It would be nice to go a year (or hell, a month) without reading a story about Minnesotan students donning blackface, and then being shocked (SHOCKED!) to learn that it was deemed offensive but their fellow students.
Six football players at Hamline University are the newest to learn that using "blackface and body paint to dress up as African tribesmen" for Halloween might not be the smartest thing to do. Getting help from cheerleaders who then post the photos on Facebook is also pretty damn stupid.
But of course, they are misunderstood. Also apparently misunderstood? The photos appearing on Facebook had the caption, "Spooks."
Budding PR flack, sophomore Tasha Simmons, identified in the article as a friend of the students involved, attempted to explain away that one:
"If you would have seen them, you would have been spooked out. Most [students] don't correlate that term with the '50s," she said.
I'm pretty sure I'm not buying that excuse. Follow the reasoning, such as it is. The photo was captioned with the noun form of a verb describing how people seeing the costumes would have reacted. Using that logic, were the photos of (let's assume here) the Sexy Nurse captioned with, "Derisive Horndog"?
Oh, and let's not forget the pure coincidence that the caption happened to be a racist term as well. As if the phrase "spooked out" is far more common in our current vernacular.
Dear College Students: As a public service, I'm going to provide a couple of rules you can follow to avoid getting in trouble with your Halloween costume, and finding yourself on the front page of your local paper.
1. Don't dress in blackface. Even if you are planning a respectful homage to Desmond Tutu, or Thurgood Marshall, don't do it.
2. Don't caption photos of your friends in blackface using terms that could be "misinterpreted" as racist slurs.
Follow those rules, and you should be fine.
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1 comment:
I was saying "Boo-urns."
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