This past Halloween, Hamline University was shook up by a group of students from the football team assisted by certain members of its student government who had decided that it would be a good idea to dress in black spandex tights, faces painted black, grass skirts and fake bones and attend a party.
If you think that the description of the costumes sounds like blackface, you would be right. It looks a lot like blackface as well.
Apparently it was not intended to be dressing up in blackface, the students say that they meant to dress up as the tribespeople in King Kong (more on that later).
This raises a couple of issues in my mind, but first I must confess. I have to confess that my first reaction is anger. My first reaction is to almost take it personally, that the actions of these students are at worst malicious towards me and others of African descent, or at best completely callous towards the past injustices done towards those of African descent, and to current social and relational wounds in the United States between people of different ethnicities.
And there are wounds. One of the things that can be hard to grasp is the fact that past group sins still have repercussions in individual lives. The sins of the father are visited upon his children. By dressing up in what looks like blackface, these students reopen the wounds. The president of the black student group at Hamline asked the question “Is this what you think of us?” I cannot speak for her, but I suspect that underneath that question is encapsulated several other questions.
“I thought that we at Hamline were trying to heal those wounds, is that a lie?”
“In the past, those who endorsed blackface actively sought to deny African Americans their rights, now that you’ve worn blackface, how can I trust you to ensure my rights?”
“Blackface is part of a history of discrimination and violence against African Americans, am I safe around you?”
“You know that blackface is offensive to me, are you trying to offend me or is it that you just don’t care?”
“Your words say that you respect me, by dressing up as you did, your actions say that you think my ethnicity is one of savages and one to be made fun of. Which can I believe? Can I trust you?”
I will admit that it is possible that the students who dressed up never meant to imply hate, never meant to break trust, never meant to make other students feel threatened, but it has happened, and it has caused a gaping relational wound on campus. That wound needs to be addressed. I think I may talk a little bit more about how this wound should be addressed, but my thought runs possibly towards my look at Philemon from a while back (use the search feature, or it may show up in the related searches). In short, we need an appeal to both justice and mercy for reconciliation to happen here. What that looks like is another question
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