There are many good reasons to vote against Justin Trudeau. The fact that he dressed up as a person of colour is not one of them.

The revelation of Trudeau’s flirtation with blackface has rocked the Liberal leader’s campaign. Trudeau himself has said it was racist for him to dress up 18 years ago as the fictional Middle Eastern figure Aladdin.

He has apologized again and again. He has said he is really, really sorry.

He has also revealed another incident, this one from his high school days in which he blackened his face and sang the Harry Belafonte hit “Day O (The Banana Boat Song).”

Meanwhile, a video from the 1990s featuring Trudeau in blackface has surfaced. He said Thursday, he can’t be sure there aren’t more.

It seems that in the years before he entered politics, Trudeau was a serial offender against the norms of political correctness.

But was his behaviour racist? I’m not sure it was. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer called Trudeau’s actions “open mockery” of racial minorities. To know if this were true, we would need to know the context.

In his Aladdin escapade, was Trudeau, then a Vancouver high school teacher, making fun of the fictional street urchin? Or was he merely an enthusiastic participant in the Arabian Nights costume party organized by his employer?

To date, no one has accused him of saying anything rude about Arabs. The yearbook photos that gave rise to this story suggest, in fact, that Trudeau played Aladdin as a bit of a ladies’ man and one cool cat.

Similarly, there is no evidence that Trudeau’s high school rendition of “Day O” was anything but respectful toward both Belafonte and the Jamaican folk song he popularized.

The real rap against Trudeau, it seems, is that he imitated a person of colour. But does that automatically make him a racist?

The answer is no. Classic American blackface typically demeans Black people. Classic American rock and roll typically does not. Yet both involve whites borrowing from black culture.

To put it another way, if skin colour is the criterion for events such as dress-up parties, where are the lines drawn? Is a Somali dark enough to play Aladdin? A Spaniard? A Palestinian? Could Trudeau have avoided censure if his mother had been born in, say, Pakistan?

Does any of this really matter?

In the world of theatre it does not. Ontario’s Stratford Festival routinely casts blacks in roles that Shakespeare wrote for whites. And it famously casts women in key male roles, including that of Julius Caesar in the play of the same name.

The operating theory here is that acting skills are more important than either gender or ethnicity.

It’s an approach that politicians might like to consider as they navigate the fraught waters of racial identity.

There is an upside to all of this. Trudeau’s skirmish with the doyens of political correctness may cause him to moderate his unbearable holier-than-thou approach to opponents, whom he routinely dismisses as closet racists.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

He has been particularly hard on Scheer’s Conservatives — sometimes with real evidence, sometimes without.

But the fuss over Trudeau’s use of skin colouring also highlights a more sobering reality.

If even this international goody-two-shoes can have his campaign derailed by identity politics, then no one is safe.