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    Red-faced over blackface

    I find the term offensive, I don't believe there's any excuse for using it and I am Australian.

    How's that? (Smiley thing)

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      Red-faced over blackface

      Yes, I had finally got that far by my last statement but thanks for the clarification anyway. You can never be too sure with me

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        Red-faced over blackface

        Nor with me (apparently)...

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          Red-faced over blackface

          French Vogue.



          I genuinely cannot believe that they commissioned this shoot, let alone published it.

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            Red-faced over blackface

            Harry Truscott wrote:
            [quote]willie1foot wrote:

            Italian Australians might call themselves 'Wogs'...
            Do they really? Or is it an unfortunate typo?
            Yes. I know what you are getting at here. The racist term in England is "Wops".

            Over here in Oz, the term for those of Italian, Greek or even Croatian background is "Wogs". Naturally, as an Englishman, I refuse to use this term even though everyone else does.

            Bear in mind, that this is a country where you can buy "Coon Cheese" in any supermarket.

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              Red-faced over blackface

              Wog is also a term for a cold or flu type illness - I can't work today, I've got a wog.

              The cheese is supposedly named after one of the employees involved in developing the process used to make it. This story has been challenged by at least one anti-racism campaigner.

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                Red-faced over blackface

                Re the pictures in French Vogue, yeah.

                Someone agrees with me, even if it's just Jezebel.
                "What Klein and Roitfeld should know … is that painting white people black for the entertainment of other white people is offensive in ways that stand entirely apart from cultural context," it said. "France and Australia may not have the United States' particular history of minstrel shows … but something about the act of portraying a white woman as black ought to sound an alarm, somewhere."

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                  Red-faced over blackface

                  Elsewhere, I forget where, someone made the point that the message of the Vogue pictures is, in effect, "we would rather paint white models black than actually hire any black ones."

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                    Red-faced over blackface

                    Mind, if America's Next Top Model is anything to do by, the crassness of fashion types, and their uncritical love of novelty for novelty's sake, knows no bounds. The "natural disaster" shoot, anybody?

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                      Red-faced over blackface

                      Something struck me on the bus this morning.

                      I was puzzling about why I don't see a problem with Vic'n'Bob, or SNL's Obama. I think it has to do with the portrayal of a specific person, rather than "anonymous black people" as a type. I guess Michael Jackson impersonators are fine too, by that measure; the problem with the TV clip is the undifferentiated, comedy-black brothers(heh).

                      Avid Merrion's stuff seems an exception to this; but I think the problem with that is that it's ignorant racist shit, not that dressing up as Trisha is itself inherently racist.

                      In other words, let honkies play Othello again.

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                        Red-faced over blackface

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                          Red-faced over blackface

                          It's kind of hard to know where to go with this

                          Most of the "racism" in the article could be explained as people thinking he is a nutter who has blacked up

                          Günter Wallraff blacks up to present himself as a Somali immigrant ? a look which, though hardly convincing, still managed to fool many Germans

                          German politicians have been urging foreign residents to integrate more deeply into society — and so Kwami Ogonno, a Somali, decided to do his bit.

                          He tried to rent an apartment, join the local allotment community, stay the night at a campsite and apply for a hunter’s licence — a fair introduction to mainstream German society. But at every juncture he was blocked, and often rudely rejected.

                          Kwami Ogonno is, in fact, Günter Wallraff — one of Germany’s top investigative reporters — and he has now made a film, Black on White, and written a book about his expeditions into the country’s racially prejudiced undergrowth.

                          Blacked-up and wearing an implausible Afro-style wig, Mr Wallraff’s first point was quickly apparent: that the Germans are so unaccustomed to seeing black faces in everyday life that they cannot distinguish his not-very-convincing caricature from the real thing. The result is, if anything, more revealing than Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional character Borat — supposedly a Kazakh reporter — who exposed bigotry in the US.

