Some white actors feel it's OK to use makeup to portray blacks with empathy or for laughs.

A cultural memory of blackface: Burnt cork, red lips. Steppity-steppity-step, shuffle, slapstick. "Authentic" former slaves, dancing for the white folks. T.D. "Daddy" Rice, a white man in the cork and face paint, a national sensation in the 1830s, doing a dance he lifted from a Negro in Cincinnati."Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so; "Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow." (The song and dance seeps so deeply into the cultural id that it later becomes the code word for racial segregation.) Blackface fades but never goes away, the greasy rub between the fingers of racial loathing. The insulting nature of it: No one turned out in blackface to play Scott Joplin's "Solace" or, as the 20th century slid by, Duke Ellington's "Solitude." No one used burnt cork to portray Romare Bearden painting "The Street." The joke is ignorance, the subject is black.Time morphs. Swing, bop, civil rights, modern, postmodern, new century. Now things are complicated. Blackface has long been taboo, but now it's not all about insult. Now olive-toned whites play light-skinned blacks, without a sense of irony ( Angelina Jolie darkened herself to play Mariane Pearl in "A Mighty Heart"). Since we're all supposedly post-racial, some white comedians feel it's allowable to use makeup to portray black characters with empathy or just for laughs.Fred Armisen is Illinois Sen. Barack Obama on "Saturday Night Live." Robert Downey Jr. plays a pompous white actor playing a black soldier in a Ben Stiller movie, "Tropic Thunder," due out this summer. Chuck Knipp does drag as a black Southern woman, Shirley Q. Liquor, the "Queen of Ignunce," in clubs and on video-sharing sites. Comedian Tracey Ullman dons face paint to portray a black security agent, Chanel Monticello, in her new series on Showtime.For better or worse, Ullman goes for it all. In the opening minutes of the March 30 debut of her show, "State of the Union," a mockumentary about a day in the life of America, she plays an undocumented Bangladeshi doughnut maker, a Jamaican caregiver (whose elderly charge tells her to get "your black hands off me") and a mid-market Latino TV news anchor. That's a white actress going brown, browner and light brown in about three minutes of airtime. SOURCE OF THIS STORY