Raffi Torres of the Phoenix Coyotes dressed up as Jay-Z for a Halloween party Sunday night, and he brought his girlfriend dressed as a slightly pregnant Beyonce. The catch to this costume is that both of them appeared at the party in blackface makeup. Since then there has been an uproar among the writing and talking elite about how Torres' move was racist, or insensitive, or the type of thing "you just don't do."
Harrison Mooney, a black writer for Yahoo! Sports wrote a more-reasonable-than-most-column about the blackface costumes, saying he would give Torres the benefit of the doubt and assume he is not a racist, or that he was espousing "a return to minstrelsy and the Jim Crow Laws." However, he did believe that Torres had made a poor and racially insensitive decision, because of how blackface started out as a way to make fun of African-Americans for their dark skin.
Most of what Mooney wrote I agree with, and I understand that as a white middle-class-raised American I cannot speak to what Mooney or other African-Americans' experiences are. But I do feel that he is a bit off when he claims that blackface is backwards and offensive.
What is being lost entirely in all this is that Torres and his lady friend were at a Halloween party. As in, a costume party. As in, you dress as someone or something other than yourself. Now, Torres and girlfriend decided they would like to go as Jay-Z and Beyonce. Those two are very popular and topical right now. Beyonce's pregnancy is the most-tweeted moment of all time, for crying out loud. How could the two of them have done that costume without putting on makeup to darken their skin? (Let's set aside for the moment that the makeup those two are wearing does even come close to resembling the blackface makeup that was seen as offensive in the first place. Torres did put burnt cork all over his face.) They couldn't have. Look at the costumes they are wearing in that picture. If the two of them had showed up in their normal-skin color, people would have thought they had forgotten it was a costume party. They would have been berated all night for having such poor costumes. The blackface was necessary.
So if wearing blackface was necessary, maybe they should have come up with a different costume. But why? They went to a party to have some fun, and dressing up like that allowed them to. Wearing blackface probably got them several slaps on the back for putting together a good couples costume.
Mooney made a good comparison between Torres' costume and Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi a couple years ago. He said the Prince's costume was in bad taste as well, because like Torres', it references a negative past. And technically, he is correct. But I don't see why that's a problem. It is a Halloween costume. You should be having fun. Really, fun is what's behind blackface in this day and age. Mooney makes a reference to Robert Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus character in Trop Thunder donning blackface to play a character in a movie. He says that blackface is okay, because it is making a larger statement (in this case, that Kirk Lazarus has a heightened sense of himself). This is true, Kirk Lazarus has a heightened sense of himself, but that's not why Robert Downey Jr. is in blackface in the movie. Ben Stiller and Justin Theroux put him in blackface because they figured it would be funny (and it was).
Shouldn't we be more concerned around Halloween time that starting at age 14 girls are dressing as sluttily as they can, because that's what they keep hearing and seeing is the best way to do Halloween. Shouldn't we more more concerned that 14 year-old boys are encouraging the girls and then taking advantage of them, than about two adults putting on dark makeup to look like two (pretty-well covered up) celebrities?
Mooney closes with a reference to a Flannery O'Connor story that ends with two white men meeting under a statue of a black boy eating watermelon (a racial stereotype). He closes with these sentences:
"For the grandfather and grandson, it was merely humorous and harmless, because they didn't have to worry about its larger meaning.
Not unlike the people that go out on Halloween in blackface."
Exactly. The people that go out on Halloween in blackface don't have to worry about it's larger meaning, because there is none. It's Halloween.
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