It’s possible that the implications of Justin Trudeau’s blackface episode (I can’t recall how often I blacked up, says Trudeau, 20 September) will be taken as simply personally unfortunate, the result of “a bit of fun” and careless playacting coming back to hurt his political prospects. It should make us ask serious questions. What kind of world is it where a white person getting made up to look like a black person can cause such trouble?
Two recent Guardian articles pointing to our continuing refusal to talk about race, by Mithu Sanyal (Whisper it, but it’s finally OK to talk about race in Germany, Journal, 18 September) and Alex Clark (‘What we can learn is, be aware of the beginnings. Be aware of racism, be aware of nationalism’, Review, 14 September), are good places to start looking for answers.
The blackface issue is so powerful because it reveals white people’s almost total failure to appreciate the ongoing violence of racism and how this is fixed on the skin, making it the most basic index of racial identity. A white person “blacking up” cannot help but tease out all the most injurious features of race while allowing them to play in the inversion of its hierarchies and the fictions of its construction.
Many people believe race does not exist and that, like the makeup, it can be wiped away. This is only possible if it’s not your skin that is in the game, a point powerfully made by the black American comic and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, to white audiences in 1962: “Wouldn’t it be a helluva joke if all this was really burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nuthin?”
Rod Earle
Shalford, Surrey
• It should not surprise us that such revelations about Justin Trudeau appear right before a tight election. Trudeau has been fighting to maintain a federal carbon tax; powerful international oil interests would prefer that Canadians elect Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who voted against the Paris agreement, is a fierce opponent of the carbon tax and has promised to stop Trudeau’s “war on cars”.
May I remind you that the world is burning. Please highlight our climate crisis and threats to the health of our Earth rather than gossip which is clearly politically motivated.
Dr Pamela Jane Smith
Cambridge
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