Another day, every other blackface controversy in the weirdest Black History Month ever. This time, through pop megastar Katy Perry.
Blackface, to the surprise, is the lifestyle of white human beings, using make-up to darken their skin and exaggerate their lips and eyes to mock Black people, with origins in slavery and segregation-era minstrel shows. (You can read about it in Element right here.)
And this Black History Month, this shameful exercise… continues stoning up.
Seriously, what is happening in February of our Lord Two Thousand and Ten and Nine this year?!
If you went right into a pitch assembly and had been like, “So check it. What if there’s a wild racist with KKK ties within the White House who gained’t shut up about constructing a wall to keep brown human beings out, after which, within the midst of all that, Black History Month comes, and it’s simply day after day of mind-blowing racist malarkey for 28 consecutive days (or 29 if it’s a bounce yr),” everybody in that room would be like, “This is silly and improbable. You are awful at your process to move home.”
First, the Governor of Virginia, then the Attorney General of Virginia, then the Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi, then a country rep from Florida.
And then, like Anne Hathaway’s cerulean sweater in The Devil Wears Prada, the trend leaped a Gucci sweater before trickling right down to Katy Perry’s style line, with a pair of shoes that, let’s be actual, actually must-have raised alarm bells for SOMEONE inside the hallowed halls of Katy Perry Wal-Mart Fashions Inc., due to the fact study this stuff:
And as Katy has explained, they were supposed to be “a nod to fashionable artwork and surrealism.” In an assertion, Perry and crew endured:
“I became saddened when it became introduced to my interest that it was compared to sharp pictures harking back to blackface. Our goal was never to inflict any pain. We have at once eliminated them.”
This is the right component to do, and, in keeping with TMZ, they did so quickly, scrubbing the footwear from Walmart and Dillard’s websites by using early afternoon on the very day the scandal broke out.
But that also doesn’t deal with the elephant in the room: HOW DID NOBODY NOTICE THE BLACKFACE LIKENESS IN THE FIRST PLACE??? In the entire TEAM of humans it took to layout, create, and merchandise those shoes, NOBODY looked at them and said, “I hear you, but this is a shi*storm.”
