The 'blackface' in Catalonia

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lthough it may seem untrue, theater had actresses banned from the stage until recently. No matter how many Antigones and Medeas they represented, in classical Greece, amphitheaters were exclusively male. Women were forbidden to appear on stage, even in the chorus. In Elizabethan England, the female roles written by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe also had to be played by men, so when you saw a performance of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo fell in love with a child dressed as a girl, and the terrible Lady Macbeth was usually a teenager with an incipient beard.

In the case of black characters, like Othello, the racism of the time forced the face of the white actor of the moment to be painted, a habit that became widespread in the United States under the name of blackface. It has only been decades since there have been black actors on stage. During slavery and well into the 20th century, plays were performed with white actors playing black people, evil characters or, in any case, "happy darkies," and therefore a constant source of ridicule. And with the invention of cinema, the trend jumped to the big screen uncritically and at full speed: in the silent classic The Birth of a Nation (1915), that shameful apology for the Ku Klux Klan, most of the black people were blackface, and in The Jazz Singer (1927), the first film with synchronized sound in history, the star was a white singer with a darkened face and whitened lips.

The civil rights struggle banished blackface in the sixties, but the Asian variant, yellowface, continued to exist. In Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Mickey Rooney played Mr. Yunioshi, the grumpy Japanese neighbor, and in the Kung Fu series – from the early seventies – the little grasshopper was played by David Carradine. Women, black people, Asians, all the cases described so far are cut from the same pattern: whatever the era, those in power – white and heterosexual men – decided to represent the rest of the groups according to their own tastes and prejudices.

But one doesn't have to go that far: in Catalonia, discrimination and mockery have also been the historical norm, from Conguitos to "I am that little black boy, from tropical Africa." And on the country's stages, controversies continue to this day. A few weeks ago, a debate ignited at the Teatre Lliure following the decision of the director of Àngels a Amèrica, David Selvas, to choose a white actor to play one of the few specifically racialized roles that exist. Here the performer did not have a blackened face – Julio Manrique did in Àlex Rigola's 2666, 10 years ago – but the collective of black actors and actresses in Barcelona published a video denouncing the discrimination.

But the most shameful blackface in the country does not happen in theaters, but in the streets and squares of those towns that, around this time, still opt for hiring three white actors in the Three Kings' parades. In the 21st century, we still have a lot of municipalities – among the most populated are Reus and Girona – that choose someone white and paint them black to represent King Balthazar, in a racist custom that might have made sense fifty years ago, but not now, when there are black residents in all municipalities of the country. With the #BaltasarDeVeritat campaign, the collective Casa Nostra, Casa Vostra – promoter of Europe's largest demonstration in favor of refugees – asks that we finally put an end to the makeup and that those who play the roles of King Balthazar and his pages be black Catalans, young and old.