Nino Caliendo

Blackface is the practice of performers of any ethnicity using burned cork, shoe polish, or theatrical makeup to portray a caricature of dark-skinned people, e.g. African-Americans, on stage or in entertainment. Scholarship on the origins or definition of blackface vary with some taking a global perspective that includes European culture and Western colonialism. Scholars with this wider view may date the practice of blackface to as early as Medieval Europe's mystery plays when bitumen and coal w…