Book Week is supposed to be a joyous, innocent celebration of our children’s favourite literary characters.
But last week we saw it hijacked by parents intent on using their children as pawns in their own political game.
A Perth mother shared a photo of her nine-year-old son with his skin painted black – dressed as AFL star Nic Naitanui for his school’s Book Week.
The photo went viral prompting criticism of the costume and her ignorance over its upsetting historical significance. People were especially mad as the mum said she knew it was controversial but decided to “grow a set of balls and combat the “politically correct extremists”.
Now a photo has been newly posted to a Facebook fan page for former AFL player Ben Cousins of a little boy dressed up as the ex-footballer wearing a West Coast Eagles guernsey and brandishing his biography.
The WA boy is pictured with a white powdery substance on his nose and his eyes rolled back behind his head to mimic the effects of cocaine use.
It has been widely reported that Cousins suffered a long battle with drug addiction and attended rehab.
The image was captioned: "Check out this little tacker dressing up as the champion AFL legend Ben Cousins for #BookWeek. Powdered nose the works, future all Australian right here."
It so far has attracted more than 20,000 likes and close to 4000 shares, coming just days after the snap of the young Perth both made national headlines."
Top Comments
The "whiteface" picture is completely different. The child is dressing up as a fictional, non-human character. There is no racial context. It's like painting stripes on your face if you dress up as a tiger.
The kid wanted to dress up as his footy idol, it wasn't an application for the Klan. You're just devaluing the term racism and in so doing you are devaluing the real victims of actual racism.
As others have already said, many times over, he could have dressed up as his footy idol very easily without the blackface.
I personally don't understand the blackface problem.
While I'm aware of the historical implications, in this day and age very few (if any!) don blackface in a way to "take the piss". Its most often used as a way to dress up as a character or person you admire. Surely that reasoning alone makes it not racist. Surely the people it offends could ignore the historical point for one moment and think "Wow that person really loves Obama and respects him so they chose to dress up as him for book week".
While we cannot forget the past, lets look at the current motives and bring an end to racism by normalizing black skin. Instead of calling it a problem for white people to dress up as a black person.