Druski’s viral whiteface skit isn’t racism. It’s satire that punches up at power

American comedian Druski has gone viral with a short parody video titled “How Conservative Women in America Act”.

In it, Druski plays a character whose costumes, make-up and activities all resemble those of right-wing activist Erika Kirk, widow of former Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk – whose role she has taken up.

Conservatives are up in arms, predictably. Many are calling it racism or reverse racism. Imagine, they declare, how fast a white man would be cancelled if he were to don blackface to send up the activities of an African American widow.

But this backlash misses the point. Blackface and whiteface are not opposite and equal.

Blackface punches down. Whiteface can’t

Whiteface draws attention to the privileges and protections that whiteness allows.

It uses exaggeration – in this case the ordering of not just coffee, but a “sweet cream foam chai ice matcha” with an “organic pup cup” for the fluffy pet – to draw attention to how gaudy and obviously performative the elite white class can be.

The joke in whiteface comedy is not “this person is white”, but “this person is protected, entitled and used to being in control”.

That privilege can even extend to white people who aren’t especially wealthy, as Druski has explored in other whiteface videos. In “Guy who is just proud to be an American”, the comedian portrays a stereotypical, ultra-patriotic NASCAR fan, whose racist and misogynistic remarks are egged on by his white peers.

Druski shows how his character’s feelings of superiority come from a very deliberate set of conditions and environments that produce his whiteness.

Key to the distinction between whiteface and blackface is simply the relative power of the groups being parodied.

Blackface minstrelsy emerged in the United States in the 1830s – just as slavery began to disappear – as a mass entertainment form that degraded Black people. White performers used burnt cork on their faces, and painted on enlarged red lips and white eyes, to create offensive caricatures.

Most white people embraced the new stereotypes, wanting to maintain a cheap labour force and cling to the feeling of superiority they gave them.

Blackface soon became the most popular form of entertainment all over the English-speaking world, including in Australia, New Zealand and Britain. It remained a mainstay of popular culture in movies, on television and even on radio, as late as the 1970s.

Whiteface, by contrast, is a prime example of what anthropologist James Scott called “weapons of the weak” – an idea taken up by historians of African American labour and social life, such as Robin D. G. Kelley in his work Race Rebels.

Rather than just reversing blackface, whiteface aims to expose whiteness as a social and historical performance with material consequences. In doing so, it calls into question any sense that racial inequality is natural.

Whiteface emerged before blackface

This method of undermining white people’s authority goes all the way back to slavery in colonial North America. For example, in 1772, in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, a group of about 60 enslaved Black people gathered for a party.

Thinking themselves in private, they mocked their white owners in an elongated performance including dress, speech and dance.

Annual one-day festivals or parades, which took place from the 1740s up until the Civil War provided similar opportunities for enslaved people in North America to come together for rare celebrations. Participants performed rituals – such as electing a Black person to be king or governor for a day – that demonstrated a deep understanding of white society.

Some white onlookers regarded these performances as merely poor imitations. Many, however, were unsettled when they saw that the people they had enslaved understood white society all too well.

Discomfort is the point

White onlookers of African American comedy have likewise been made uncomfortable, since at least Richard Pryor’s stand-up shows of the 1970s. Nobody who ever saw Pryor send up white people’s walking, eating, cussing, or indeed their ideas about race and safety, can ever forget them.

Pryor’s collaborator Paul Mooney, also a Black comedian, once said:

My job is to make white people mad. They have to learn how to laugh at themselves.

A more recent example comes from actor Maya Rudolph, who impersonated Donatella Versace in a series of early 2000s TV skits. Whiteface enabled her to exaggerate the signs of elite whiteness by portraying a camp, hyper-mediated version of European white femininity. In this context, whiteness becomes costume drama.

Exposing white fragility and grievance

This is the tradition Druski belongs in. His over-the-top portrayal of affluent and conservative white women compels viewers to notice the artifice of the performance.

His target is not women in general, but a rich, entitled figure who turns privilege into threatened innocence and then demands protection from racialised “dangers” she and other people like her have largely invented.

The complaint about “racism” draws a false equivalence between Druski’s satire and centuries of anti-Black racism. It also aims to distract from white women’s electoral power, including their majority allegiance to the Republican Party.

What the complaint really shows, as Paul Mooney might have said, is that too many white people are still refusing to laugh at themselves.