Posted on 10/08/2009 10:35:33 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
THE most entertaining entertainment story in the world yesterday was an oldie but a goodie: backward and racist Australians had been caught red-handed in a blackface race scandal, live on TV.
The Nine Network on Wednesday night happily put five men in black-face makeup and fake Afros on TV.
The skit was part of Hey, Hey It's Saturday's popular - and, as it turns out, aptly named - Red Faces talent show, and the story went global because the guest judge was Harry Connick Jr, a Louisiana crooner whose father was district attorney in the race-torn city of New Orleans for 27years, and whose band includes a half-dozen talented African Americans, who then had to go on and play.
In the US, a white man with a black-painted face is a minstrel or a "blackface". Minstrels toured the American South in the years before the civil war. The performances were deeply racist. Connick Jr said he could not believe he was seeing the act on TV here.
Snap polls on the internet, including News Limited blogs and Twitter, suggest many people thought the Hey Hey skit - the Jackson Jive - wasn't racist, but a harmless, indeed funny, tribute to the Jackson Five.
One of the performers, Suresh de Silva, told News Limited's The Punch website: "The worst consequence of what we did is that the skit has raised the question of are Australians racist. We're genuinely horrified that our mistake could cause people to think that.
"I'm Sri Lankan-Australian, there's an Indian-Australian, a Greek-Australian, an Irish-Italian-Australian and a Lebanese-Australian. We're all Australian.
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
I’m with you. I prefer open, honest racism to all this PC sneaking around.
Did you ever notice how the white people who are the most wee-weed up about racism never live anywhere near the darker side of town?
Do the 400 years of history of the Irish being made to look like sub-human buffoons in American popular culture count?
They have come from Tonga originally, but Australians are prejudiced against them because they're New Zealanders.
MM!-MM!-MMMM!
You don't suppose the tanning is "ongoing" to emphasize the blacker side of his heritage? While under the "suited" is much lighter. To be "more like them". I guess "color" makes this man. To not be looked at as Muslim.
Color should not be an issue. You raise an interesting point, "a fool in paradise".
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