From 1906 to 1946, McGill student newspaper archives record definitive evidence of blackface on and around campus. Although the majority of clippings publicize nearby local theatre productions of minstrel shows, several excerpts explicitly describe blackface performances as taking place at McGill.
Persisting in Montreal today, blackface is a form of representational violence that dehumanizes Black people while reinforcing white supremacy. A tool historically used to justify the systemic oppression of Black people in North America, blackface normalizes racial humiliation as entertainment, inflicting intergenerational, psychological wounds in Black communities.
A brief history of blackface in North America
North American blackface performances were first popularized in 1830s New York, where white performers would darken their faces and bodies with burned cork, grease paint, or shoe polish and dress in tattered clothing. These performances mocked Black Americans enslaved on Southern plantations, propagating derogatory stereotypes of Black people as lazy, dangerous, hypersexual, and even content with slavery.
In an interview with The Tribune, Cheryl Thompson—author, associate professor and research chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, founder and director of Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives, and archival scholar of North American blackface—described how 1830s minstrel shows constructed false narratives of Black people as acquiescent.
“Black people [were depicted] as happy, contented, always smiling. You’ll never see a Black minstrel not smiling,” she explained. “Happy and lazy were the two common tropes that circulated through the visual culture, and in the absence of a [Black] political class, why would the dominant culture believe anything other?”
The most famous of minstrel show acts during this period was American blackface performer and playwright Thomas Dartmouth Rice’s character Jim Crow—portraying an enslaved stableman with a physical disability. Rice combined blackface, imagined vernacular speech, song, and a shuffling dance to depict the character. A 1690 United States law had long forbidden enslaved people from most forms of dancing and musical performance, inspiring Black people to develop shuffling dances to bypass the legal definition of dancing—which involved crossing one’s feet. Rice’s signature dance style appropriated this technique, exaggerating and ridiculing an already suppressed form of Black artistic expression for the amusement of white audiences.
The Jim Crow character quickly spread across the United States and Canada, becoming a popular minstrel performance. Thompson explained how the ability of white performers to caricaturize and mock Black identity and culture stems from racial power imbalances.
“The stage has everything to do with politics, with culture [....] Parody, caricature, [and] satire all come from the theatre. But it’s only people with power who can parody other people,” she said. “Until we’re actually taken seriously as a political class and not seen as a comedy class, [these dynamics] are never going to go away.”
Yet paradoxically, Black people would perform these caricatures themselves, since performance opportunities for racialized artists were largely restricted to blackface roles. Systemic racism in the entertainment industry cornered Black artists into participating in their own degradation—or risk being excluded from the performing arts world entirely. According to Thompson, this pattern continues today through stereotypical roles for Black actors in television and film.
“[As long as] the Black actor or the comedian continues to wear the caricature in the absence of the blackface mask, […] it’s never going to change,” she said. “You have to resist that impulse to slip into what is essentially a minstrel character.”
Within 10 years of Rice’s first performance, Jim Crow was a racial epithet for Black people; within a century, Jim Crow was the chosen name for the United States’ codified system of segregation. This trajectory from visual culture to law reflects the pervasiveness of racial caricature within the racial psyche of North America: Although Jim Crow Laws were formally abolished with the landmark United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, blackface is still practiced in the United States and Canada today, and bears critical relevance to contemporary race relations.
What the archives reveal: Blackface at McGill
The McGill Outlook—McGill’s weekly student newspaper from 1896 to 1908—offers the earliest available record of an assumedly on-campus production of blackface. In an article published in 1906, two student actors are said to “oblige with a black face clog dance during the love scene in the first act.” A decade later, a 1915 article in the McGill Daily states that the McGill Mandolin Club would perform alongside a “well-known black-face act.” The most recent archival evidence of blackface at McGill, however, is an article published in the McGill Daily on Oct. 17, 1946. It reads:
“Upper classmen [dressed as stormtroopers,] robed in McGill blazers [and] swastiked sleeves, […] brought [the freshmen] to trial for their misdemeanours […] during initiation week [....] Each culprit […] heard her sentence read [....] The freshmen, thus purged of their guilt, put on a Minstrel Show, proving they were endowed with both beauty and talent. Then both prosecutors and prosecuted reconciled by indulging in sandwiches and bottles of pepsi cola [sic].”
An overt example of how caricature acts as a vessel for not only anti-Black racism, but also antisemitism, this article’s casual register testifies to how deeply normalized discriminatory performances were within McGill’s campus culture during this period.
Beyond examples of blackface occurring on campus, numerous other student newspaper articles publicized minstrel shows occurring at other venues, including the Orpheum, Gayety, and Imperial theatres. These articles described performers fondly as “comedians of the funniest kind,” “[making] millions laugh,” “bring[ing] forth well merited applause,” and “enjoy[ing] a great […] reputation.” By applauding these performances for their humour, McGill student newspapers further contributed to the normalization of racial impersonation—not only as entertainment, but as a reinforcement of community ties.
Thompson noted how blackface has historically acted as a source of social connection, reflecting white reluctance to abandon a racist status quo.
“What does it mean that people of a certain class are doing [blackface] to form social bonds? What does that speak to in terms of the ways that white supremacy actually becomes a kind of comfort?”
