Hope McCoy was stunned. On Oct. 29, the 21-year-old Northwestern insurance department employee had been idly glancing through Facebook when she discovered the profile picture of her friend, a 24-year-old Northwestern Ph.D. student and teaching assistant, dressed head to toe in blackface: black makeup, black hair dye and a traditional African kente shirt. A fellow Northwestern Ph.D. student, also in blackface, accompanied him. To McCoy, these costumes screamed insult and denigration.
"I contacted him saying, 'I never thought you'd be the kind of person to do this.' I never received a response," she said. At this time the Phoenix is withholding the names of both individuals until they can be reached for comment and until Northwestern releases a formal statement.
Blackface, a term that describes both an explicit style of makeup application and theatrical performance, was used by 19th and early 20th century white entertainers to exploit blacks with crude, degrading and misleading impersonations. Post decline, it has resurfaced in popular culture through television and movies such as the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation, the'70s sitcom All in the Family, and more recently, Spike Lee's 2000 release Bamboozled.
Alarmingly, in past weeks blackface has reappeared in national headlines. In St. Paul, Minn., Hamline University suspended six football players for wearing blackface to an off-campus Halloween party and more notably, in Washington, D.C., an unnamed individual at the Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division won "most original costume" for wearing dark makeup, dreadlocks and a prison jumpsuit.
McCoy immediately posted a note on Facebook condemning the pictures, including her friend's name and the two photos from his profile. Two days later, Facebook removed the note, calling it offensive and an attack on a specific person. She removed names and pictures and reposted the note.
She also alerted Northwestern's Multicultural Student Affairs Center and the Daily Northwestern but was frustrated after receiving no response from the student publication. No formal action has been taken by the MSAC.
"Last week [the Daily Northwestern] had an article on students preferring tea over coffee, and this person is a Ph.D. student who is [now] going to be a TA [known for] dressing up in blackface," McCoy said.
"They didn't think it was newsworthy because they said it was just one incident," said McCoy's friend Kristiana Colón, 21, a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. McCoy had tagged Colón, who experienced a similar incident in 2005 while attending University of Chicago, in her Facebook note. "It's not just one incident. There are catalogs of this happening," Colón said, explaining that it's a societal problem, one particularly damaging to universities.
"[Universities are] where prestigious people go on to become lawyers, doctors and immigration officials. If they think it's funny to make fun of blackness or stereotypes, and they go on to these jobs [then] it's a scary reality to me how they will handle it," she said.
Loyola assistant sociology professor David Embrick, who specializes in race and ethnic relations, wrote in an e-mail to the Phoenix that the "new racism" practices of today are far subtler than the overt racism of the Jim Crow era.
"The short of the story is that whites (and even some minorities) have developed ways to explain away racial incidents that occur in businesses, on campus, in the grocery store, etc," he wrote, making reference to Duke sociology professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's writings.
Northwestern senior Melanie Brezill, 21, was also tagged on McCoy's note. A member of For Members Only, Northwestern's Black Student Alliance, she said despite the importance of this issue, Northwestern's campus remains muted. According to Brezill, there has been no response in campus publications, nor mention of the incident in her classes.
FMO, in conjunction with NU's Black Graduate Student Association and Black Law Student Association released a formal statement Friday on their Listserv, according to Northwestern junior and FMO coordinator Mark Crain, 19, who was notified by students Nov. 2. In the statement, FMO, the BGSA and the BLSA condemn the act as "despicable and reprehensible" and state that the students' actions "ignore the historical significance of iconic symbols that were routinely employed in the very real oppression of Blacks in America for nearly 100 years after the end of slavery."
The full statement by FMO was published yesterday in the on-line edition of the Daily Northwestern in the "Forum" section.
The NU administration has not taken any formal stance as of Tuesday night, but Crain confirms that the Dean of Students has contacted at least one of the individuals and a series of meetings have been set up with him and other senior administrators. Crain would like the university to issue a public statement denouncing the graduate student's action.
"Our main concern is this Ph.D. student will be not only instructing but grading black students," he said. "That a student has to walk into his class knowing this is a teacher who had the nerve to dress up in blackface. It's making fun of our culture and alienating a specific group of students he'll be working with on a day-to-day basis at one point or another."
McCoy and Brezill agree that the student should be removed of his status as TA. McCoy, who describes her friend as "a blonde, blue-eyed man from the south" and a "good, sweet guy, but ignorant," said his actions are alarming and upsetting for students.
"I'm not trying to attack an individual; I'm attacking a behavior," McCoy said. "It's not black versus white, or [a] Hope versus [him] thing. It's inappropriate for someone who will be [a] TA at a university."
Crain was disappointed, but not surprised. He points to a recent national trend that "types of racist sentiments are pervading campuses closer to home," including a swastika drawn on a professor's door at Columbia University and a noose hung at Indiana State University. At Loyola, racially charged incidents in the past year include alleged racial profiling by a campus safety officer and a Muslim student receiving a threatening note.
Kevin Huie, the director of Loyola's Office of Student Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, said he doesn't recall any episodes of blackface at Loyola but, hypothetically, his initial step would be to find the offended students, offer comfort and create discussion. Huie said that until he has all the facts it's difficult to assess the incident without jeopardizing his position of objective listener and educator.
"It's possible that these students have no idea of the implications or that it was unacceptable. I don't assume what their intention was. I just don't know," he said.
Benjamin Harris, 28, program coordinator at OSDMA and director of the Black Men's Initiative at Loyola, sees no excuse for not understanding the cultural implications of blackface, which played such a painful role in American and black history.
"It's not like wearing pink for breast cancer, it's not that innocent of a subject matter, just doing blackface. For me personally, from a black standpoint, it has never been funny or [something] to take lightly," he said.
"Holidays such as Halloween allow us to dress up as someone or something different than what we are. Thus whites are able to engage in blackface parties under the guise of 'fun' or 'a joke' while reproducing racial stereotypes and the current racial hierarchy in society," Embrick wrote, a symptom of "minimizing how racism works in society."
Everyone interviewd agreed that education played a key factor in preventing future incidents. With campus-wide dialogue, universities are the ideal place to address these issues, Harris said. We must "look to address it in an educational way and learn how we can heal, a good part about having a dialogue. There's some redemption to it."
"Every time [these incidents] happen they need to be discussed," said Colón. "It's not about face paint and a costume; it's a matter of dehumanizing people."
To read the full statement released by FMO go to: http://media.www.dailynorthwestern.com/media/storage/paper853/news/2007/11/13/Forum/Letters.To.The.Editor-3096817.shtml.
To explore the issue further, contact FMO by phone: (847) 491-3610 or e-mail: formembersonly@gmail.com.
Contact the Office of Student Diversity by phone: 773.508.8840 and by e-mail: diversity@luc.edu.
4 comments
Despite the touting of the post-racial America, residential and social segregation still exist. But the essential question is which is more important--having fun at a party or respecting how others feel? These incidents of blackface reveal that some people are so self-centered and narcissistic as to believe that their pleasure and fun are more important than the pain that something like teh blackface symbolizes.