> I don't see what the big deal is though. I liked Mr T when I was a kid (The
> A-Team.) What if, for Halloween one year, I got a bunch of gold chains, a
> blue tank-top, and colored my skin black? How is that disrespectful?

I think it goes back about 100 years or so when white comic actors would
dress in blackface and give a stereotypical performace of a black person as
being slow, uneducated, etc., in order to entertain a likely all-white
audience.

So the problem is not that you are dressing as a black person, but that you
are using a "costuming method" that was once used in comedy that is now
considered racist (and I would have to guess was offensive then, too).

Of course, there are probably few alive now that can remember those blackface
routines of the past.

Mike

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