Blackface and ?

There's been a recent rash of instances where certain white politicians in Virginia have admitted to using black face in the past.

One of them also had a picture which may or may not have been him in his yearbook with a person in black face and a person in a Ku Klux Klan outfit in it.  There was no caption.

These incidents happened quite a few years ago and are considered racist, apparently.

The two admitted two incidents were performances, where they portrayed a black artist in some amateur type performance or at a costume party.

First, I have never, as far as I remember, ever put on black face, but I know that in at least one elementary school play many years ago we had a performance where some of us portrayed Native Americans and some of us portrayed Cowboys and make up was used.  Think we acted out a fake encounter while doing some very bad singing and dancing and mostly we were embarrassed.  However, it never had anything to do with racism, whatever our opinions were in those days about Native Americans were pretty much based on movies and TV in the Bronx.

I have seen movies where minstrel shows were portrayed and the cast were in black face and of course in the Jazz Singer we see a pretty famous performance involving black face.  Accepting that racism was pretty widespread in those years, it never seemed to me that these portrayals had anything to do with it, or in fact anything to do with actual black people.

So what I'm trying to figure out is why portraying a black artist in a private event is in fact racist.

Both portrayals were probably at best terrible but the intent wasn't to degrade the people portrayed, they were actually emulating them.

If a drag queen dresses up as Cher, is that some sort of anti-female act, or is it just entertainment?

I'm not advocating the use of black face but after all it is just make up and the message conveyed wearing it would be the more important thing.

It is certainly getting a lot of time on various news channels but it just seems like something done by young stupid (being young and stupid is redundant) people who don't seem to have had any bad intent.

Is it worth all this angst?