Examines Hollywood's painful, enduring ties to racist performances.

Variety

Sharp … In explicitly laying out the history and costs of blackface performance, [Ayanna Thompson] fully meets her stated aim of offering an accessible book that constitutes part of an ongoing "arc toward justice."

Times Higher Education

Blackface reveals a legacy of performance that is pointed and detrimental, known but purposely forgotten. Thompson's analysis is exquisite and exact. A new entry for the historical record.

Ibram X. Kendi, Founding Director, Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, and author of How to Be An Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning

Essential! This is a lucid, engaging, and long overdue exorcism of American culture's greatest haunt.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Associate Director, Playwriting MFA program, Hunter College, CUNY, USA, recipient of the Obie Award for Best New American Play (Appropriate, An Octoroon) and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Gloria, Everybody)

A truly eye-opening, defiant, must-read.

West End Best Friend

Wide-ranging and hard-hitting… a passionate, well-informed, and gripping read… another triumph for Object Lessons.

New York Journal of Books