Blackface

Friday

Kat Rosenfield

The age of online bullying is back

For some people, the video of police officer Derek Chauvin callously kneeling on the neck of the unarmed, pleading George Floyd looked like many things. A travesty. A horror. A stark reminder of the brutality and injustice of American policing, and an urgent call to stand up, dig deep, and demand change.But for the subjects of an article published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, the video prompted a different kind of deep digging.‘Blackface incident at Post cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party resurfaces amid protests’, reads the headline, a prelude to 3,000 words of groundbreaking work in the field of offense archaeology.

online bullying
left
Ben Zeisloft

Here’s some left-wing stuff we can cancel, too

‘What do we burn apart from witches?’ ‘More witches!’A pitchfork-and-iPhone-wielding diversity mob is running amok in major metropolitan areas and on social media, calling for the wholesale destruction of statues, monuments and institutions that mark the history of racism in the United States.In their efforts to build a more perfect union, the mob has so far succeeded in canceling Gone with the Wind, Aunt Jemima, police-themed Legos and thousands of average, working-class Americans. Thanks to these ‘stunning’ and ‘brave’ civil rights heroes, little black boys and girls in America will never again feel terrorized, oppressed, or microaggressed during Saturday morning pancakes or afternoon playtime.

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

Dear dictators: don’t lecture the US on how to treat its people

If you’ve been watching the news, you would think the United States is a third world nation on the verge of collapse. Less civilized countries all over the world have noticed American policing problems and the volatile riots we’re having; riots that they either experience on a weekly basis — or their governments don’t allow to take place at all. Take Iran, for instance. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, ‘some don’t think #BlackLivesMatter. To those of us who do: it is long overdue for the entire world to wage war against racism.

china

Thursday

Jarvis Dupont

‘Literary Blackface’ is woke as hell

In order to cash in on celebrate Black History Month, Penguin Random House and Barnes & Noble planned a collaboration to achieve an amazing feat of wokeness. They were set to perform what I like to term as ‘positive blackface’ on a number of literary classics in order to show their support of diversity. Very much in the spirit of Justin Trudeau, they redesigned the covers of classic novels such as The Secret Garden and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz so that the main characters are more representative of ethnic minorities. Now, the more cynically-minded among those less in tune with what people of color want might see this promotion as a horrendously clumsy and lazy attempt at earning virtue points. Well, to that I say a resounding, ‘NO!’.

literary blackface

Thursday

Jarvis Dupont

Justin Trudeau has earned the right to do blackface

A photograph has been uncovered by TIME magazine which shows the Canadian prime minister attending an 'Arabian Nights'-themed costume gala at the West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver in 2001. Since the photograph came to light, Mr Trudeau has apologized. In a televised news conference on his campaign aircraft, he said: 'I take responsibility for my decision to do that. I shouldn't have done it. I should have known better. It was something that I didn't think was racist at the time, but now I recognize it was something racist to do and I am deeply sorry.' At the time the photograph was taken, Mr Trudeau was a 29-year-old teacher at the academy.

trudeau blackface

Sunday

Cockburn

WATCH: SNL sends up the Virginia blackface scandal

For the first time in what seems like decades, Saturday Night Live turned their sights on the Democrats – and delivered what Cockburn considers one of their best sketches of the season. ‘State Meeting’ takes place in the Virginia State Capitol, where an African American ethics committee chief (Kenan Thompson) addresses a room of mostly white colleagues to check whether they have ever worn blackface. Unsurprisingly, many of them have – and they ask whether their excuses for doing so are good enough. ‘I have a question,’ asks Beck Bennett’s state senator. ‘What if your blackface was just part of your costume as a black person?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrpQVSVa2QI ‘Does it count if you did it all the way back in the Eighties?

SNL virginia state meeting
lee carter forgiving
Caroline McCarthy

The digital age hasn’t made society more forgiving

In the fall of 2018, 31-year-old Lee Carter – a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates and a self-described socialist – took to Twitter to expose just about all the proverbial skeletons in his closet. His rationale: he wanted to air it before it showed up in opposition research. Some of it, such as his custody battle over his kid and an arrest for assault at Marine boot camp that was ‘quickly ruled self defense’ was the sort of thing that could have been used against any politician going back for generations. But other admissions were very specific to his having grown up in a world where everything is digitized – possibly permanently.

Tuesday

John R. Schindler

Wokeness eats the Virginia Democrats

If there’s one word which symbolizes American progressivism in 2019 it’s wokeness. Asking what it means constitutes proof that one is not woke. Although wokeness can best be viewed as the pop-cult wing of the late-Marxist heresy called intersectionality by academics, it’s really more a cultivated posture than a coherent political program. The challenge with wokeness is its fluidity. Its arbiters exist mainly on social media as an unelected Politburo of sorts, and their edicts can change without formal notice. What was sufficiently woke yesterday may not be deemed so today, with real-world costs for those eager to stay on the vaunted right side of history.

justin fairfax ralph northam virginia democrats

Friday

Godfrey Elfwick

We need to talk about problematic Hollywood

This week the New York Times published an article which was long overdue, illustrating the obvious racism featured in the original Mary Poppins movie. (Something which, incidentally, Titania McGrath had already flagged up in a tweet last September: I remember watching that scene as a child one Christmas, and even at the tender age of four, a woman putting coal on her face instantly reminded me of the black and white minstrel show which I would read about 14 years later when studying for my Bachelor’s Degree in Human Rights and Social Justice (Hons). This, coupled with the cultural appropriation of Dick Van Dyke putting on a West Indian accent throughout the entire film utterly nauseated me.

hollywood mary poppins godfrey elfwick