                          One of Kwami’s first destinations was a guard-dog training centre in Cologne. Kwami explained that he would like to train his dog to defend him from skinheads, but the owner of the centre took one look at the pseudo-Somali — whose skin colouring involved two hours of spraying — before blurting out: “Sorry, no places left on the course.” When Kwami persisted, the owner cited an absurdly high sign-up fee of ¤250 (£226). A voice could be heard off-camera saying: “And those rates are about to go up!”

                          Kwami gave up, but Mr Wallraff’s secret camera team remained in place long enough to film a white German trying to enrol shortly afterwards — and being accepted immediately, and charged the usual fee of ¤60.

                          Mr Wallraff has been criticised by some African residents in Germany who say that the film, which went on general release yesterday, is a portrait by a white man who cannot begin to understand the emotions stirred by social rejection. “He can’t claim to be a spokesman for black people,” says Sven Mekarides, head of the Berlin Africa Council which, among other things, chronicles and arranges legal support for victims of racist attacks.

                          Mr Wallraff — in contrast to many African immigrants, especially in eastern Germany — was only once seriously threatened with physical violence, when he tried to get on a train with football fans from Dynamo Dresden football club. “In real life you would have to be tired of life to do that,” says Mr Mekarides.

                          Mr Wallraff made his reputation as an undercover reporter in the 1980s, when he disguised himself as a Turkish steelworker and chronicled discrimination in a plant on the Ruhr. His other roles have included working a stint as a reporter for the mass circulation Bild newspaper to expose its journalistic shortcuts and, more recently, infiltrating a call centre. His latest odyssey will stun Germans, who consider themselves to be a tolerant society.

                          The reporter’s unsuccessful attempt to rent an apartment will strike a chord with many foreign residents who don’t have white skin. One potential landlady, having made an appointment with Kwami by telephone, declared the apartment to be taken as soon as she saw him in the flesh. As he left, she was secretly filmed saying: “Really black, really bad”.

                          The reporter, accompanied by two black women friends, tried to stay at a campsite in Minden, northern Germany. “No space,” he was told, with the manager commenting out of earshot: “The skin colour is the problem.” There were positive moments. In a Bavarian pub, for example, he was protected by two customers from threats — but this was a rare occurence.

                          Philipp Lichterbeck, film critic for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, says that Mr Wallraff’s disguise made him look like a clown. The fact that nobody suspected that something was amiss, he says, “does not exactly testify to the worldliness of the Germans”.
                          ..and, in other news, blacking up and gaying up?

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                            Red-faced over blackface

                            Kwami Ogonno
                            Ah yeah, typical Somali name that. It certainly shines a light on German attitudes, but maybe not in the way this chap intended.

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                              Red-faced over blackface

                              Sounds a bit like when Tracy & Jenna tried to prove who was more discriminated against.

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                                Red-faced over blackface

                                There seems to me to be a big difference between the Vogue pictures and the traditional minstrel stuff. For a start, the model doesn't have big painted white lips or an Afro wig that cost 10p from the joke shop. It's an artistic shot- which means it's aimed at a different audience who will react differently to it to an audience that looks at the Jackson Jive shit. It isn't aimed at making black people look stupid or recalling when they were just there for our amusement, and they should be thankful they're in here making us laugh and not on the plantation outside etc.

                                I know what Wyatt means about America/Britain/Gibraltar's next top model though. But the fact such people are often crass doesn't mean we should interpret everything they do in the crassest way.

                                There might be formal reasons why a photographer might want to paint a white model black. Are we saying that should never be allowed? And I find the idea of convincing make-up quite an impressive thing, though not without some discomfort. Like lots of art.

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                                  Red-faced over blackface

                                  To revisit an old controversy, which perhaps has some relevance to what the Vogue editors thought they were doing, I was disappointed in the Queen agreeing to black up for that Benetton advert. I know it was a long time ago, nut I think the Palace was poorly advised, at best.

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                                    Red-faced over blackface

                                    Heh heh heh

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