The role of the archive in institutional memory and accountability
Uncritical reviews and advertisements for blackface productions in Montreal fallaciously construct an archival memory of blackface as normal during this period of North American history: When the only accessible records of blackface at an institution are neutral if not positive, the institutional and collective memory shaped by this archive becomes sanitized and partial.
In an interview with The Tribune, Anthony W. Dunbar, professor at Dominican University, founder and leader of the Critical Race Theory collective (CRTc), and creator of Critical Race information Theory (CRiT), described how the archive itself can be a mechanism of power and accountability.
“There’s power and archives and then power in archives. We live in a capitalistic society where most power shows up in one of two ways, either in some form of fiscal component, or in some sociocultural aspects. In archives, those things hybrid[ize] and overlap,” Dunbar explained. “The folks who have money are usually the ones who have the power [to] use archives in those social, cultural, beneficial manners for themselves. Who has fiscal or custodial control has a lot to do with how those stories are used.”
Dunbar’s research proposes the use of counterstories—the purposive inclusion of people of colour and their experiences into dominant culture narratives—to subvert what is typically viewed as objective, neutral, or even true. However, the ability of an oppressed group to contribute their knowledge to the archive is closely determined by their access to record-keeping resources.
“Saving [records] costs money, whether it’s digital or in storage. It’s a bill that you never really [finish paying],” he said. “The reality of caring for [records involves] fiscal and personal commitments. That transcends [the archival process] at a base level [....] That power and control and sustainability, [those] operational opportunities, don’t often exist for Brown folks.”
According to Thompson, power and resources have decisively, historically shaped the ability of Black people to dissent against the mainstream visual culture, particularly during the 19th century when Black literacy was climbing but low.
“People always [ask], ‘Was there backlash to blackface in the 19th century?’ But all they could do back then […] is write a letter to the newspaper expressing concern [or] discontent. Otherwise, the Black Canadian in the 19th century is a disenfranchised group,” she said. “It’s not a coincidence that […] Black people protesting against [blackface] started in the 1920s and accelerated into the 1930s because there’s more evidence of it through the visual and the audio medium […] with the advent of cinema.”
By consequence, archival records like McGill’s—which are rife with articles praising blackface, but lack any apparent evidence of dissent—can depict blackface as acceptable during this period. Yet, the gaps themselves tell a story: The first step toward understanding and learning from the archive is a cognizance of how power directly shapes one’s ability to express and record their own dissent.
Contemporary incidents of blackface in Montreal
In the past 15 years, blackface incidents have accelerated within Montreal’s visual culture: In 2014, a white actor with Montreal theatre group Théâtre du Rideau Vert wore blackface to portray Montreal Canadiens player P.K. Subban—unfortunately just one incident within a common, decades-old pattern where Quebec theatres cast white people for non-white roles. In September 2011, a group of about 30 students at HEC Montréal wore green and yellow tracksuits, spoke in mock Jamaican accents, chanted about smoking marijuana, and carried around a stuffed monkey during a freshman orientation sporting activity. And in 2012, McGill students dressed in blackface at a 4Floors Halloween event at the University Centre, accompanied by several other costumes that caricaturized Indigenous and Latino people.
Clearly, the 19th- and 20th-century-era practice of white people engaging in caricature for the purposes of community bonding and entertainment still persists—and so too does its psychological afterlife. In an email to The Tribune, N. Keita Christophe, associate professor in McGill’s Department of Psychology and principal investigator of the Cultural Development Science Lab, explained how blackface enduringly remains a source of harm for Black people through intergenerational storytelling.
“From a racial trauma perspective, often histories like this come with a lot of pain and distress for those that directly [experience] them, and these emotions and accompanying recounting[s] of the event are often then […] passed down through generations [as] historical trauma,” he said.
According to Christophe, the historical trauma that results from a national or institutional history of blackface poses profound risks toward racial identity, particularly through internalized racism.
“We know that discrimination can sometimes result in people […] asserting pride in their identity in response to discrimination, but often it can also […] lead to internalization of the negative stereotypes that blackface and other experiences of discrimination often perpetuate,” he said. “This phenomenon of internalized racism has been described as the most harmful form of racism because it comes from within the marginalized person themselves.”
In 2020, McGill introduced its five-year Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism, now extended through 2027. The plan tackles anti-Black racism across five axes—students, faculty, research, outreach, and physical space—and seeks to investigate McGill’s historic connections with the transatlantic slave trade.
In a written statement to The Tribune, the McGill Media Relations Office (MRO) emphasized the university’s stance as committed to addressing anti-Black racism on campus.
“McGill unequivocally denounces all forms of racism, very much including anti-Black racism, and reaffirms its dedication to preventing and combating such discrimination,” the MRO wrote.
While a crucial starting point for institutional reform, McGill’s reconciliation efforts must acknowledge the breadth and depth of historic forms of anti-Black violence on its campus that stretch beyond slavery and colonialism—including blackface caricature. With the psychological aftermath of blackface still acute and the practice itself still ongoing, McGill’s archives cannot remain a repository of unexamined racial violence. It is time for the university to confront its place in the history of North American blackface.