, like how the word Paki (short for Pakistani) in the 70s and 80s was a very nasty, aggressive slur word but in more recent times has been reclaimed and the younger generation of Desis don't consider it any different to Gujji (Gujarati) which has never been a slur word.

The big difference between racism in the USA and the UK is that in the USA "white" is a single ethnic group and it's the dominant ethnic group. Here in the UK white has never been a single ethnic group. An American may look at a bunch of white people in Britain and think "white people" and assume that none of the group would have any experience of racism. A European would look the same group and see English, Scottish, Polish, Latvian, Welsh etc and would know that the Polish and Latvian in the group (for example) are a lot more likely to have experienced racism than the others and the English person would be the least likely

Also, the legal definition of racism in the UK is treating someone badly or discriminating against them based on where they come from. Skin colour isn't a necessary component of racism in the UK, though of course racism based on skin colour does exist too. If you mistreat or hate someone just because they're Irish then that's racism. And even if you can't tell someone's Irish (or whatever) by looking at them (though quite often you can) you'll know by their name and their accent.

I appreciate that this is a different way of defining racism to how it's defined in the USA, but it's necessary to define it this way in Europe because racism exists between different European ethnicities. I also think some Americans need to realise that the whole world isn't the same as America, especially when discussing complex topics like racism. Racism exists the world over but in very different forms.
 
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