This is me as Bob Marley, via Snapchat’s new 4/20 filter, which blends your face with Bob Marley’s. It’s a particularly uncomfortable filter if, like me, you’re a white person. I don’t feel so good and I don’t think everything’s gonna be alright.
Though Halloween is technically tomorrow, plenty of proud American citizens dressed up for parties and work events this week, some of them in blackface.
October 31, 2015 is still four days away, but Americans have already started donning blackface to celebrate the occasion. This morning, an apparent student from Florida posted photos of herself dressed up as “Nicki Minaj” on Twitter.
Welcome to October: the leaves are turning, the nights are getting colder, and college Greek parties are getting even more racist than usual.
The final word on the Julianne Hough blackface controversy comes, naturally, from Thought Catalog: "I am in fact, a white person... is your average person, like in real life, who’s just going about their day, actually upset about this? Because no one I’ve spoken to personally seems to think it’s that big of a deal."
Milan's annual Halloweek masquerade party took place last night, and the theme was Disco Africa. While many attendees kept it neutrally jungle-themed — like Dolce & Gabbana's Steffano Gabbana (pictured on the left, and in other photos on Vogue Japan editor-at-large Anna Dello Russo's Instagram) — others took it to a pretty racially offensive place.
Today's REALLY? Halloween costume comes to us from a tipster by way of Quincy, MA where some brainiacs decided to slap on some blackface and dress up as George Zimmerman shooting a bloody Trayvon Martin.
Dov Hikind is the asshole New York assemblyman representing District 48, a swath of concrete in Brooklyn that includes Midwood and Borough Park, a famous Orthodox Jewish enclave in the borough's southwest quadrant. Hikind is an Orthodox Jew himself. To celebrate Purim this year, marking the deliverance of the Jewish people from extermination in ancient Persia, Hikind threw an elaborate costume party. Hikind's wife dressed as a red-faced demon and his son painted a yin-yang symbol on his face, reportedly to look like an "angel." And Hikind himself, the 62-year-old elected representative from one of the world's most diverse cities? Why, he went as a basketball player, in Afro and blackface, of course.
College sorority blackface Halloween party controversy news of the day: "The [University of Southern Mississippi] Dean of Students Office said the six women, all members of Phi Mu sorority, dressed in blackface to depict themselves as the Huxtable family from 'The Cosby Show,' as part of their participation in a 1980s-themed, off-campus costume party on Wednesday."
The Germans have a long history of, well, "dabbling" in every sort of racism or prejudice imaginable. Much like every other country! But they have a special, recurring knack for representing Barack Obama in ways that they think are innocent, but are actually casually racist. It's sweet, in a way. (Maybe not.)
Australians are renowned for having contributed a great many things to the world, such as [TK/research intern], but cultural sensitivity is, alas, not one of them. For example, last June we noted one newscaster's lighthearted description of a Chinese lotto winner as having "slanty eyes and yellow skin." Reaching back further, in 2009, a variety show called Hey Hey, It's Saturday caused a bit of an international stir when a Jackson 5 tribute group came out in blackface, horrifying guest judge Harry Connick Jr. Well, it seems not much has changed, as Qantas has named the winner of its Twitter contest to send two lucky fans to an international rugby match, and it's...yet two more guys in blackface and afro wigs. Wait! Let them explain! They were actually paying lighthearted and respectful homage to...uh...Oh, never mind. If you have to explain it, it's already lost half the joke. Their teeth! So white! BLOL! [tracker.org.au]
