Justin Trudeau is not your woke bae, he's just Joe Biden with abs: there's no policy so progressive that JT won't endorse it, provided that he never has to do anything to make good on that endorsement, which is how JT ended up being complicit in the #MuslimBan, making Canada's Patriot Act much worse, bailing out the Transcanada pipeline so in service to Alberta's filthy, planet-destroying tar sands, abandoning his promises for indigenous reconciliation, rescuing the giant Saudi arms deal, caving to Trump on NAFTA 2.0, and putting partisanship ahead of justice to get a corrupt, giant engineering company off the hook, throwing his indigenous Attorney General under the bus in order to preserve his relationship with a giant party donor.
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He was performing 'Day-O,' the Afro-Jamaican chant made famous by Black civil rights activist Harry Belafonte.
Fashion designers often make Derek Zoolander look like Albert Einstein, but in picking 2019 to be the year of smirking references to racist imagery, they really outdid themselves. The latest celebrity endorser to be humiliated by something under their name? Katy Perry's blackface shoes.
Katy says she is "saddened" that her design - blue eyes and red lips on black leather - was compared with "painful images" of blackface by critics online.
The shoes have reportedly also been taken off shelves at US retailers.
Katy says the shoes, The Rue and The Ora, were "envisioned as a nod to modern art and surrealism"
Note that it isn't an apology, as some reported. It's not even an "apologize if you felt that way" nonapology. Perry is instead "saddened" and "our intention was never to inflict any pain."
It truly is the year of stupid in the fashion biz:
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Having served a whopping 16 days in office, Florida's Republican (shocker) Secretary of State Mike Ertel has resigned after the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper obtained photos of Ertel in blackface, dressed as a Hurricane Katrina survivor. Read the rest
What the hell were they thinking?
Luxury brand Prada is accused of selling $550 "blackface" figurines. They have charms in their Pradamalia line that are monkeys with dark faces and big red lips, i.e. blackface. The merchandise has now been removed for purchase, though the site still shows it.
Here's Prada's response to the accusation:
On Friday morning, Gothamist's Jennifer Hsu got this video of the Prada store in NYC's SOHO district shuttering its blinds, as a way of hiding the offensive window display:
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Blackface halloween costumes represent a perfectly-formed bubble of bad ideas. Everyone knows they're widely condemned as racist and everyone knows you can get in trouble for doing it. But a frozen peach-flavored witches' brew of indifference, ignorance and inchoate spite leads a certain sort of person into doing it all the same. Then they go viral and are made examples of in exactly the way that they knew they risked.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A nurse lost her job with a Kansas City, Missouri hospital Tuesday after a Facebook photo of her in blackface went viral. A photo of Shelbi Elliott-Heenan reportedly shows her dressed in blackface as Beyonce, standing next to a man in blackface as Jay-Z. Saint Luke's Health System, where Elliott-Heenan worked, released a statement about the matter.
"While it is against Saint Luke’s policy to comment on specific personnel matters, we can confirm that this individual is no longer a Saint Luke’s employee," the statement said.
This is a common failure state of examined privilege: they know who what, but don't know who whom. Read the rest
