A friend of mine is getting some flak for using brownface to dress up as Pi to his wife’s Richard Parker. Is black/brownface inherently offensive if the costume itself isn’t a rude racial caricature? What makes it non offensive to wear, say, a pre-packaged afro wig but so much worse to wear blackface?
IMHO, skin color should be treated akin to hair color. When people get offended by an “otherwise” tasteful costume with blackface, I’m tempted to conclude that they’re projecting their own fixation on skin color. Thoughts?
Blackface yes, but really, applying makeup, a costume, and a wig to dress up as say, Bob Marley, or Lieutenant Uhura?
I can’t imagine that would ever be offensive, right?
Let’s stop you right there. We have a forum called IMHO. But you chose to post your thread in Great Debates.
Make your case with facts and references. No one is interested in your opinion in this forum.
Oh man, there was a thread just yesterday. Apologies
Why is browning his skin necessary for that costume? If you dress like Pi did in the movie and walk around with a tiger and maybe a life jacket or a little boat on a string, people will get the costume. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a costume where skin coloring was necessary. It’s just a lame excuse to get away with something most of us have the sense not to do.
I’m not aware of people being enslaved or lynched or deprived of the right to vote based on hair color. Discrimination based on hair color tends to be pretty trivial. I agree that trying to look like a specific person of another race is not the same as caricaturing a race - that’s why some comedians are sometimes able to get away with darkening their skin to imitate specific people. Why random people on Halloween think they can do the same with no satirical intent and no context is beyond me. And at the risk of assuming and saying a thing I know people hate to hear, it just reeks of white privilege. (Maybe your coworker isn’t white; if so he’s literally the first nonwhite person I have heard of getting into a controversy like this.) It’s stupid and insensitive because it invokes some extremely ugly history. It’s that much worse because people don’t seem to think about what they’re doing or how people might react before they put on the makeup, but afterward they insist everybody pay attention to their feelings and interpret everything the way they want it to be interpreted.
Without pictures I’d really be hesitant to judge the situation as to whether the costumes were offensive or not.
There’s a huge difference between blackface(which is clearly racist) and having a white person use makeup to look like a black person.
As Monstro pointed out on a similar thread no one got upset at Darrel Hammond dressing up like Jesse Jackson.
Similarly, C. Thomas Howell made himself look black for Soul Man and was praised by Henry Louis Gates.
Also, I’m sure you search hard enough you could find some people upset about Fred Armisen playing Barack Obama but generally speaking the people I know upset about it were more upset by the fact that it showed how few black comedians SNL had.
As has been mentioned in other threads, the premise itself is flawed.
We don’t get to decide for other people what they find offensive. People will find offense where they will. No number of “right” arguments is going to change that.
And in this particular case, it doesn’t take a lot of smarts to realize that even in the best case, a lot of care has to be taken.
It’s stupid. Pi’s Indianness and brown skin are not at all related to the story. It’s like if I went to a costume party dressed like Hester Prynne with whitened skin. As I said in the Pit thread, if you think simulating skin tone is paying appropriate tribute to a character’s essence, you’ve missed the point of the exercise.
But when you dress up you attempt to look like a character, not somehow embody their essence.
It wasn’t the blackface that was offensive in that film, to be fair. It was the way that it managed to reinforce a lot of the stereotypes it purported to be skewering (For example, there a joke about black guys being good at basketball. But Howell’s character is terrible at it, which is funny because we know he’s not a black guy. But the actual black guy? A natural B-ball player. Funny, that.)
But I digress.
I’m not sure that’s a good example. Whatever Gates may have said, Wikipedia notes that there were protests against the movie and today it’s remembered as stupid and tasteless.
I would’ve said the opposite.
Sure, if you want to be unimaginative and superficial. You might want to go all the way, though. Contact lenses, plastic surgery, dental veneers. Why stop at skin color? It’s all about getting the appeance just right, right?
Pi is a fictional character. His appearance is left to the imagination.
My band, which is mostly African American, played a Halloween party where two of the white guests dressed up as Serena and Venus Williams complete with black face. . . I don’t think anyone in the band was offended. And we often talk about such things.
From my observations I would say in “real life” people are not terribly offended by black face. It’s primarily a meme that media/politically-correct types like to sensationalize that most people don’t care so much about. Kind of like the NFL name “Redskins.”
So, I guess, “Yes, some people find it offensive.”
Yes.
If you want to wear a costume you’ve got to spend thousands of dollars and change your appearance permanently, or do nothing at all. No excluded middle I can see. But then anyone that sees such a middle must be unimaginative and superficial :rolleyes:
As an answer to the OP, I don’t think that just trying to resemble another person / character is inherently offensive, caricaturing a race is.
But it is an eye of the beholder thing, and you have to take into account the history of where you are.
I think in the US, generally you’d have to be very careful, but I think Pi and Richard Parker is a great costume idea. Though your friend would have to stay with his wife all night… 
Right, kind of like an issue that Native American groups have been advocating against and even running studies of for several decades.
Old-time minstrel-show big-lip googly-eyed blackface: that person is trying to be offensive.
Dark makeup to fit a certain character: that person is probably not trying to offend, but is pretty naive if it doesn’t even occur to them that someone could get their undies in a bunch about it.
Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman costumes: these people are just cruisin’ for bruising.
Julianne Hough as Crazy Eyes: naive but not malicious. Leave her alone.
Blackface is one of a growing number of things that’s perceived as highly offensive even though almost nobody remembers why.
I’m a 52 year old white male- nobody my age or younger has ever seen an actual minstrel show. None of us has ever actual seen or heard an episode of Amos and Andy. None of us has ever seen anything resembling an actual Uncle Tom. And that goes for BOTH black AND white Americans my age and younger!
Most of us know there are certain words and stereotypes that are off-limits, and we generally don’t mind steering clear of those. But many of the stereotypes that were once considered most offensive are so old and outdated that nobody even remembers what was offensive about them.
Regardless, there’s no good reason for any white person to use blackface unless he’s playing Othello in a Shakespeare company. Why take a chance on insulting someone for something so completely unnecessary?
Tell that to the “gingers” who are bullied and beaten up in the UK. No, it is absolutely nowhere near the abhorent discrimination based on skin colour, but it is by no means “pretty trivial”.
You need to roll your eyes, because no one is excluding the middle except for you and the folks who think getting skin color just right is necessary for a costume of a fictional character whose story has nothing to do with his skin color.
It’s not offensive. It’s gratuitous. Which means it’s not worthy of protest or outrage, but it’s likely not going to win top prize in a contest. Big whoop.