Billy Dee Williams Says Blackface Is Fine If You’re An Actor
Billy Dee Williams feels actors can do whatever they want — like wearing blackface. Williams spoke to Bill Maher during an episode of Club Random, where they discussed the 1965 version of Othello, which featured Laurence Olivier as the titular character. The United Kingdom actor sported blackface in the film for his performance. Williams admitted that he loved Laurence’s rendition of the character, referring to the blackface performance as “really interesting.”
“When he did Othello, I fell out laughing,” he said. “He stuck his a** out and walked around with his a**, you know, because Black people are supposed to have big a**es… I thought it was hysterical. I loved it. I love that kind of stuff.”
Maher asserted that white actors wouldn’t be able to get away with that in the current social climate. He insisted that “they” would never allow for something seen as offensive to be used for entertainment. Williams then challenged Bill Maher to try it out himself. At this moment, the Star Wars icon declared that, as actors, you should be able to do “anything you want.”
“You should do it… If you’re an actor, you should do anything you want to do,” he said. “As an actor, whatever you think you can do, you should be able to do it.”
“[You] actually lived in a period where you couldn’t do that, where you couldn’t play the part you should’ve played,” the controversial host responded, referencing America’s segregation era.
Williams resisted the comedian’s point. He insisted that segregation, racism, etc., didn’t and doesn’t hold him back. The Brian’s Song actor said he refused to be a “victim” of the world’s ills. He then doubled down on his claim that actors should have the creative agency to do whatever they please for entertainment’s sake.
“But it didn’t matter,” he said. “Of course, it happened, but the fact is, you discuss it. The point is that you don’t go through life feeling like, ‘I’m a victim’… I refuse to go through life saying to the world, ‘I’m p*ssed off.’ I’m not gonna be p*ssed off 24 hours a day.”
“If I’m going to be creative, let me be creative as an individualist. I don’t want to do anything based on this whole idea that ‘you’re a Black person, you’re a white person’ and things of that nature,” he said. “I’m an artist. I’m a creative entity in this life.”
Blackface’s origins date back to 19th-century minstrel shows. These shows featured white people donning shoe polish to darken their skin. White people would also wear tattered clothing and make exaggerated facial features and actions to appear “stereotypically Black.” These exaggerations included hypersexuality, lack of intelligence, slurred speech, and more.
According to the National Museum of African American History of Culture, historian Dale Cockrell detailed that poor and working-class white folks felt shunned by their wealthier counterparts. “[White people] who felt squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm,” he stated. The historic archival site also notes that it is almost impossible to separate minstrelsy from blackface as an art due to the racial derision and mockery built into the concept.
Basically, blackface is historically and inherently racist and less about entertainment.
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