Until a few years ago, painting your face black to look like a black person or artist was a very common practice on Italian television. In the eighties, especially in Fininvest, there were many gags that made fun of the way of speaking of foreigners using the help of make-up that changed the facial features of the comedians, often using prosthetics to mark the lips or pronounce the nose. In recent years, the television program that made you remember the most was Such and Which Show, Raiuno’s hugely successful autumn show which, from the first to the last edition, has always used make-up to paint black the faces of the contestants who were about to imitate singers like Prince, Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé and John Legend.
Well, from today this will not happen again because, following several protests from spectators and also from Ghali, one of the first to point out the thing, Rai has decided to undertake to ensure that the practice of “blackface” no longer occurs on public service networks.
«With regard to the matter for which you wrote to us, let’s say immediately that we undertake – as far as we can – to prevent it from being repeated on Rai screens. On the contrary, we will be the spokesperson for your requests at the top management and at the departments that play a key coordination role so that your observations on the practice of blackface become widespread awareness “ Rai wrote in response to a letter sent by various associations such as Lunaria, Cospe and Arci asking, in fact, to abandon the habit of using blackface in public service entertainment broadcasts. For those who don’t know, the habit of whites to dye their faces black does not have Italian roots, but American roots: it is from the first half of the nineteenth century, in fact, that blackface became the most widespread form of entertainment for the “minstrels” who made fun of freed African slaves, exhibiting the whole repertoire of clichés on native populations represented at the limit of caricature.
Blackface shows helped build the myth of the lazy, superstitious, fearful and foolish African, which lasted a long time in American popular culture to the point of being repeated in many cartoons of the first half of the twentieth century. Even today the practice is considered as a very serious racial insult in America, so much so that there have been many appeals launched on Twitter in recent years to emphasize how in countries such as Italy and in programs such as Such and Which Show it was made use of without any kind of repercussion. The same Carlo Conti he often broke the issue by explaining that “we don’t care about the color of their skin or their religion, for me they are celebrations of great artists” and that the stratagem was used only to make an imitation more true and authentic. This, of course, generates debate: on the one hand there are those who believe in the good faith of the authors and on the other hand there are those who are convinced that it was time for someone to take action. Beyond everything, however, we should think about the Italian black community that watches TV: if we have to start from here to eliminate any form of misunderstanding in terms of racism, then we could make an effort and endure the fact that Roberta Bonanno imitates Aretha Franklin without make-up: we will make up for it.
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