Peridyd's Progress

Today's Dad's Weekend football game at Oregon State University will feature twin protests. On the one side are students who are "showing their school spirit" by putting on blackface (OSU's colors are orange and black), largely in defiance of others, who, by providing a counter protest, are attempting to remind these students of the historical roots of blackface.

The use of blackface has a long history in our country and is akin to other offensive stereotypes that have been created and used by white culture to justify racism. Since the mid-Nineteenth Century, white performers have put on blackface in order to entertain their audiences with comic representations of African Americans. The first performances were minstrelsy shows. But those of us who are a bit older (I was born in 1956) can remember seeing cartoons with Bugs Bunny et al which used blackface in the same hurtful and racist manner.

I bring this up to point out that blackface isn't an old phenomenon. I grew up watching television commercials spotlighting their products vian Aunt Jemima and the Frito Bandito, broadcasts containing the "Wascally Wabbit" doing his version of Al Jolson, not to mention occasional movies featuring Al Jolson himself in blackface.

The official campus student newspaper, The Barometer, is the original source of the problem. I never saw the issue in question (I don't really like the paper, despite the fact that it's "award winning"), but my understanding is that they ran a front page story encouraging students to dress up in blackface for today's game, and had a photo of a white student in blackface. They now have issued a non-apology apology that justifies their actions via their ignorance of the painful roots of blackface. Conversation, censorship, and racist letters to the editor have ensued.

White students claim the right to the innocent use of blackface. Those who are protesting their promise to dress up in blackface counter that there is no innocent use of blackface.

To those who are paying any attention to this issue on campus, it's clear that the conversation has a polarizing effect. Like arguments around abortion, no one's being converted.

Yet that doesn't mean that each side is equally entitled to its opinion. Some opinions, I'd like to remind us, are better supported than others. Those who support the wearing of blackface to the game today are wont to claim that blackface is a dead issue today, and they have a right to appropriate it for their innocent (football and school spirited) ends, as if blackface has somehow been cleansed of its historical and racist roots.

As Luke Sugie points out in his excellent, yet censored, commentary on the claims of ignorance being used as an excuse,

it's not surprising that the Barometer took this route. There are few (if any) serious repercussions for not knowing the history of media and ethnicity in this country, even for an award-winning student paper. After all, you can just apologize and claim ignorance, silently allow those who point out such instances to be vilified as uppity one-issue writers, and move on. But the problem when folks in dominant groups remain ignorant of the historical citations they make is that no such privilege exists for the “others,” which Jerred Taylor pointed out in his letter to the editor last Friday.

If I don't know the ins and outs of heterosexual culture, I am liable to be physically assaulted or worse by being queer at the wrong place or wrong time. Similarly, if I don't understand how whiteness is constructed and operated in this country I am liable to face serious negative social, personal, or physical ramifications. The opposite of the two preceding statements is rarely true.

I know the troubling and deeply embedded historical citation being made when someone dresses up like a ninja, slutty Pocahontas, or some other regurgitated stereotype for Halloween - even if they don't. I understand that a historical citation of a stereotype such as blackface, however accidental or well-intentioned, calls forward the hurt and pain of communities who lived or continue to live with those stereotypes. If you don't understand why the image of blackface is so powerful, even the mere appearance of blackface, it's probably because privilege has let you ignore it without consequence.

In the social justice circles I hang out with on campus, the tension yesterday was palpable. In a day of meetings and not enough time to read email, today's protests came up several times.

I fear for what might happen at the game today.

All of which is a long winded way of getting to the point of this post: where in all of these voices is the official voice of OSU? I respect Ed Ray and believe that his commitment to diversity and social justice issues is authentic. But the silence from the President's office is deafening. And the resultant vacuum ends up sounding like a tacit approval of those who would wear blackface, which, since it cannot be scrubbed of its racist roots, is wrong. How difficult would it be for one who is committed to social justice to say just that?