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[MrSheps]

This discussion reminds me of an incident that happened at my law school while I attended. A law professor wore a costume with blackface to her Halloween party, and, while not confronted at the party, someone snapped a photo and sent it to the local paper. Faculty and students were in attendance, including people of color. There was a lot of discussion surrounding this incident, town halls, and other venues. 


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<p style="font-size:12px;font-family:'Helvetica Neue';">Part of the discussion surrounded the matter of intent. The professor, who is in her 60’s, claimed that the costume was meant to provoke thought about the lack of persons of color in attendance at medical school. This costume was based upon the book Black Man in a White Coat by Dr. Damon Tweedy. It was also inspired, apparently, by her daughter not having any black students in her medical class. Setting aside the professor’s claims that she did not know the history of blackface, does her intent matter? If so, to what degree?

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<p style="font-size:12px;font-family:'Helvetica Neue';">I’m still not sure of the answer. Where I lean is that intent is a factor that must be considered, but it is not conclusive. One must also consider the potential effect on others and connotations that exist independent of one's actions. One can point to a benign intent as one factor, but that intent does not exist in a vacuum. However, I believe it is haphazard and dangerous to disregard intent altogether or, even worse, to automatically assign malicious intent where no evidence exists of such intent.

Yes, I think her intent absolutely matters, but I agree that intent isn't the only factor even if completely benign.  Now in that specific case, I think her intent is still questionable, or at least confusing if not suspect.  Granted, I'm putting 2019 standards on something that took place some years back, but it's a little hard to believe that someone who felt strongly enough about the lack of black students/faculty at the school would not know anything about the history of blackface. But even if true, her choice to dress up that way, since it was intended to be a comment on race, I would say deserves more scrutiny, as the intent is not benign, she was trying to make a statement about race (even if an admirable one) and with that you open the door to more scrutiny. Maybe she didn't know about blackface, but she should have.  

 

Now, say it's a white child who wants to dress up as her favorite teacher, character, athlete, performer, etc, who is black and the child, wanting to look more like her hero, puts on dark makeup. Well that's completely innocent and I think intent is then all that matters.  She shouldn't know anything black face and her costume choice had zero to do with race. You can perhaps question the parents if they let her go out that way, but not the child.  

 

How and when humor enters into these things is what I find fascinating.  There's an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer falls asleep in a tanning bed. The episode ends with him meeting the parents of a girlfriend who are revealed to be black.  The dad says something like, "I thought I was meeting a white guy, all I see here is a damn fool!"  You can laugh at this because Kramer wasn't trying to look black, it was an accident, there was no malice. The dad, not knowing his intent, is justifiably offended, and the misunderstanding is funny. And you can sympathize with both characters.  

 

Now, years later the actor Michael Richards goes on a comedy stage and uses the n word.  His intent, he would later say, was to be edgy and funny, and he failed.  Here I think the intent, even if you believe him, is not enough because he had a greater responsibility to know better.  To use an earlier example from Slaw, had Kramer fallen asleep at the wheel (instead of in a tanning bed) and hit his girlfriend's dad with his car, it's not only a very heavy lift to make funny, you can't sympathize with Kramer.  In both cases he didn't intend to fall asleep, but his mistake in the car is viewed as much worse because the responsibility to stay alert is much greater in a car than a tanning bed.

 

To take all this back the original image, I think it's clear that the people in the photo don't know they look like klansmen, and certainly aren't intending to.  And there's humor in that. That a company made those, and unintentionally messed up the design so badly that they sold or gave them away as a promotional, that's funny too.  What that leaves then is the question of should they have known better, do they deserve blame for negligence and/or (as in hitting someone with a car, or yelling out the the n word) is the offense simply so bad that the humor is mitigated. Is this falling asleep behind the wheel, or in the tanning bed?  I would say tanning bed.  And I could be wrong, but I suspect it would be as well for most, black or white.