What history says about Richard Dreyfuss wanting to wear blackface

Banned Histories of Race in America

Richard Dreyfuss is an actor and an American icon. He’s been a lead in countless classics. We’re talking about Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Stand by Me and What About Bob? and Mr. Holland’s Opus to name just a few. Unfortunately, over the last few years Dreyfuss has come out as a regular ol’ dipshit bigot. In a recent PBS interview he gave another peek under the hood, whining about the Oscars’ new diversity standards, “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a Black man?”

He really asked that, in all sincerity. The answer, of course, is no. There is nothing in the new rules about wearing blackface and even though the lack of blackface performances in his 60-year-long career implies a disingenuous nature to that question, I think he should. There is no law or written rule anywhere that I know of that forbids wearing blackface and I think he should go for it!

Dreyfuss continued his rant with, “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”

I decided to consider this classic line of white supremacist thinking by pouring over the vast troves of Black American literature that came out of the Antebellum South. But it turns out a certain moral trend of the moment prohibited that artistic movement from ever getting off the ground… by requiring the murder of any Black person learning to read and/or write. Oh, well. Maybe I’m missing the point.

Maybe the point is that because morality is conveyed through art, we need to be mindful of how we do such things or we risk limiting ourselves in a way that could prove destructive to the entire endeavor? Hmm. I’ll bet there’s a hidden history somewhere that can explain all this, but before we get there