Agreed. Some of the more modern ones do go in for green or blue. Much better.
Yeah, saying it’s the chimney that made them black is what some of our “zwarte piet” apologists are doing here (Netherlands).
Going as far as to posit a “roet piet” (soot pete) as a alternative:
(To be fair they also, sometimes, remove the lipstick, gold earrings and afro)
How is the response to this approach when they try it for morris dancing?
Depends where it is I suppose. The Rochester Sweeps Festival does have some degree of vaguely historic backing so…
In most places, it’s not much of an issue. Morris dancing is so old (and still seen as old-fashioned) that they’re mainly left to get on with it. Since they tend in general to be more interested in beer, folk, music and increasingly paganism, large beards, freaky tattoos and piercings, most people are prepared to cut them some slack on the “is blacking up racist front”.
At the end of the day no one knows why they blacken their faces. It probably is as straightforward as it originally having been “Moorish” dancing but since I don’t know of any side that has ever blacked up in anything that could remotely be construed as some sort of caricature of a black person…
I think it’s one of those things that is possibly just far enough disconnected from its origin that it’s its own thing rather than perpetuating racist stereotypes if that makes sense?
Let’s face it, it’s a bunch of guys smearing shoe polish on their face and waving hankies at each other or hitting each other with sticks. If anyone’s being made mockery of, it’s the guys with the hankies.
I suspect most black people in the UK just look at it blankly just like the rest of us if they notice it at all.
YMMV which is why personally I’m all for them using different colours.
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I just had a quick look on youtube for the Morris dancing, there are at least some (the only ones I found with black faces) that wear something that resembles feathers. That’s actually quite interesting since that may point to a shared origin with Black Pete.
Apparently the Black Pete’s started as Odin’s two ravens and then somewhere along the way (undoubtedly afters countless other changes had already been made) got turned into a racist caricature by a school teacher. I don’t really understand why we don’t take it back to Odin and his ravens, that will automatically gives us a good reason to also ditch the catholic priest that is our version of Saint Nic (Sinterklaas) who (inexplicably) nobody has ever complained about.
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I think there is certainly a distinction between many of the European cultures use of black face in Europe and the use of black face in America. In America it’s primary original use was mistral shows which were used mostly in a mocking and degrading tone. Much of the use in Europe, while having some racist overtones, aren’t in the same realm as the mocking and degrading performances.
That said, it is 2017. Today we should know that at best it is culturally insensitive, and at worse racist.
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Speaking of colourful Morris, the Oz crews tend to look something like this:
Nope, I didn’t.
The bigots and dupes did.
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If you have an alternative, go for it. This is an all-hands-on-deck maximum-effort type of situation, so every bit of productive work counts.
But “wait for 2018/2020 while pretending that the extreme and blatant corruption of the US electoral system doesn’t exist” is not a solution.
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Read: “Moorish dance”, but hopefully the implications of blackface in Europe are not quite as grave as in the slave-built US. FWIW the morris dance of the contemporary UK looks pretty damn white to me, so I think it is it’s own thing now.
It WAS about naughty bits, it wasn’t about heresy.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the same for most sides here. There still plenty who do the really oldfashioned look but most are more like that.
This video give a decent idea of the range of fashions in UK Morris:
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Yeah, but if nobody knows for sure what you’re trying to get across, how effective can you really be? These people might be absolutely correct (and they are) but a muddled message is of no real use to anyone.
As any good teacher knows, there’s value in getting people thinking and talking about something because they’re not quite sure what it means.
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That still seems like a thin reason to not worry about the actual perception of the message you’re putting out. Surely it’d be more useful to be clear from the beginning.
I don’t think so, not always, especially these days, when people are so quick to file messages into established silos, so as to quickly be done with them.
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This thread was originally about racism, I’m not sure why it needed to be about Trump. Racism was here long before him, and if he weren’t elected we would still have deep racist issues here in the USA. And you know what? If we kick him out of office, and manage to get left leaning majorities in all three branches of government that isn’t going to stop jackasses from hurling N-bombs at Fenway, let alone stop someone like Richard Spencer from promoting his Nazi-lite beer hall puss. I was trying to discuss ways to convince conservatives, on a purely personal level, to give a damn about people of color. I still think appealing to patriotism is a valid tactic on that front. You are free to disagree. (And BTW, that ridiculously long list of links was not necessary, I am aware of those issues and had already seen most of those articles.)
Isn’t that exactly what the civil rights movement did?
IMO the emotional appeals of the civil rights movement were subordinate to the principles. Nationalism puts the cart before the horse which is why toward the end nationalists often wind up supporting things they opposed to begin with.
I think that before Trump was elected, institutional racism was separate from individual racism. Now they are one and the same again.
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