A novel idea: in between hearing that something is racist, and posting a comment to Facebook to tell everyone why it’s not racist and that the world has gone mad, do ten minutes of research to discover why that thing might actually be racist.
Last night, French football player Antoine Griezmann posted a photo of himself dressed as a 1980s Harlem Globetrotter on Twitter. He donned the jersey, he put on an afro-wig, and then he blackened his skin.
Most people reacted in what would be deemed a reasonable way — that is to say Griezmann’s tweet probably broke the record for responses that simply say “OH NO.”
But Twitter, for all its alt-right infiltration, can still be a little bit of a “liberal bubble” at times — and Facebook did not have the same reaction. In fact, on Facebook, many jumped to Griezmann’s defence. Some likened it to the Wayans Brothers dressing up as white women in the movie White Chicks. Some decried how sensitive we have all become. Others said it was a tribute to athletes whom Griezmann obviously admires. More still pointed out that Griezmann has many friends and teammates who are black.
The final diagnosis? Another case of PC gone mad.
All in all, it took about an hour for Griezmann to respond to the online backlash — originally telling everyone to calm down before removing the photograph and apologising more thoroughly. But even though Griezmann himself appeared to have acknowledged the mistake, many of his online defenders were unrelenting.
It begs the question — where is the disconnect? How does it arise in somebody, when seeing a wave of people who are offended by something, to stick their head above the proverbial parapet and say “That’s actually not offensive. You are offended for no reason.”
The most forgiving assumption one can make is that those people are two things: over-confident and under-informed. That they have given the situation a cursory glance, believe themselves to have carefully studied its ins and outs, and rendered a fair and wise verdict. A harsher judgment might be that these people (often white, often men) are just sick of being told that a lot of things they do, or say, or find funny, upset vast swathes of people who, for centuries, were not heard from.
Blackface is unacceptable because of the real and valid grief it causes so many people. It doesn’t actually matter whether or not every white Irish man is personally offended by it. You are not the objective barometer of whether or not something is offensive. If there are hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people who are offended by something you believe to be “just a bit of banter,” then the burden of proof is on you to deliver an explanation as to why those people have no cause for upset.
To do that in this case, you’d need to look at the history of blackface — as well as how it permeates modern-day culture. If you were to do that, it’s pretty unlikely you’d be able to justify Griezmann’s actions. After all, accounts of why blackface is absolutely not-on are comprehensive, and immediately accessible to anybody with an internet connection.
In fact, it’s very likely most of you had a brief lesson in blackface without even realising it. Remember hearing about Jim Crow laws in Leaving Cert History? The laws that forced black people to use inferior public services, and stand for white people on the bus? Well Jim Crow wasn’t the name of a judge, or a legislator who wrote the bill. Jim Crow was a blackface minstrel character from the 19th Century. The Jim Crow laws that consigned black people to second-class citizenry were inextricably linked with the offensive depiction of black people through mediums like minstrel shows.
Anne Branigin of The Root writes that blackface is “about blackness as white people understand it.” Dr. Terence Fitzgerald, a professor at the University of Southern California, refers to it as “a continuation of defining a people as less than.” After all, it is a mirror image of old minstrel shows, described by writer Jenée Desmond-Harris as “mocking portrayals that reinforced the idea that African-Americans were inferior in every way.”
Blackface has long been a tool through which black people are oppressed. Times have not changed so much that these memories are not still fresh in humanity’s collective psyche. Racism still snarls at the world, and blackface costumes are one of its many jagged teeth. They are a symbol of a vicious racist movement that enslaved and killed hundreds of thousands — just like a pointy white hood or burning a cross. Antoine Griezmann may not have meant to offend anyone with last night’s costume, but now that he has, those he offended must be understood and not ignored.
