2. What’s the Joke? The Black Body as White Pleasure in Canadian Blackface
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What's the Joke?The Black Body as White Pleasure in Canadian Blackface Down at the deep dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black men's gall.(Ellison, 1958, p. 104) If Black people experience blackface as antiblackness, indeed if the violence of the relations of slavery are deeply woven into blackface logics, it is just as clear that many white and non-Black persons experience blackface as pleasurable.Contemporary blackface in Canada is performed almost exclusively in contexts of ostensible humour, fun, and entertainment.That this is the context in which blackface occurs is easily confirmed by a scan of media accounts of blackface incidents in Canada, which demonstrates that contemporary blackface in Canada occurs primarily during Halloween parties, campus carnivals, frosh events, sporting events, comedy fests, theatre performances, and comedy revues (e.g., CTV News, 2010; Dunlevy, 2016; HueyFreeman222, 2007; Montpetit, 2011; QMI Agency, 2014; Ravary, 2013).Importantly, blackface performers are not the only ones who find blackface fun.In fact, those who wear blackface have frequently been rewarded with approval by their audiences.Indeed, in 2009 at the University of Toronto and in 2014 at Brock University, students wearing blackface to portray the Cool Runnings film version of the Jamaican bobsled team received An earlier version of this chapter appears in Howard, P.S.S. (2018).A laugh for the national project: Contemporary Canadian blackface humour and its constitution through Canadian anti-blackness.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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".