I'm not sure how I missed this tweet from a few days before Halloween:
@bomani_jones can a kid dressed up as his favorite athlete go black face? Tony Gwynn 1989 pic.twitter.com/gAZOfMbzjV
— david podgurski (@thatpfunk) October 27, 2013NOTE: David, the San Diegan who tweeted the picture, is not, nor is he related to the kid in the picture.
Bomani Jones is an ESPN2 radio host from Florida. I'm not familiar with his work. Without digging through his timeline history it's probably safe to assume he was rightfully offended that some people are ignorant of the evils of blackface. The topic probably arose because around Halloween of this year Dancing With the Stars pro, Julianne Hough, made news when she dressed as a character from Orange is the New Black by darkening her skin. It wasn't quite full on blackface, but still it was cringe inducing. It was very controversial as you can imagine, and although admitting that she did it out of ignorance she said it was done out of love for the character and the series.
The picture of the kid dressed as Tony Gwynn? Well yeah, that's blackface. Without knowing the kid pictured but being roughly the same age, I can almost promise you that he dressed as Gwynn purely out of unadulterated admiration. If he was anything like the kids I went to school with then he idolized Tony Gwynn. My standard saying is that "If you grew up in San Diego in the 1980's and your favorite player wasn't Tony Gwynn then you were just trying to be different."
I remember going to a Halloween party as a kid in the mid-80s where an adult was dressed in blackface as Aunt Jemima. I didn't know it was wrong, probably anymore than the kid pictured did. I'm also pretty sure that costumed adult didn't do it with malicious intent, but would surely be mortified if presented with the picture today.
@bomani_jones whoa, not my kid! Blame the parents, but the kid is doing it purely out of love.
— david podgurski (@thatpfunk) October 27, 2013So can a kid in dress as his favorite athlete go blackface? Apparently, yes. Should they? No, please no. Well not by today's standards certainly. There was a time however where this was quite common in the entertainment in the last couple centuries. It's hard to believe that society didn't always frown on this type of thing. Remember a major studio released the movie Soul Man in 1986, it was a different time.
