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So, You’ve Boycotted Chris Lilley. What Are You Going To Do Next?
“My dad said he pinched her bum.”
These are the words of the brownface caricature called Jonah Takalua. They were part of a deleted scene from ‘Jonah From Tonga,’ which was posted on Chris Lilley’s YouTube channel on June 27.
Two weeks earlier, ‘Jonah From Tonga’ was taken off Netflix as a direct response to the global Black Lives Matter protests, following the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, as a White officer pressed a knee into his neck.
Lilley’s caricature of Pasifika people ties in with a long history of White people appropriating the skin of people of colour in art. The mainstream performance of blackface, yellowface, redface and brownface started in the United States more than 200 years ago as a form of theatrical makeup and racially stereotyped conduct. Award-winning Afro-Caribbean-Australian author Maxine Beneba Clarke writes that blackface was created when “White performers liberally applied black greasepaint or shoe polish and used distorted dialogue, exaggerated accents and grotesque movements to caricature people of African descent” in the name of ‘art’. It is an expression of White supremacy to think brownface is anything but a racist trope used to denigrate and dehumanise communities of colour for a cheap laugh.
'Woke' White boys would be dressed in tupenus, strumming on ukuleles, asking me if it was true 'Islanders hooked up with our cousins' and telling me they wanted to have my '10 Fobalicious babies'."Winnie dunn
I was in the first year of my bachelor of arts degree when Chris Lilley’s mockumentary ‘Jonah From Tonga’ aired on the ABC for the first time. During this period, I encountered many “woke” White boys mirroring Lilley’s brown-faced Afro-wigged minstrel ― they would be dressed in tupenus, strumming on ukuleles, asking me if it was true “Islanders hooked up with our cousins” and telling me they wanted to have my “ten Fobalicious babies”.
Anthropologist Ghassan Hage Continue reading on HuffPost
