• This guy says he’s sorry for implying that if you wear saggy pants you’re gay. [DV]
• The NAACP joined 50 former Eli Lilly workers in a racial discrimination lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company. []
• Two NJ black coaches say racist parents were responsible for their firing. [WCBSTV]
• A couple of Yale students try to school their ignorant peers on the history of blackface. We’ll see if it hit home next year around this time. [YDN]
• Don Imus’ radio deal is official. [Reuters]
Since I had you guys vote for the most popular blackface Halloween costume, the least I could do was search Flickr for some real life examples. While there were a few Michael Vicks – check one out after the jump — I found this one to be the most egregious. According to the Flickr site, this guy is supposed to be Zwarte Piete (Black Pete), who, to make a long story short, is Santa Claus’ black assistant in Dutch folklore. Considering the fact that this guy had the nerve to tag his photo “blackface,” I’m pretty sure he knew what he was doing.
More fun with ignorant blackface costumes Flickr after the jump.
CONTINUED »
Let’s be real. A football player is probably the easiest sort of black person a white person can impersonate, since a helmet over the face can at least partially obscure one’s skin color. I guess that would be too easy — or too hard, I can’t figure out which.
The readers of Stereohyped have spoken, or at least voted, and you officially predict that Michael Vick will be the most popular inspiration for blackface enthusiasts this Halloween. You also felt that a nappy-headed ho look would be popular.
Some of you wrote in your ideas, which include:
Barack Obama — How could I forget about him! All you need is shoe polish and a suit.
Barry Bonds — How could I forget about him? All you need is shoe polish and ‘roid rage.
A Rasta with dreadlocks — Eh. I wasn’t so sure about that when I saw it. But ‘lo and behold, a band of University of Illinois students were photographed dressed as the Jamaican bobsled team. I’m pretty sure none of them were Rastas, but they hail from the same geographic region.
Check out the results from Stereohyped’s Halloween Poll after the jump.
CONTINUED »
Halloween is supposed to be a holiday for the kids, who get to dress up like their favorite Disney characters and troll the neighborhood for sweets. But a lot of adults consider Halloween as a chance to expose the side of you that you keep hidden the other 364 days of the year. Most women use Halloween as an excuse to dress like a total slut and get away with it. But for the completely ignorant and/or racist, Halloween is blackface time. Every year, in the days following Halloween, some frat boy at some college gets in trouble for impersonating a black person. And they never learn!
So I put together a little poll to see what you guys think will be the most popular costume among the blackface set. O.J. Simpson’s an old favorite that I’m sure will be resurrected after his recent legal snafu. The Michael Vick craze has already begun. Jay-Z and Beyonce are the perfect costumes for the most popular couple in school. Plus, if the girl is blond, she doesn’t even have to wear a wig. And the Jena Six and Rutgers basketball team? Those two are only for the truly daring. But I’m sure America’s privileged college boys are up for the challenge.
It was only a matter of time before amateur Jena Six parodies (complete with the ubiquitous college blackface shots) started appearing on Facebook. Or Blackfacebook, as the Smoking Gun has ingeniously renamed it. A freshman at the University of Louisiana at Monroe posted a video and an album showing her friends re-enacting the Jena Six assault on her Facebook page. It was a move she surely regrets now.
In the video, three students with mud smeared across their bodies stomp on a fourth student, while two of the participants are heard to say, “Jena 6.” One man can also be heard saying, “Niggers put the noose on.” After the video and photos on Smith’s page were discovered by fellow students, she removed the material and made her Facebook page private.
Smith, who did not respond to a TSG e-mail sent to her school address, apologized for the images in several recent Facebook postings. “We were just playin n the mud and it got out of hand. I promise i’m not racist. i have just as many black friends as i do white. And i love them to death,” she wrote. She added in a later message that her friends “were drinking” and things “got a lil out of hand.”
Oh, the black friend defense! If every racist has so many black friends, I might trust whites who don’t know a single black person more.
[TSG]
**Thanks for the tip, BMD!
Uh, just because a very confused Nicole Richie tells a person — in this case, past-her-prime actress Sally Kirkland — that dressing up in full blackface as her father, Lionel, would be fun, it does not mean it’s a good idea. What kind of person listens to Nicole Richie? Oh, right. The type of person who would dress up in blackface.
[TMZ]
This will probably go down as the most racist, ill-advised, well-meaning ad campaign in the history of the world. Somewhere in Germany, an ad agency told UNICEF that the best way to call attention to the needs of children in Africa was to slap some dirt on Aryan kids’ faces and stick their pictures next to captions like, “I’m waiting for my last day in school, the children in Africa still for their first one.”
