This weekend, Phoenix Coyotes forward (and former Edmonton Oiler) Raffi Torres attended a team Halloween party with his wife. The couple dressed like Jay Z and a pregnant Beyonce Knowles, complete with darkened skin. Unsurprisingly, there are people who don’t think that’s okay. Also unsurprisingly, and infinitely more depressing, is that there are a lot of people who think it’s perfectly okay, that people who were upset by it are wrong and making something out of nothing. Some of these people have asked if people would be offended if black people dressed up in whiteface (Answer: Not very much, though they hated the movie) or if Torres had dressed up on a poncho and sombrero, itself ignorant of the fact that Torres is of Mexican and Peruvian descent, so if anyone could dress up as that stereotype and claim clean hands, it could possibly be him.
I don’t think Torres is racist. There’s zero evidence that he actually dislikes black people, and I’m inclined to believe part of the defense of him that’s cropped up, which is basically that he’s not racist and that his costume was intended to be a genuinely admiring one. However, I’m also surprised that Torres, who has weathered disgusting racial slurs and stereotypes his whole life, wouldn’t stop somewhere along the way and think, maybe this will sends the wrong message to some people. Because whether or not it’s a minstrelsy show - which it wasn’t - and whether or not he meant it as blackface - which I don’t think he did - someone of light skin darkening their skin to appear black will always bring up the spectre of blackface. In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether Torres meant for it to be blackface because to thousands of people it will be, and being ignorant of that absolves Torres of racism but not of a certain degree of racial insensitivity.
And yes, it is different if a white person uses make-up to look black than it is if it’s the reverse. Whiteface is gauche. I don’t like it and I don’t approve of it. But it also isn’t part of an established theatre and cultural tradition in North America. For over 100 years, an accepted form of popular entertainment was a white dude smearing grease paint (or shoe polish or burnt cork, I don’t need your historical pedantry bringin’ me down) and singing and dancing in a way to enforce all the worst racial stereotypes. Whiteface doesn’t have that connotation, it’s a whole other kind of dumb and insensitive. But just because Torres didn’t mean it that way doesn’t mean that him doing it wasn’t an uncomfortable reminder for thousands of people about how horrible things used to be for black people and some of the ways it still can be for many. It brings that awful tradition right back front and centre, and not thinking that might happen - or worse, not caring because it can be “explained” as not being racist - was stupid and insensitive.
One more thing, something uncomfortable that still needs to be said: every single person I’ve seen saying there wasn’t anything wrong with Torres’ costume or asking, “But what if?” has been a straight white man. Every single one, though that’s certainly influenced to a degree by my social circle and who they know. And I get it; it can suck feeling like there’s a double standard, like there are words you can’t say or things you can’t do because it will be seen as “racist” or “sexist”, even if other people can say or do them. Well, there’s nothing I can say but tough shit. Guess what? For a couple of thousand years, white men have more or less had the run of the sociopolitical place. For a long time, it has been a pretty great starting point to be a white male and statistically in terms of education, wealth and power it still is. The only real way it’s hard out there to be a white man is that sometimes people remind you it’s not.
And I know that chances are, you aren’t some person who’s had the best of everything. You’ve fought for a lot of what you have and being told you haven’t can feel insulting. But you also haven’t been called “bitch,” “cunt,” “fag” or “nigger” (I apologize for the use of these uncomfortable terms, I really do) throughout your life and you don’t have to wonder whether you will at any given point during a day. You don’t work for, on average, 20% less than a coworker with the same position and if you get a good job or into a good school, nobody accuses you of only getting it because of affirmative action or because you fucked an important white dude.
That’s called privilege and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t make you racist or sexist or homophobic. It just means you have a different background and a different lived experience, because of which it might not always be immediately apparent that different words and actions mean different things to people not of your background. I know it is for me sometimes, and probably a lot of other times I haven’t even noticed. The first time I realized that the women I know often live daily lives where they wonder if they will get called a cunt by a passing motorist or whether taking a certain route home might be too dangerous, I felt embarrassed and a little ashamed that it took me so long to realize that. But that doesn’t mean it’s my “fault” I’m a light-skinned man, I know that. And it’s not your fault if you live a life where you don’t have to worry about those things.
But that also means you might not automatically see what’s wrong with a light-skinned person dressing in a costume where they rub paint on their skin to pretend to be black. It might seem like people are too sensitive to things. Maybe they are sometimes, I dunno. But when a lot of people get offended by something, sarcastically telling them they’re wrong to be might not be the best or most appropriate idea. It’s a luxury to be able to be that indignant, one that’s often as unwise to exercise as it is to smear dark paint on your face.
