Muir showing Hillary in blackface? Who cares?

I forget what the caption was but you get the idea.

And what’s wrong with being a “pansy frenchman faggot liberal?” Some of my best friends are pansy frenchman faggot liberals and I’ll have words with anyone who disses them!

What are you, some kind of pansy frenchman faggot liberal?

/good article

Of course the devil, as always, is in the details. Applying this principle will always be contentious because the question of what constitutes racism in a given instance can be open to debate.

This caveat clearly doesn’t apply to minstrel show imagery in the hands of white folks. This tradition in American popular culture has always been overtly racist in that it was a means of reducing black people to comedic cyphers for the amusement of white audiences.

Moreover, the point in both Hamsher and Muir’s examples is more than a little obsured by the racial context. Black face isn’t about pandering to the group being caricatured, it’s about pandering to the bigotry directed towards the group being caricatured.

Somehow, I don’t think that was either Hamsher or Muir’s intent in using black face but it is the caricature’s content. The argument for “context” actually works against both of them unless we actually ignore any context other than subjectve political bias.

I would add that I’m opposed to banning or otherwise suppressing any historical examples of such racism (re: Holiday Inn). Closing our eyes to the sins of our history is the most direct route to repeating them.