Welcome to Well, That Sucked, our weekly compendium of exactly what it sounds like. Thrown in this week’s garbage: whoever bought shoe polish as a part of their Halloween costume.
It’s the day after All Hallows’ Eve, and a truly sad day indeed. Halloween is the best holiday of the year! It’s all candy, and spooky stories, and crisp weather. You get to be whoever you want to be, and a free pass to dress up like a slutty chocolate chip cookie.
But today, we all go back to normal, so you know what that means: no more blackface, okay? We all know that it’s only okay on October 31, so say the bite-sized Wunderbar Gods.
This year’s batch of racially insensitive costumes was so bad that Julianne Hough’s attempt to dress up as Orange Is The New Black’s Crazy Eyes was the lesser of so many evils. Sure, she wore blackface, but at least it skewed closer to “wrong shade of bronzer” rather than “actual shoe polish.” Meanwhile, top designers in Milan sported blackface at an annual “Halloweek” party, but, considering the theme was “Disco Africa,” it actually could have gone in a far, far worse direction. Maybe a party with blackface and someone dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member?
At least they weren’t a group of San Diego high school football coaches who dressed up as members of the Jamaican bobsled team from Cool Runnings in, again, blackface. Is this costume terrible because it includes every single stereotype about Jamaicans you can cram into a single Rasta beanie, or because it’s 20 years too late? You decide.
But oh, Internet, you always find a way to top yourself: the winners this year, by a considerable margin, were the teens who dressed up as George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. And if you think the kid dressed as Trayvon was going to be anything other than a white guy in a mock-bloodied hoodie and blackface, then I both applaud and condemn your optimism in the face of what this toilet-world unleashes, day after day.
For every costume incorporating blackface, there are people trying to justify its use, arguing that context matters. And it does. So here’s a good example of why some people can use it and why you can’t.
This past week, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia aired an episode in which the main characters film their own version of Lethal Weapon 6. This, of course, included Mac sporting blackface in order to play Danny Glover’s Murtaugh.
But there’s a reason that IASIP and shows like it are able—allowed—to use blackface. They exist in a vacuum, in a way the rest of us do not, in which context is established by whatever episodes preceded the one you’re watching. If you watch the show, then you know the entire premise is that everyone on it either has a rotten soul or is criminally stupid (or both). It’s therefore perfectly in character for Mac to think wearing blackface is a perfectly reasonable, nay, respectable way to play Danny Glover.
The joke, then, is not on black people or even on Lethal Weapon, but rather on the characters. Short-sighted, racist, stupid Mac, who can’t stop making whooshing sounds to soundtrack his own karate moves and who keeps threatening to scale walls to prove his core strength, is the butt of the joke.
When you and your idiot friends wear blackface, there’s no vacuum. Your costume exists in the world, absent any context but that of history. It may very well be that your terrible Africa Disco party is some massive inside joke the rest of the world doesn’t get, but it isn’t really our job to go out of our way to dig for subtext and meaning when you show up and start shuckin’ and jivin’. What it ends up looking like, then, is that you are just an awful person who makes awful choices.
Your costume doesn’t need blackface. If it does, your costume is terrible. Halloween costumes can actually say a lot about what kind of person you are, so choose carefully. If, this time next year, you feel the temptation to go out in blackface, try this instead: just dress as you normally do. When people ask what you are, explain that you really wanted to paint on some blackface, but you realized oversensitive leftists would just make your life miserable, so you decided to be yourself.
“Oh,” everyone will say. “I get it. You’re a piece of shit.” Very little cleanup required.
