Laughing Through the Lesson: Blackface, Post-racialism, and Canadian Innocence

Written by: Djamila Mostefai

There are moments when a joke teaches more than a lesson ever could. In my final years of high school on the South Shore, right outside of Montreal, a boy arrived on Halloween in blackface. His justification was ready-made: he was “mocking” Justin Trudeau’s blackface scandal. The logic was a neat formula of irony subtracting racism: a parody of a parody. The school’s indifference taught me that teachers’ policing was for hats and hallway running, not for this performance. We had just learned about the history of blackface in class thanks to our former Prime Minister’s past, but this seemed to make the costume funnier to my classmates. Philip S.S. Howard’s Performing Postracialism gives language to this uncomfortable memory. The book names what I could see but could not yet articulate: how blackface persists not despite postracial education, but through it.

Howard is a Black Studies scholar whose work examines how racial knowledge is produced, circulated, and normalized within settler-colonial societies, particularly through educational institutions. His research is driven by a set of deceptively simple but far-reaching questions: how do we learn antiblackness? How is racial violence rendered mundane? And how do Black people make life within institutions that are structurally hostile to them? Performing Postracialism addresses these questions through an examination of contemporary blackface in Canada, arguing that blackface functions as a form of postracial pedagogy that teaches Canadians to rehearse antiblack violence while claiming to have transcended racism.

The book is situated in Canada, with empirical research drawn from seven universities in Ontario and Quebec, and temporally anchored in what Howard calls the “long postracialist moment” (Howard 13) of the last fifteen to twenty years. This period, shaped by the symbolic weight of Barack Obama’s presidency and its accompanying racist backlash, carries the widespread belief that racism is an aberration rather than a structure. Against Canada’s self-image as a multicultural, benevolent alternative to the United States, Howard insists that antiblackness is neither imported nor exceptional, it is foundational.

Howard’s central thesis is that contemporary blackface cannot be understood as mere racial misrepresentation, ignorance, or poor taste. Rather, it is a pedagogical practice that normalizes antiblack logics precisely through the claim that racism has already been overcome. Blackface is not an accident within postracial society but one of its preferred teaching tools. Howard develops this argument through several interlocking claims: that blackface restages the afterlife of slavery by rendering Black bodies fungible and available for white pleasure; that postracial discourse provides cover for this violence by framing objections as oversensitivity or “political correctness”; and that educational institutions are not neutral sites where these incidents occur, but active producers of the white rationality that makes them possible.

Methodologically, the book moves from empirical data toward theory rather than the reverse. Howard draws on ten focus groups and thirty interviews with Black students, alongside interviews with forty-two non-Black students and twenty faculty members and administrators. He supplements this with a critical discourse analysis of over one hundred media articles and their comment sections, treating reader responses as key sites where postracial common sense is articulated with remarkable candour. Crucially, Howard prioritizes Black theorizing, both academic, drawing on figures such as Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexander Weheliye, and quotidian, taking seriously the analytic insights embedded in Black students’ descriptions of their own experiences.

The book’s structure reflects this careful scaffolding. It starts by establishing blackface as a national and historical phenomenon, situating it within the afterlife of slavery and Canada’s settler-colonial mythology. It then narrows its focus to educational institutions, examining how universities respond to blackface through what Howard terms the “pedagogical imperative”: the impulse to treat blackface as a teachable moment for white perpetrators rather than as a crisis requiring accountability and repair. This progression is effective as by the time Howard turns to the university, the reader understands these incidents not as isolated failures but as predictable outcomes of a broader racial project.

My favourite aspect of the book is its analysis of humour. Howard dismantles the common defence that blackface performed “as a joke” is therefore non-racist. Drawing on theories of relief, superiority, and incongruity, he shows how humour in postracial societies functions as a technology of deniability. Jokes allow white subjects to flirt with racist pleasure while disavowing racist intent. Laughter becomes evidence of an antiblack libidinal economy in which the Black body is persistently associated with pleasure, excess, and absurdity. That this pleasure often remains beneath conscious awareness only underscores its depth.

However, a closer look at chapter four complicates my analysis. Building on Spillers and Weheliye, Howard uses the pornotrope to explain how blackface operates through a convergence of violence, sexualization, ungendering, and spectacle, reducing Black people to racialized flesh available for display. From a Black feminist standpoint, this pornotrope framework, while theoretically generative, is insufficient because it risks collapsing differentiated Black gendered experience into an overly totalizing account of domination that under-specifies the distinct conditions of Black women’s and queer subjects’ lives. For instance, the claim that enslavement produces a condition in which “the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related” and that subjects of antiblack violence become broadly “ungendered” (Howard 114) can be critiqued for flattening how Black women were not simply stripped of gender but violently reassigned hyper-exploitative gender roles (breeder, domestic, sexual commodity), meaning gender was reconfigured rather than erased. Similarly, the assertion that “the ultimate objective of the pornotrope is not…about sex” and that sexualization is merely a “means” or “epiphenomenon” of enfleshment underestimates how sexual and reproductive violence functioned as central engines of racial domination, especially for Black women whose reproductive capacity and sexual vulnerability were directly organized into property relations and racial capitalism. The framework’s emphasis on white desire and spectatorship, where enslaved flesh is subjected to “the (un)pleasure of the viewing sovereign subject” and domination depends on visual display, also centers white libidinal structure while leaving comparatively underdeveloped Black interiority, erotic autonomy, and affective life, a gap Black feminist theory has long worked to fill by theorizing Black pleasure, refusal, and relationality beyond violation. Finally, by focusing on spectacular scenes of violence and pornotropic display, the model risks reproducing the very spectacle it critiques and sidelines the everyday, slow, and intimate forms of gendered racial domination (domestic labor, reproductive governance, and caretaking coercion) that Black feminist scholarship treats as structurally central. 

