Thursday, September 19, 2019

Justin Trudeau sinks deeper in the shit


Time calls this "brownface".  It's so black I didn't see him on first viewing.
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, wore brownface makeup to a party at the private school where he was teaching in the spring of 2001. TIME has obtained a photograph of the incident.

The photograph has not been previously reported. The picture was taken at an “Arabian Nights”-themed gala. It shows Trudeau, then the 29-year-old son of the late former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, wearing a turban and robes with his face, neck and hands completely darkened.

  Time
That's very recent as these things go. I'm surprised it hadn't come out sooner. Perhaps they con't concern themselves about that kind of thing in Canada.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday night, following TIME’s publication of the photo, Trudeau apologized: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have known better and I didn’t. I’m really sorry.” When asked if he thought the photograph was racist, he said, “Yes it was. I didn’t consider it racist at the time, but now we know better.”
"We" knew better in 2001.

And now that he's been busted, he'll get in front of the next one:
Trudeau said he wore blackface “makeup” in high school to sing “Day-O,” a Jamaican folk song famously performed by African-American singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. “I deeply regret that I did that,” he said.

[...]

The Liberal Party leader has championed minority groups during his nearly four years as prime minister and made his embrace of Canada’s many cultures a major part of his leadership. At least seven of the 35 members of Trudeau’s cabinet are from ethnic minorities.
Making it doubly sad, because the next PM might not be so progressive.
Trudeau was also criticized by artist Robert Davidson, who is a member of the Haida indigenous people, because of a tattoo on his left arm that is based on the artist’s work. Davidson said in 2016 that the Trudeau government’s approval of a natural gas facility opposed by the Haida showed the prime minister was not genuinely sensitive to concerns of Canada’s indigenous population.

[...]

This is a critical moment for Trudeau, who began his re-election campaign on Sept. 11 under the cloud of a scandal over whether he pressured his then-attorney general to drop corruption charges against a large Canadian engineering firm.
Yeah, that was probably worse.

UPDATE:  There's more.

UPDATE:

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