"Some images touch and wound the soul at its center. A human face that inspires at the same time both desire and the dread of approaching it, because of the fear of harming it, whose change we cannot imagine, and whose extreme fragility we intensely feel, which tears up our soul by the roots, and which makes us sense that we are nailed to it, is that kind of image." -- Simone Weil
Yes, it's done in blackface. And yes we don't do things like that anymore. Yet Fred Astaire's tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson is so deep from the heart; and so beyond race.
