By now, everyone has seen the image of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in “brownface” at a 2001 “Arabian Nights” party while he was a teacher at West Point Grey Academy, a private day school in Vancouver. Trudeau, who was 29-years-old at the time, is not only in brownface but he’s also wearing a turban and robe — to match the party’s theme.

Brownface, a variation on blackface, is the racial caricaturing of “Brown” groups, such as Latin Americans, Indigenous people, and South Asians.

Trudeau has a long history of dressing up in the traditional clothing of South Asians. We’ve all seen the pictures of him with wife and children in tow donning traditional Indian and/or Sikh attire. Now we know where it comes from, and I’m not at all shocked by it.

If we keep it real for a minute, Trudeau is not the first (or last) white male to darken their skin in supposed jest. As someone who has spent the last 10 years studying blackface in Canada, the one thing I know to be true is that blackface is as Canadian as hockey. It literally was (is) performed everywhere.

When I was in high school in the 1990s, for example, a white teacher showed up in blackface dressed as a Rastafari from Jamaica. Students were outraged. I was outraged. But no one screamed racist or demanded that he was fired. While it sounds like a cliché, the times truly were different. The collective consciousness had not caught up with the social-cultural change that was taking place during that era — such as the rise of anti-racist and diversity training.

When I was a PhD student at McGill University in 2011, then law-student Anthony Morgan filmed white students at a Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) school wearing blackface, once again dressed as Jamaicans. To say it was a déjà vu is an understatement. This incident brought into plain sight the realities that while whites still put on racial caricature as a joke, Black and brown people are no longer going to stay silent to it anymore, as we did 20 years ago.

The act of darkening one’s skin, often referred to as blackface, is a genre of performance that originated in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, but by the 1850s Canada was firmly a part of the blackface circuit so much so that we even had our own stars, such as Colin “Cool” Burgess, who was born in Toronto in 1840 and who toured with most of the leading American blackface companies throughout the 1860s and 1870s.

From the 1880s through to the 1960s, blackface was performed regularly in public spaces, such as department stores, high school graduations, churches, women’s auxiliary groups, and even at summer camps.

After the 1960s, however, as a wave of socio-cultural shifts swept across North America, such as multiculturalism and affirmative action in the United States, coupled with more diverse representative on television and film, blackface was no longer accepted as routine. It was now considered racist.

Like most racist things, it did not go away. Nothing ever really goes away. It was relegated to private schools, private parties (especially at Halloween), and private spaces where Black and brown folks just did not go.

With social media, these private spaces now get thrust into plain sight. With the click of a button and an upload, racist moments from the past suddenly become part of the contemporary discussion about race, racism and white privilege.

Trudeau has always said that “diversity is our strength” and he’s clearly had an affinity for South Asian culture, but maybe he’s not so aware of the day-to-day realities of life for those very same people. Dress is, after all, just one aspect a culture; it is not the totality of it.

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Racist jokes and mimicry happen everyday and such acts often go unreported and unnoticed. If there is anything that comes from this my hope is that we move beyond apologies to a long overdue conversation about racial inequality in our country.

Where blackface and brownface can be taken off, being Black and brown is for life.

Cheryl Thompson is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on Canada's history of blackface. Dr. Thompson is author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada's Black Beauty Culture. Her next book, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Race, will be published with Coach House Books in 2020.

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