Is it Offensive to Blacks When Whites Dress Up in Black-Face for Halloween???

6 Comments

  • Shelley - 14 years ago

    Leah and Vandelish you need to lose the anger (and Leah, learn how to spell Halloween correctly). Leah seems to make a valid respectable point, but Vandelish, you are a hater!! I bet you don't have 1 white friend. Chris, you said it well. It depends on how you are portraying the person. Diana Ross will always be one of my favorite artists. As a white woman, I would not be playing the part if I didn't change my skin color. How would anyone know who I was? To me you girls are saying that there is something offensive about having a black face. Along the same lines, why is it O.K. for a black person to use the "N" word to another black person, and it is not taken as offensive, but if a white person said it, there is hell to pay. Get a clue! It is offensive from either race. By the way, it was the Spanish that enslaved black people from Africa, not whites! So why are we always getting the bad rap? Yes, I know that it was southern whites that treated slaves very horribly, but would they have had slaves had it not been for the Spanish explorers that took them from their homeland?

  • TB - 14 years ago

    @ Chris. I agree with your first statement. But Flava Flav's TV show has done more damage than the white kid dressed as him with NO black face will ever do.

    There's always risk in doing this but I don't think we can look at a picture of someone's Halloween costume and make a call on all situations. If I dress as a woman for Halloween am I cross-dresser? Am I disrespecting women, or masculine women. Maybe it's just a funny costume. What if I dressed as a rabbi or nunn or a minister. Is that disrespectful? Where do you draw the line. I think the only people who can really judge are those at the party, who really know what that person's intent was.

    But no matter who or what you dress up as you need to know your audience, because you need to be prepared for the folks like Vandellish (poster from above) who might step in your A$$ for it. Or that it's going to make the Interweb and everyone's going to think take it the wrong way.

  • Chris - 14 years ago

    As a young black man, I don't find it as offensive dressing in black face. It would be offensive however if the non-black person was portraying blacks in a derogatory way. Black face is not inherently racist or offensive.

    Let me explain with two examples;
    1. white guy dresses like flava flav with NO black face but a big clock chain, gold teeth, afro etc and walks around saying "yeah boy" and he feels like he is portraying a dumb NI%%ER for halloween. That is offensive.
    2. white guy dressed like Barack Obama or Michael Jackson while wearing blackface because he likes and respects them as people and doesn't degrade them. This is not offensive at all, to me at least.

    That being said they better watch out for angry negroes like the one above who beat down first and talk later!

  • DOODDO BROWN - 14 years ago

    Is it Offensive to WHITES When BLACKS Dress Up in WHITE-Face for Halloween???

  • Vandellish - 14 years ago

    Co-sign with Leah.
    Let these clueless jokesters keep doin it though because sooner or later they gonna come across a cat like me that's simply not phu@kin having it. Take that whatever way you wanna take it and tread lighty.

  • Leah - 14 years ago

    I am a laid back person and really do not get upset when I see caucasion people do ignorant and silly things toward another race. However, when you see history repeating itself and people are not annoyed by it I have a problem with black people. We were called Jiggaboos and white people dressed up as us in films and made dolls to insult us. Black people alllow people to degrade us and think it is Okay because they do not want to seem confrontational or just want to let things go . If you allow people to get away once they will keep doing IT!!! Holloween or not ! There is no excuse

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