Some 1,500 men and women, their faces blackened, will ride along 4.5 miles of the city’s most storied avenues in the full light of Mardi Gras morning as part of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club’s annual parade. They’ll mug for TV cameras and snap social media selfies, all while sporting makeup similar in appearance to the kind that in recent weeks has sparked a national firestorm.
Now, though, for the first time since a backlash during the civil rights surge of the 1960s, Zulu dignitaries are taking steps to explain the message they mean to send with their parade costumes, especially the painted faces. The move owes directly to the recent public maelstrom over blackface and a modern media landscape that spreads local culture far beyond its often-complex origins, they said.
“Blackface is pretending that black people are less than human; the black makeup that we wear has nothing to do with that,” said City Councilman Jay Banks, a onetime Zulu king who now serves as chairman of the organization’s board.
“Our costumes are warrior-like,” he told CNN, “and they have nothing to do with the buffoonishness when these idiots do blackface.”
The sentiment was echoed by Andrew Gross, a white entrepreneur who’s paraded with Zulu since 2004 and who said he’s “never had a single soul say anything” to him about his black parade makeup.
“If someone misconstrues that, I 100% respect that. You can’t blame people for how they feel,” he told CNN. “But I think if they understood the relevance of it, being a Zulu, for me, a white guy from Uptown New Orleans, … is just such an honor for me. It’s opened up so many doors. …
“If my Zulu brothers want me to mask this way,” he said, “I’m going to mask this way.”
Intentions and impressions are at odds
When Banks sees his fellow Zulus in black makeup, he said, the racist context of blackface does not cross his mind.
“Zulu is much more than a just a one-and-done,” said state Sen. Troy Carter, who has participated in club events for decades, including donning black makeup as a float rider. “Mardi Gras is just one part of who we are.”
It’s undoubtedly one reason the matter of the makeup — a requirement for all who parade — has roared back to life in light of the scandals in Virginia and elsewhere.
“To Zulu’s credit, they don’t discriminate,” state Sen. J.P. Morrell said. “The issue becomes much more nuanced when you have white people doing blackface next to black people.”
The debate may hinge on who makes the rules
Some Zulu officials insist that seeing white float riders donning black makeup simply does not conjure notions of racist blackface.
“I see it just the opposite because it’s an exchange of culture,” said Carter, who is African-American. “When our white brothers and sisters engage in Zulu, that’s a recognition of us better understanding each other’s cultures.”
Indeed, the sight of a white person — whose neck is often exposed below the black face paint — might connote among locals a person liberal on matters of race, respected enough by Zulu’s overwhelmingly black membership to merit an invitation.
For his part, Gross said he’s “never, not once, considered myself wearing blackface.”
“We’re not trying to disguise the fact that we’re whatever race underneath,” he said. “I’m not out there on Mardi Gras morning trying to pretend I’m not a white guy.”
Back to the modern day, DeBerry, who is black, issues this admonition: “If Zulu doesn’t change, if it continues to demand that its members paint their faces black, please don’t misconstrue that as permission for anybody else to do the same.”
The leader of the nonprofit Dialogue on Race Louisiana, which hosts community conversations, took a similar view.
“If it was me, I wouldn’t use black paint … because it looks like Jim Crow blackface that whites used,” Maxine Crump said, noting another complication of Zulu’s makeup justification: History books tend to show African Zulu warriors wearing face paint that’s brightly colored, not black.
But, she acknowledged, the right to choose how its parade looks lies squarely with Zulu’s African-American leaders.
“If Zulus have done that with blackface, … they can use it the way they want to,” she said. “And if they decide that white riders can wear blackface, then OK.”
That permission, though, ends the moment the parade disbands, Crump said.
“If they wore their same Zulu masks at a Halloween, then it’s disrespectful,” she said. “Only in the context of the Zulu parade is this worn. It’s never appropriate to dress in Zulu costume outside the Krewe of Zulu.”
Zulus want to clarify — but not change — the picture
Such deference generally has been the practice of New Orleans’ political leaders and its local luminaries, white and black. And until the latest scandals involving Virginia’s governor and others, the matter of Zulu’s black makeup existed as just another long-accepted quirk of America’s quirkiest city.
As such, Zulu leaders haven’t sought to publicize the nuances of their tradition beyond their own ranks — until now.
“With the onset of the internet, we probably should have been pumping the fact that black makeup wasn’t blackface,” Banks said. “But we were fine; it wasn’t affecting us. And then all this blew up.
“Maybe with this attention, people will get a clearer picture,” he said.
As for implications or outright suggestions that Zulu move away from its black makeup, Banks said, those are nonstarters.
“That would somehow indicate that we were complicit of the disrespect of black people for 115 years,” he said. “That’s no way going to happen.”
Source : CNN