augh

[ratcreature]

I don't really care much one way or the other about Epiphany caroling for charity. I mean this being a Protestant region it is not done as much, so usually I don't see any, but for some reason the Catholic church kicked of their charity campaign from my city this year. So they got a fair bit of attention. And they certainly manage to collect a lot of money for children's charity projects. But I really wish they would cut out the blackface in the Three Magi costuming.

Comments

[caiusmajor]

...holy shit, WHAT. D:

At least you don't live in the Netherlands?

[ratcreature]

I strongly suspect if you did Zwarte Piet here, few would find it problematic either. The casual racism is appalling. And it is not even a traditional "requirement" of the character costumes either (not that that would excuse anything), after all which of the Magi, if any, is depicted as black in depictions varies anyway, along with the ideas where they came from. I mean, I realize that the problems of blackface are not as high profile in the collective consciousness here as in the US, but it is not rocket science to realize that it is based on and perpetuates racist caricatures.

I guess it kind of pales in the priority lists behind racist hate crimes and police brutality and racist profiling and such, and the myriad of other more obvious instances of racism. And yet, here you have a bunch of basically well meaning people, and they are centrally organized too in the charity campaign, so how hard could it be for the church to do some sort of memo to all participating congregations, explaining that they'd prefer no black face in the costumes and why? Not that other parts of Three Magi costumes are entirely unproblematic, but it would still be better.