Dude’s not being lynched… how about you stop comparing what’s happening here to a few hundred years of actual racist violence.
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Some people equate criticism = oppression, which just shows they have no fucking clue what either criticism means or what oppression looks like.
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The actual actual statement included this…
“In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers…”
then,
“…we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup.”
That’s blackface, by any reasonable objective standard…
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Those of us living in the Old Dominion are not particularly surprised by this, unfortunately. Saddened and disappointed, but not surprised. VA is historically very racist in the old fashioned, “we don’t talk about things like that, son” way. It is only now turning blue, not due to changing attitudes but due to population changes centering on the urban bits. The rural areas have not changed one iota. These guys who grew up steeped in the old ways probably truly do not believe themselves to be racist. Because “we don’t talk about things like that, son.” It is not racist, it is just the way things are done. You know, the racist way that we don’t talk about. I wish there was an easy fix, but in the lily white rural areas where you just don’t see many POC’s it is very easy to maintain the old ideas mostly because they are not challenged.
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Perhaps John Howard Griffin is the only creditable Caucasian to use ‘blackface’.
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Virginia Gentlemen /s
Note: The current label no longer has a black slave on it. They just added yet another white dude. Whitewashed so to speak.
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I blame the lawyers.
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I’m guessing that’s Reston now (or maybe that was your point)
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Sadly this is ingrained in the NYT culture. During WWII they dragged their feet on covering the Nazi extermination camps because they did not want to be accused of pursuing an agenda of their (Jewish) owners:
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Well, if it’s a quote from the Va attorney general, and he said “dark makeup”, then that’s what you have to print. You can’t unilaterally change the quote to “blackface” just because you think the AG is being weasley.
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Well are they quoting the AG of Virginia? If they are they should’ve amended the headline with “commonly known as black face”.
For reference, and not to minimize, but by “very active” you mean sporadic anonymous birdseed-weighted flyers on a couple streets to widespread community outrage.
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they didn’t use quote marks, so the description is theirs not the ag’s.
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He didn’t use the term “dark makeup,” he used the term “brown makeup.” So the Times had two reasonable options:
- Quote him using his own terminology and leave “brown makeup” in scare quotes to make it clear that’s the language he used rather than an objective description of the act, or
- Use the phrase “blackface” in the headline, which is the long-established term to describe the act of a white person putting on dark makeup to impersonate an African-American person for entertainment purposes.
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But they didn’t quote the AG. The AG said:
In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened to at the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song. It sounds ridiculous even now writing it. But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes – and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others – we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup.
(emphasis added)
All NYT needed to do was put the brown makeup quote in their headline, but they didn’t. Instead they changed it to “dark makeup” which is not what the AG said and is crappy euphemism for blackface.
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OMG I can’t believe he was a goth!!
Yeah, they tried to take the middle road when there was no middle road. If you’re on a collision course with another car, and one of your passengers yells “turn right” while the other yells “turn left”, you don’t split the middle and keep going straight.
Asked if he had a reaction to Herring’s revelation, Del. Lamont Bagby, head of the Legislative Black Caucus, replied: “prayer.”
Word.
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The term blackface being whitewashed? Seems like a bit of a grey area.
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