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[Il Palazzo]

Damn, I guess half my class was racist when we dressed up as Indians in kindergarten. Had I been more woke I would have dressed as a cowboy. Now I'm racist forever.

[wierd]

Segregation was effectively ended before this guy was a teenager; As such, unless he was dressing for halloween as an early 1900s thespian, he has no business wearing blackface at that period in time.

But see, it does not follow from: the guy wanted to dress up and was insensitive to how offensive it was; to: the guy is (or even was) a racist.

I do not ascribe to preconditions in my thinking like that.  There's a reason the maxim of Hanlon's Razor ("Do not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity") exists.

It is more likely the kid was just stupid.

Racism is a pattern of behavior, not a specific instance of a behavior.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The "kid" was in his 30's

Y'all are real predictable

[Il Palazzo]

No he wasn't.

[wierd]

Again, PATTERN of behavior.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/justin-trudeau-wearing-blackface-details-emerge-third-incident

"Can't recall how many times he did it."

Which is the missing part of the picture.


"Wearing blackface" is not sufficient. "Wearing it frequently" however, is.

[nenjin]

As much as I dislike Trudeau, there is a difference between not caring and not knowing.

With how many people have been seen in blackface in the last 20 years and the fallout from that, I find it pretty absurd that someone doesn't know it's racist in this day and age. It find it way more likely they just didn't give a shit and/or never thought it'd see the light of day. (Which is how most of this stuff comes back to bite people.)

Damn, I guess half my class was racist when we dressed up as Indians in kindergarten. Had I been more woke I would have dressed as a cowboy. Now I'm racist forever.

The two are not equivalent, if not for age then for the basic culture connotations of black face versus wearing Indian garb.

Now, if you ran around making whooping noises and saying stuff like "Me makem big medicine white man", then yeah, that's about as racist.

[Trekkin]

Damn, I guess half my class was racist when we dressed up as Indians in kindergarten. Had I been more woke I would have dressed as a cowboy. Now I'm racist forever.

Well, cowboy garb was still ultimately appropriated in part from the vaqueros, although with how mangled the image of the Wild West has gotten it's debatable whether dressing as a cowboy as popularly understood could be considered part of that.

[scriver]

Vaqueros are cowboys

Vaca = cow

Vaquero = somebody who cows

[Trekkin]

Vaqueros are cowboys

Vaca = cow

Vaquero = somebody who cows

Yes. Congratulations on knowing a Spanish word. The point, which I would have thought obvious, is that the original vaqueros were not white cowboys.

[Frumple]

Kindergartners themselves might not have been particularly racist (though only might, kids pick up on that shite pretty early, unfortunately), but the teachers or parents that thought it was okay? Probably. Kids I'd maybe give a pass for explicit awareness when they're still like six bloody years old or some crap, but that cuts off somewhere in the teens, if that.

Either way, that's fairly irrelevant to the actions of a 29 year old in the 2000s, which was apparently when trudeau was still pulling that shit. Or most of the people that wore or encouraged fucking blackface since it started snowing up in minstrel shows and junk. You can maybe make the argument of it being racism neutral years ago if you were talking about somewhere not North America or most of Europe or basically anywhere with a substantial english speaking population, or maybe pre-colonization, but on this continent the crap's been racist as hell from day 1 and it ain't slacked off.

Cowboy/indian stuff has its own problems, but we ain't talking that mess. We're talking something pretty specific and it's shit that's been unambiguously racist for its entire history in just about every context. Trudeau is or was racist, flat out. Maybe not the virulent lynching-doesn't-sound-that-bad sort, but the more passive sort that doesn't give a damn to the degree they'd trot out friggin' blackface, yup. It's pretty evident he is or was literally that.

Again, that might not mean other options were worse, but the blowback he's gotten on the subject is deserved. Maybe he's changed in the last twenty or so years, I'unno. Maybe he stumped hard on the problems making a good number of corpses out of canadian minorities and I just missed it. S'possible.

[Max™]

Plus, if you want to talk racism: why do we call the people here before that kidfucking piece of shit Columbus indians?

I would ask why we think of them as exclusively hunter-gatherers in teepees wearing loincloths but it can be hard to recognize post-apocalyptic survivors without context sometimes, and the gap between the Spaniards setting off the plagues and the Dutch/English settlers finding "pristine unspoiled wilderness" where there had been managed landscapes was a century or so. Which means the only signs of their civilization they found were "mysterious mounds and unexplained ruins" that we're only starting to properly label as cities and trade networks.

