Justin Trudeau’s blackface is an exceptional performance in privilege.

Our prime minister’s ignorance of what is and is not racist has been exposed. But in the context of establishment Canada, his lack of awareness is just par for the course.

As one of approximately seven million Canadians who is a visible minority, I am getting the sense I should be dismayed by Trudeau donning blackface.

There is plenty of reaction on social media. My WhatsApp and Twitter feeds are congested with Trudeau commentary, snark, memes, and of course questions: How many times has he greased up his face? In what year did he finally learn blackface/brownface is racist?

I confess, however, I don’t feel much of anything.

I can’t even say I’m all that surprised. If it helps to establish a baseline, I was surprised when the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship.

When the nineteen-to-one long-shots returned to Canada with the Larry O’Brien trophy, I was astonished. When a privileged and powerful white man, contrary to his ultraprogressive brand, is caught ‘black-handed’ while dripping in hypocrisy, not so much.

On two occasions — correction three occasions — that were caught on camera, our prime minister, a former drama teacher who says he has always “been more enthusiastic about costumes than is sometimes appropriate,” blackened his face and hands (was it shoe-polish, a really dark foundation, a specialty gag product?) all because he seemingly got caught up in the fabulousness of dressing up.

Cue slides of the 2018 India trip here.

The result is a maelstrom of news coverage and commentary questioning whether the sitting prime minister — an international media darling and icon for the socially woke left for much of the past four years — should resign or carry on.

And of course there is the expected debate of whether he is actually guilty of racism or if he’s yet another victim of political correctness. If it’s any indication of how that contest is faring, the hashtag #IStandWithTrudeau is trending at the moment.

To this list, however, I would add a third possibility: he was just being a privileged white man.

Trudeau is the scion of an establishment family from Eastern Canada. He was educated in private schools and was raised in the corridors of power where he observed his father, Pierre Trudeau, wield that power as the prime minister

In this rarefied world, Trudeau’s exposure to and empathy with the struggles of people of colour and immigrants living on the margins of society would likely have been limited.

In apologizing for his actions, Trudeau basically admitted as much at a press conference in Winnipeg: “I didn’t understand how hurtful this is to people who live with discrimination every single day. I have always acknowledged I come from a place of privilege, but I now need to acknowledge that comes with a massive blind spot,” he said.

When you grow up bubble-wrapped in privilege like Trudeau did, ignorance could seem like a plausible defence for blackface cosplay. But in reality, it’s not.

It’s a terrible excuse, actually. In 2001, at the time of his most recent offence, Trudeau was a 29-year-old teacher, a graduate of McGill University and the University of British Columbia. And as someone who taught drama, he should have known about the history of blackface in minstrel shows and how white actors pantomimed plantation slaves to dehumanize African Americans.

But Trudeau is not the first powerful and educated white man to (inadvertently) engage in racism. Nor will he be the last. The universal lesson from this scandal is just a confirmation of what most people of colour in this country know and experience on a daily basis: where there is power and privilege, there is also no shortage of racial ignorance.

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Examples of this pervade Canada’s boardrooms, newsrooms and political machinery, which in this country remain predominantly white spaces. In the media world, for example, hardly a week passes without some new race-based controversy.

In these past two weeks, for example, two of Canada’s major daily newspapers — The Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail — have found themselves heavily criticized for giving a platform to writers who either argued shoddily-compiled extremist opinions or have a lengthy history with the alt-right and fomenting hatred toward minorities in this country via online forums like The Rebel.

Meanwhile, in the political sphere, every major party in this election has also had to contend with some form of racial controversy, though some have handled it better than others.

The Conservatives and their leader Andrew Scheer remain under a cloud for their alleged ties to white extremists and to the above mentioned Rebel website. The NDP has had to contend with defections in New Brunswick because, according to the former federal NDP executive member for Atlantic Canada, some potential candidates were hesitant to run as they thought voters wouldn’t cast ballots for a party whose leader wore a turban.

And the Greens, the party with the smallest percentage of diverse candidates, has found itself back on its heels, having to respond to welcoming these defectors.

Set against these and countless other examples of racism in establishment Canada, Justin Trudeau’s actions — while exceptional in their ignorance — are not inconsistent from those of his peers with access to power and privilege. They also raise questions about why his employer at the time, West Point Grey Academy, didn’t flag them as inappropriate rather than publishing them on the school website.

And how did Canada’s news media miss these images for so long? Or did news editors think there wasn’t a story to be published?

But this is election season and so the story broke, and the media wave has crashed down on our prime minister. Over his tenure, Trudeau’s strategists have fed the media stories that smugly cast his rivals as being regressive and bigoted while calculatingly building a social media brand in which he plays the inclusive, diversity-is-our-strength leader of the future.

To be fair, Trudeau has backed up that brand with real policies and appointments that demonstrate commitment to a vision of Canada as a diverse multicultural country. That merits credit.

But clearly there are gaps in Trudeau’s persona and personality where the “costume” diverges from the man. At the moment, the Liberal leader should be playing to his party’s election tag line, “Choose Forward,” yet he finds himself caught looking back.

Justin Trudeau the politician failed to consider that his past as Justin Trudeau the man could ever catch up with him. But it is here now, and we are all waiting to see which Justin steps forward.

Jagdeesh Mann is a media professional and journalist based in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter @JagdeeshMann.

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