Katy Perry recently released a shoe line with a shoe that appears to be mimicking blackface, as they feature “metal appliques imitating eyes and nose, plus exaggerated red lips” over a black background. They have been removed from markets. Perry, as quoted in the article, claimed before the product’s release that her line was meant to be full of personality and be something for people to talk about when wearing.
Recently there have been many controversies regarding blackface, including clothing companies creating offensive products and newscasters denying their racism after being caught using or promoting blackface. This article calls out these people who are continuously making these mistakes and calls for a difference in the way we think about the products and ideas we are releasing to the public by including quotes from Kim Crayton’s Twitter where she states how she believes that society should set some ground rules so that these sort of controversies don’t continue to happen and people don’t continue to get hurt. People caught in the racism claims often say that they didn’t realize it was racist and that they didn’t mean to offend anyone; we need to spend less time forcing people to apologize for things they don’t understand, only to continue being racist, and more time teaching them about why the things they are doing are inappropriate so that these incidents are reduced. Schools especially don’t focus enough on the history behind subjects like these and it’s sad to constantly see the evidence of others’ ignorance.
This issue relates to the sharecropping system. Just as many don’t understand why the things they do are racist, many people didn’t understand that sharecropping was basically legalized slavery. At the time, many people would’ve argued that sharecropping was a great opportunity for freedmen to have shelter and food, or that it was not slavery because it was “paid” labor, but the truth was that those working were practically being forced to work in bad conditions for long hours just to survive, and were hardly ever given any of the crop they harvested. This made the former slaves feel as though they were not yet free.
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2019/02/11/katy-perrys-shoe-collection-pulls-two-pairs-blackface-controversy/2838552002/
It's important for us to have an organized effort to understand, as a society, how certain things can be classified as racist, and to help those people who mess up with those certain things because they genuinely did not know how what they're doing can be racist, and to not simply condemn them forever.
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