A leading academic expert on blackface in Canada says Trudeau's lapse wasn't unusual for the time, but this campaign disaster is anything but ordinary
When Cheryl Thompson, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, and author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture, heard the news that Justin Trudeau had covered his face in heavy brown makeup to dress up as Aladdin for an Arabian Nights-themed party in 2001, she didn’t think first of her extensive academic research into the history of blackface in Canada.
Trudeau was a teacher when a photograph of him in the costume—discovered and reported on today by Time magazine—was snapped in the spring of 2001. He was 29 years old, teaching at West Point Grey Academy, a Vancouver private school, and the photo was printed in the school’s yearbook. He’s wearing a theatrical turban, too, gathered close with four happy-looking young women in party dresses.
Blackface has a long, troubling history in Canada, but Thompson has written that it is “rarely framed as a ‘Canadian’ pastime,” in contrast to the wider acknowledgement of how deeply rooted it is in American culture. In Canada, there’s a tendency, she says, to minimize blackface as “a few students and/or teachers making ‘innocent’ mistakes.”
There would be intense pressure from inside the Conservative party to step down, he said, along with demands for a resignation from the opposition parties and pundits. Yet he didn’t recommend that Scheer go fully on the offensive. “Make a statement. Let Canadians judge for themselves,” Lietaer said, adding that the best strategy when your opponent is stumbling badly is to stand back and let them keep falling.
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