Today I saw a photo and that photo made me cry.
This is said photo.
For those of you who might not be familiar with its context, it's a Halloween party and the man in blackface is pretending to be Trayvon Martin while the 'Neighbourhood Watch' guy is supposed to be George Zimmerman.
There are so many things incredibly wrong with photo. Obviously, there's the blackface. But more importantly, it's the fact that the Trayvon Martin case was a case about racial profiling, essentially discrimination. The reason why it was so widely covered was because Zimmerman, being part of the Neighbourhood Watch, followed Trayvon home from a convenience store and shot him, claiming self-defence. Trayvon had a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona Fruit Juice Cocktail on him when he died.
I'm not black, but I felt their rage and heartbreak when Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges earlier this year. Why? Because I'm a minority, same as them.
Sure, I'll never worry about my relatives being killed unjustly to the extent some black people will, but I sure as hell understand what it's like to be defined by my race, better than white people, at least enough to know that using Trayvon Martin (who has become a symbol of injustice and racial profiling) as a Halloween costume is the most disgusting thing anyone could ever do.
Don't fool yourself into thinking racism is dead. We've just gotten better at hiding it, at least until Halloween rolls around. It seems that the week preceding October 31st is always marked by a surge in black face paint and a dumb celebrity being caught in a blackface scandal before claiming that 'it was done out of respect and admiration for the black actor.'
The supportive tweets of people doing blackface usually run along the lines of 'inoffensive', 'just a joke', and even 'what's the big deal? black people can do white face we aint mad lol' (honest to god, someone wrote this). To the first two responses claiming that blackface is a source of comedy, I'll direct you to this
http://gokicker.com/2013/10/28/blackface-never-okay/
The third comment, when read, sounds reasonable enough. We're all equal, right? Race doesn't really matter anymore, so it makes sense for us to poke fun at the fact that people still think it's an issue.
Wrong. No matter how hard you try to spin it, white people are still considered the top of the food chain. They are the ones whose character and personalities can be deciphered from the colour of their skin. If you don't get what I'm saying, think of it like this:
You can put on a mohawk and an olive green combat jacket and people will know you're Travis Bickle. But in order to be Nick Fury, you have to put on a black suit, an eyepatch and brown face paint, because apparently the defining characteristic of Nick Fury is the colour of his skin.
That's where racism lies, because apparently characters of colour can not be distinguished by what they wear, how they act, what they look like, only by their skin. That's why, twitter user, people don't do white face, because institutionalized racism has prompted us to consider white skin as normalcy, to the extent where race is only mentioned in relation to non-whites (eg. the asian male, the black woman).
I'm tired and saddened by this repulsive Instagram picture so I'll end it here. I feel like I haven't explained it properly but screw it, I'll probably edit it later. Right now, I just want to go to sleep and hope that when I wake up, the world will be a better place.
