Now feels like a good time to tell a story about Blackface in film. A costume designer I worked with told me about a film she did about 10 years ago that had a black female lead who did a stunt in the film that required a stunt double. For whatever fucking reason, the producers couldn't/chose not to hire a black woman as the stunt double but instead hired a white man who had to wear black makeup and a wig. They shot his stunt scenes on days when the lead wasn't there so she wouldn't find out.
Whenever I think of blackface, I think of old Hollywood movies where it was an actual serious movie but they stuck a white person into a minority role.
The most obvious to me was John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. I watched that movie with my uncle when I was a kid and was like this motherfucker is not Asian. Margaret Cho had a routine like that with John Carradine in Kung Fu.
Are there any foreign movies where they put whiteface on an actor of color? There is only one that I can think of, and that is an incredibly awkward scene from a South African film called Wah Wah.
But then again, foreign films are not exactly bastions of equal representation in the first place and they don’t seem to care, so no need for whiteface/blackface/whateverface.
I would wager Japan would be the most likely source to find a non-white example.
China has some interesting examples. https://web.archive.org/web/20171111084515/http://asiaobscura.com/ 2011/11/prosthetic-noses-red-wigs-and-whiteface-american-character s-in-chinese-films.html
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