Well, 2019 is really showing us some things.
As Virginia Democrats desperately search for a white guy who hasn’t donned blackface to maybe be governor—or just not be a whole-ass embarrassment—a Washington Post article from [squints] yup, earlier this week shows that only 58 percent of respondents find blackface “unacceptable.”
About one in four Americans said they were unsure whether it was acceptable or not, and 16 percent—all Kurtis Blow fans and moonwalking enthusiasts, surely—thought blackface was just fine.
This raises an obvious question: How did white respondents vote versus black ones? According to the poll, 73 percent of black people thought blackface was unacceptable, compared to...
57 percent of white respondents. So half of your white friends may or may not be down with blackface. A coin flip, more or less.
This gulf was secondary to the gap between Democrats and Republicans, however. Four out of five respondents who identified as Democrats said blackface was unacceptable. Only half of independents felt that way, with Republicans not far behind. Only 44 percent of Republican respondents thought blackface—a practice rooted in minstrelsy, the very point of which was to flatten and dehumanize black people and black life—was unacceptable.
Cool, cool. Everything is cool.