Something may be lost in translation, but are we supposed to take from these ads that no African children go to school and that a little bit of face paint is all a white Western European kid needs to feel at one with an African kid? Where did they get this stupid idea from? Oh. Maybe here.
[ via TAN]
Blackface at a corporate Halloween party and sexual comments and gestures from superiors? It sound terrible, but, really, what more can one expect from a company that provides cultural sensitivity training to other businesses? Oh, wait.
A New Hampshire woman is suing her former employer, California-based NetworkOmni Multilingual Communications, for sexual discrimination. She has pretty good evidence to backup her claims that the company’s management is completely ignorant. Exhibit A:
To bolster her discrimination complaint with the state, Kelly included photos allegedly showing the company’s top two human resources executives dressed up for the 2005 corporate Halloween party as a black pimp and a white prostitute. The “pimp,” a white woman wearing blackface and sporting a fake gold tooth, won the prize for best costume, the complaint said.
“These actions clearly demonstrate that discriminatory views of minorities and women permeate the corporate culture,” the complaint said.
Kelly said she had directed many of her complaints about discrimination to the two human resources executives. She said she did not attend the party and only learned of the women’s costumes recently when someone gave her the photos.
The same two executives she had been complaining about workplace discrimination to are the same ones that won Best Blackface award at the company Halloween party! I’m sure they were very concerned about her plight. It’s cultural sensitivity redefined.
[AP]
Gastonia, NC, has a bit of a race scandal going on after a local church put on a pageant during which three white men wore overalls, flannel shirts, and black face makeup and lip-synced to prerecorded black hymns. Black leaders in the town are offended, but the church members just don’t see what the gosh darned big deal is. They claim they understand the history of blackface but insist they weren’t making fun. The reporter covering the story should have asked if anyone in the audience laughed when they came out in their getups. I think I know what the answer would be.
The church should have honored black music without the makeup, said David Moore, president of the nonprofit Gaston County Organization for Community Concerns, which seeks to improve the quality of life for local minorities.
“I have no problem with anyone that wants to sing black music, but to pretend that you’re a black person when you’re not a black person seems to be more of a mockery than a celebration,” Moore said. “It’s misguided at this time in our culture, in our society.”
Gaston County NAACP president Clyde Walker voiced similar concerns.
Church members were told to dress like Americans in the 19th century for the skit held at the church’s mother-daughter banquet on the weekend before Mother’s Day, said Teresa Holbrooks, the pastor’s wife. The black makeup was her idea, she said.
Performers also lip-synced to gospel music by white artists such as Loretta Lynn and Randy Travis.
“A little tiny blonde woman sang Randy Travis. So I guess Randy Travis should be offended,” Teresa Holbrooks said. “My husband pantomimed playing the piano. So I guess the piano should be offended.”
Wow. The willful ignorance of some people in this country astounds me still, even though I know it shouldn’t. Or maybe I’m being hard on this Teresa Holbrooks person. Of course historical race issues are on par with musical instrument issues. If the piano’s not offended, then neither am I!
[Racialicious, WSOC]
I really don’t care what Mariane Pearl wanted. Okay, that sounded like a harsh thing to say about a victim of tragedy. Let me back track a bit. Of course I care about the plight of Mariane Pearl — the horrible death of her journalist husband, Daniel, at the hands of Islamic militants — and I admire the courage it took to write her book, A Mighty Heart, which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie turned into a movie that premiered yesterday at Cannes. But the caring? It only goes so far.
Everyone wants to use the fact that Mariane Pearl, a biracial woman, suggested that Angelina Jolie play her in the movie as an excuse for one of our biggest white movie stars to parade around in glorified black face and a kinky wig in a major motion picture. In the year 2007! It’s an excuse that doesn’t fly with me. So, I repeat. I don’t care what Mariane Pearl wanted — there is no way I will ever, ever, ever go see a movie in which a woman who looks like this:
plays a woman who looks like this:
.
In terms of racial fairness, I expect little from Hollywood. Still, when talented black and biracial actresses are forced to play the wife, the sexual vixen, or the ghetto buffoon because there are no real roles written for them, it kills me that a woman who counts herself as worldly as Angelina Jolie does has the gall to take a meaty part out from under them. Just because a trip to the tanning salon and a bad wig allowed Jolie to slightly resemble the woman she was playing, it’s not right. This is an issue that goes way beyond the physical, but, in Hollywood, narcissism trumps common sense and decency at every turn.
If she ever decides to be an actress when she grows up, little Zahara Jolie-Pitt better watch her back. Her mom might steal all her parts.
