Principal: "Nothing Racial" About Powderpuff Team Wearing Blackface

[RockaFowler]

http://deadspin.com/principal-nothing-racial-about-powderpuff-team-weari-1660782360



A group of students at Sullivan High School (Mo.) wore blackface for their Nov. 5 powderpuff football game. That's bad enough. The quote from school principal Jennifer Schmidt, who described her reaction after seeing the blackface, makes it worse. From the Riverfront Times:

"And then I thought, 'Oh, they don't mean anything by it. Just let it go. No one thinks anything of it.' I didn't think anyone did," says Schmidt, the principal of Sullivan High School. "Evidently, someone did."

Wait, there's more:

Schmidt adds that it's been common practice for the senior girls' team to wear face paint during the powderpuff football tournament, essentially as a parody of the eye black football players normally wear to decrease glare from the sun and lights. The face paint also serves to "to intimidate the underclassmen."



I have no words. None

[Nye Bevan]

1. A simple solution would be to wear facepaint of a different color such as blue or green.

That would make a similar visual statement but without the racist overtones.

[Blue_Tires]

2. ....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5839454

[okieinpain]

3. laugh out loud from my cubicle. n/t.

[bettyellen]

5. interesting.

[NYC_SKP]

4. What if it, by some act of fate, it became permanent, indelible, on their faces forever?

.

Spank me if it's wrong, but somehow I think that would be a cosmically Karmic turn of events.

Forever. For always. Indelible.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

6. Black face paint isn't necessarily blackface, but even if it's not racist, in the USA it's arguably

insensitive.

Borris Morris dancers here in the UK, for example, traditionally paint their faces black, (and then argue in morris dancing magazines about whether the tradition has its origins in racist blackface, chimney sweeping or coal mining, with the third theory seeming to attract the most support on the grounds that in the era when Border Morris sprung up there were a lot more coal miners in the welsh borders than there were black people or chimney sweeps).

On the other hand, the fact that they seem to have left the lips and eyes unpainted does make it look more like a racial caricature.

Here in the UK, I'd definitely give them the benefit of the doubt; in the USA I think it's less clear-cut.