[Teneb]

Plus, if you want to talk racism: why do we call the people here before that kidfucking piece of shit Columbus indians?

I've seen you blame him for this before, but... Columbus didn't really do [Native] American genocide. That was pretty much everyone that came after him.

He was a douchebag, but all he did was make an imbecillic claim ("the world is smaller than literally everyone else thinks and so going west to China is feasible!"), lucked out in finding another continent, proceeded to panic because his contract explicitly said he'd be rewarded for finding the East Indies, decided to pretend he was totally in the Indies and not in a new land, proceeded to get arrested for treason (lying to the Crown), died in jail.

You want to blame everyone else for the Americas genocide? Go right ahead, but Columbus wasn't actually responsible for that... he was just a dick.

[The Ensorceler]

He genocided and raped the island he found, even though it wasn't continental North America or continental South America. Happy? He absolutely set the tone for future expeditions.

[Lord Shonus]

It was my understanding that "blackface" started in similar veins to how Noh theater uses all male casts, and as such female characters are depicted by men.

In this particular case, it was because black people were not allowed in white establishments, due to racial segregation. This did not mean black people did not exist, nor that they did not contribute to stories and culture, and as such, some form of depiction was needed. Enter blackface. 

In this capacity, blackface is not in and of itself racist, much like Noh artists are not misogynistic.

Blackface's existence springs up from an inherently racist practice, however-- Racial segregation. As such, blackface is an icon of racist ideology being depicted. These days there is no reason to have blackface, except in the meta-commentary capacity of playing the role of a period thespian, playing the role of a black person.

Segregation was effectively ended before this guy was a teenager; As such, unless he was dressing for halloween as an early 1900s thespian, he has no business wearing blackface at that period in time.

Nope. Blackface was an integral part of the minstrel shows that were most popular in the 1830s-1840s (professional shows lasted until 1910, amateur ones until the 1960s), which were wandering performance troupes that gained much of their appeal by caricaturing black people. A surprising portion of the troupes were made up of free blacks, but the majority of them were whites with blacked (as in, literally painted with bootblack) faces. Most protrayals in minstrel shows were of dimwitted, happy slaves (later sharecroppers), with a clear implication that all black people were like this. It is notable that they were attacked in the 1830s for being racist, although they were also attacked by anti-abolitionists for not being racist enough.

Plus, if you want to talk racism: why do we call the people here before that kidfucking piece of shit Columbus indians?

I've seen you blame him for this before, but... Columbus didn't really do [Native] American genocide. That was pretty much everyone that came after him.

He was a douchebag, but all he did was make an imbecillic claim ("the world is smaller than literally everyone else thinks and so going west to China is feasible!"), lucked out in finding another continent, proceeded to panic because his contract explicitly said he'd be rewarded for finding the East Indies, decided to pretend he was totally in the Indies and not in a new land, proceeded to get arrested for treason (lying to the Crown), died in jail.

You want to blame everyone else for the Americas genocide? Go right ahead, but Columbus wasn't actually responsible for that... he was just a dick.

Columbus also started enslaving and exploiting the Indians of the Caribbean islands he stumbled over. He was a lot worse than just a dick.

[Teneb]

Plus, if you want to talk racism: why do we call the people here before that kidfucking piece of shit Columbus indians?

I've seen you blame him for this before, but... Columbus didn't really do [Native] American genocide. That was pretty much everyone that came after him.

He was a douchebag, but all he did was make an imbecillic claim ("the world is smaller than literally everyone else thinks and so going west to China is feasible!"), lucked out in finding another continent, proceeded to panic because his contract explicitly said he'd be rewarded for finding the East Indies, decided to pretend he was totally in the Indies and not in a new land, proceeded to get arrested for treason (lying to the Crown), died in jail.

You want to blame everyone else for the Americas genocide? Go right ahead, but Columbus wasn't actually responsible for that... he was just a dick.

Columbus also started enslaving and exploiting the Indians of the Caribbean islands he stumbled over. He was a lot worse than just a dick.

I'll need to review my notes on this, it's been a while and I'm going from memory. But if I'm wrong, here's a pre-emptive I'm Sorry.