This tension is especially apparent in Howard’s discussion of white women performing blackface. He notes that gender often appears “backgrounded” in these performances, suggesting a possible sensitivity to gender issues fostered by liberal feminism. I push further and argue that gender is never absent. When white women dress as Black men in their efforts to perform Blackface, they are not stepping outside gender but exploiting Black women’s historical masculinization to secure their own femininity. Black womanhood becomes the negative ground against which white, beautiful, innocent womanhood is affirmed, even in its absence. A more explicitly intersectional Black feminist framework, like in Marisa J. Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive for instance, would have deepened this analysis, particularly by foregrounding white women’s historical affective and symbolic profit from Black women’s degradation.

Reading Howard from a Canadian perspective further underscores the necessity of extending his framework explicitly to Quebec, a site that is often rhetorically exempted from analyses of antiblackness through narratives of linguistic marginality or cultural distinctiveness. Howard himself insists that national boundaries are “irrelevant to the geographies of antiblackness,” noting that Canadian perpetrators freely draw on American racial motifs, cross borders to participate in racist rituals, and remain captivated by the trope of lynching despite its absence from Canada’s official historical record (Howard 96). If this is the case, there is no analytical justification for excluding Quebec from this geography. On the contrary, Quebec offers a particularly instructive case study for how antiblack pornotropes are rearticulated through francophone nationalism rather than Anglo-American liberalism.

Howard’s discussion of Quebec comedian Réal Béland’s blackface character Sandra Paul (Howard 101) provides a critical entry point. Béland’s performance,marked by padded hyperfemininity, sexual grotesquery, and pornographic exposure, reproduces centuries-old colonial tropes of Black women as excessive, deviant, and other-than-human. As Howard notes, the skit culminates in the literal tearing open of the Black woman’s body for visual consumption, a gesture that echoes the colonial visual economy in eighteenth-century representations of enslaved Black women. Situating this example within Quebec feminist historiography sharpens its stakes further. As historian Denyse Baillargeon has shown in Quebec Women of the 20th Century: Milestone in an Unfinished Journey, white women occupy a symbolic position as reproducers of the Quebec nation, a role repeatedly reinforced through nationalist discourse and state policy. During the 1980s and 1990s, Parti Québécois spokespeople openly decried declining birth rates, proposed natalist measures aimed at returning women to the home, and framed white women’s reproduction as essential to Quebec’s survival. Lucien Bouchard’s 1995 declaration that “white women are not having enough children” crystallizes this logic. Within this framework, Black women are structurally foreclosed from the category of national futurity. They cannot reproduce “the Quebec race,” and are therefore positioned not as racialized excess, figures of sexual spectacle, deviance, or humor. Béland’s Sandra Paul thus functions not merely as racist entertainment but as a pornographic reassurance of who does and does not belong to the nation. Bringing Black feminist standpoints makes clear that these performances are inseparable from reproductive politics and nationalist femininity, a dimension that remains underdeveloped in Howard’s otherwise incisive analysis. Applying Howard’s insights to Quebec therefore also requires applying a Quebec-specific feminist framework to Howard, revealing how pornotropic antiblackness is sutured to white women’s symbolic centrality and Black women’s exclusion.

Furthermore, Howard’s concept of postracialist pedagogy is just as relevant when applied to the high school setting, where antiblack logics are often dismissed as immaturity or “just jokes.” My experience functions as a vivid example of precisely the dynamics he describes. The student’s invocation of Justin Trudeau’s blackface scandal as a pretext for his costume exemplifies what Howard calls “working the edge” of acceptability (Howard 67), producing postracialist deniability by framing the act as political parody rather than racial violence (80). The collective laughter of peers aligns with Howard’s theorization of an antiblack libidinal economy, in which white pleasure is generated through the circulation and degradation of Blackness (55). 

Most strikingly, the institutional response, or lack thereof, mirrors the pedagogical imperative, wherein schools prioritize the comfort, learning, or intent of the white perpetrator over the harm experienced by Black students (Howard 144). That this incident occurred immediately after a class on the dangers of blackface exemplifies the “seduction into post-racism” (163), in which superficial multicultural education attenuates indignation rather than confronting structural antiblackness. My high school stands as a common example of this method’s consequences: teenagers not only recognize its superficiality, but they also exploit it in social settings.

Ultimately, Performing Postracialism shows that the problem is not a lack of education but the kind of education we rely on. As Howard suggests, when anti-racism is delivered as a compulsory module rather than a challenge to power, students learn how to endure it, mock it, and move on, collecting participation points while reproducing the very logics they were meant to unlearn. As I saw with the class on Trudeau’s blackface scandal, the classroom often becomes a stage for defying authority and performing humour, where provocation is rewarded with social capital amongst teenagers. This book forces an uncomfortable realization: in postracial Canada, schools do not merely fail to stop antiblackness, they train students to perform it better.