1. Contemporary Blackface in Canada as Performance of Antiblackness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1 Contemporary Blackface in Canada as Performance of AntiblacknessThis chapter introduces us to the findings of the study, by introducing us to the Black participants' reactions to blackface.It argues that they experience blackface as taking from them -specifically, as stealing their bodies and identities -and highlights their frequent references to slavery and other systems of historical racial violence to describe what they feel blackface does.Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's (2007) concept of the "afterlife of slavery," and building from her analysis of blackface minstrelsy in the United States, the chapter shifts the analysis of blackface from the limited terms of minstrelsy, representation, and stereotype within which it is usually discussed in the public sphere to one that offers a more precise framework for articulating its offence. The Offence of BlackfaceAs discussed in the introduction, this book has its beginnings in Black outrage at blackface, and my interest in the disturbing ways that it shows up in the context of postracialism.Of course, I am by no means the only Black person who is profoundly disturbed by contemporary blackface, and the Black participants in this study also speak of being disturbed by it.Most Black participants 1 I interviewed have an initial automatic negative reaction when they encounter blackface.This reaction varies in intensity.Some participants, like Gary at University 5, have a very strong negative reaction: "Like, you feel it almost spiritually, viscerally, 1 There were thirty-five Black participants in this study, only three of whose responses do not fit the pattern I am describing here.The exceptional cases will be discussed in Chapter 9.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".