Because context matters. The picture of a guy in blackface, next to a guy dressed as a klansman, is inherently more fucked up to me than someone dressed as the biggest pop star ever during the height of his fame.
Darkening your skin to appear like a specific black person is different than dressing up as a blackface minstrel performer.
How do we all feel about Tropic Thunder? Asking for a friend.
Forget it. Stupid. Adds nothing to the discussion.
Sweet jesus.
I can see how this would matter if you’re trying to resolve some kind of dispute one-on-one or with a small group…basically, in a situation where people can be rational and seek to understand one another. But in the mass media of politics I just don’t think it matters whether the person understood that they were doing something racist. If something racist was done, even unintentionally or without understanding due to the culture of the time, it’s still going to be called out and pursued. As indeed is happening right now with Northam.
If you’re a person in the situation where you’ve done some bad stuff in the past, even unintentionally, then you need to stay the heck out of politics. Or at least bring it up yourself, explain and apologize and hope that works out for you.
Now now, one party isn’t bothered with scandals on their side all!
I feel like everyone is going to have done something that is gonna offend someone, so you are gonna end up just destroying your own guys, while the GOP just feigns outrage while not giving a crap about their own things.
If we can all just agree Time is completely wrong and has no idea what he is talking about, I would appreciate it. Move on to something of value.
Shorter Kaine & Warner “We thought you understood what we meant last night.”
Fairfax in a bit of a weird spot, since he can’t explicitly say: “Give me your job”…but…
State AG Mark Herring – also a Democrat and fairly popular – also calling for resignation.
When Soul Man came out there was a LOT of controversy about it. Mistral blackface was brought up in pretty much every conversation about it. The NAACP and Spike Lee were both strongly against the (unseen) film. There were rumors that the studio was going to pull it from theaters because of the many protests… but I don’t know how seriously they considered that.
In the end, many of the people who were dead-set against the movie came around on it, as it actually tries (as much as a movie written by “The Wonder Years” scribe could) to point out how terrible things actually are for minority students - profiling, racist classmates, etc. It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it’s heart was mostly in the right area.
“Hey, guys what’s going on in…”
I will add my limited experience anecdotally here, if I may. In 1980 I was 21. Heavy drinker. Went to many holiday/costume parties that included cocaine and other drugs. Never once did I see anyone in blackface or KKK garb. We knew it was wrong. Strangers knew it was wrong and friends knew it was wrong.
Anecdata, certainly. NYC Manhattan and Brooklyn. Maybe I was hanging out with a certain group? Well no. I hung out with an eclectic bunch of people who weren’t racitsts? Maybe. Or maybe they hid it well.
No one disputes this. This isn’t the argument. Northram doesn’t dispute this.
Northram loses Wilder (Virginia’s first black governor):
At the time Soul Man was released people said it was a racist movie.
Pretty sure we can find a few people who didn’t dress up to pose in a picture as either the black face guy or the Klansman and then have that picture posted in their yearbook and then apologize vaguely for it when people notice it and then lie about it a day later. There have to be one or two.
Now that I’ve seen the photo it’s clear this is actually ‘blackface’ - which to me means denigrating and objectifying persons of African descent - and not just ‘dressing up as Michael Jackson’, which let’s let the hypothetical be, something that wasn’t offensive then but is offensive today.
I mean I grew up with Michael Jackson and at the time, at least to my kid brain, I never associated Michael Jackson with being “black” in some deeper sense, he was clearly a world wide pop star whose music was aimed to have universal appeal. I mean, he was black, but this wasn’t a defining characteristic of his media or cultural representation. So dressing up as him in blackface is bizarre and weird and totally inaccurate just on every possible level. Nor did at the time was it ever made clear that blackface was ever acceptable in the 80s, not in a time of Bill Cosby or a bit later of the Fresh Prince.
It’s a strange hill to die on Timex. Blackface wasn’t acceptable behavior in the 80s. I think you’re getting this mixed up with the 20s.
It is a strange hill to die on. I can’t even grasp the point of it. It is certainly true that some people didn’t think blackface was racist in 1984, but it’s true now that some people don’t think it is racist. We call those people ‘racists’, whether we’re talking about people now or people in 1984. That there were more of them then than now doesn’t cause the behavior to not be racist, it just means that we’ve made some progress. There are fewer slaveholders now, too, but the larger number of slaveholders in 1861 didn’t mean that slavery wasn’t racist.
You mean besides Ted Danson, right?