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Let's take a second to dissect this. @paintdatface is not sorry for his blackface transformation. It was never about race for him. He got bored, wanted to mix it up, and even though women of color have reached out to him to express their feelings, he is not going to apologize. Why? Pick a reason. He's Cuban, so it's not blackface. He's not mocking black people, so it's not blackface. He's an artist, so it's not blackface.
Rather than hiring a model of color, @paintdatface transformed a white woman into a woman of color and called it harmless. It is not harmless. It is, in fact, wholly harmful. Women of color cannot magically transform into white women. We live in a world where whiteness is endlessly promoted through dangerous and sometimes deadly procedures, including skin bleaching. What's more, being a woman of color is not just skin tone. Painting a white woman any shade of brown or black doesn't create anything but a white woman painted brown or black. It's not celebrating the culture it's imitating. It's holding a mirror up to whiteness and reflecting white beauty ideals with the contrast turned way up.
When influencers, no matter how large or small their platform, normalize acts like blackface, they are effectively telling their entire following that racism is not only OK but defensible self-expression. It's a classic case of centering: @paintdatface told his followers and anyone who saw his posts that his self-expression mattered more than the lived experiences of hundreds of thousands of women whose lives and deaths have been dictated by the color of their skin. This kind of centering paves the road for even more ignorance to take center stage. In hopes that we never have to have this discussion again, let's briefly go over the myriad of ways this whole thing was not OK and should not be repeated ever again.
