brownface
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From brown + face, based on earlier blackface.
Noun[edit]
brownface (uncountable)
- A style of theatrical makeup in which a white person colours the face brown in order to represent somebody of another race.
- 2007 September 2, Terrence Rafferty, “Elmore Leonard’s Men of Few Words, in a Few Words”, in New York Times[1]:
- The problem isn’t so much Lancaster’s unconvincing brownface makeup — though it looks as if it had been applied by the same heavy laborers who blacktopped Laurence Olivier for “Othello” — as it is the extremely un-Leonardian softness of his presence.