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:

Ignorance is Never A fashion statement! Apology NOT accepted😡#blackface #Gucci #gucciblackface #prada #moncler #katyPerry pic.twitter.com/KDCnkzGlgA

— Kieren Boyce (@ThatGyrlKieren) February 10, 2019

Read the rest

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.

Thanks to #blackface @Prada, now you can take #sambo home with you for the holidays #StopRacism #StopBlackface #StopPrada pic.twitter.com/5t2cvosLIF

— Chinyere Ezie (@lawyergrrl) December 13, 2018

Here's Prada's response to the accusation:

[1/2] #Prada Group abhors racist imagery. The Pradamalia are fantasy charms composed of elements of the Prada oeuvre. They are imaginary creatures not intended to have any reference to the real world and certainly not blackface.

— PRADA (@Prada) December 14, 2018

[2/] #Prada Group never had the intention of offending anyone and we abhor all forms of racism and racist imagery. In this interest we will withdraw the characters in question from display and circulation.

— PRADA (@Prada) December 14, 2018

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:

screenshot via Gothamist/YouTube Read the rest

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