This was a defining moment in Australia’s entertainment history - having the public censure from the USA a wakeup call to many people - but the fact it’s still being reported on and debated means Australia still hasn’t learned from it. Blackface has been a persistent and repetitive topic of conversation in Australia for a very long time.Īssociate Professor of Modern History Melissa Bellanta says that Australia’s public reckoning with blackface performance has been kicking off since 2009 “when Harry Connick Jr slammed the Jackson 5 skit on the rebooted Hey Hey It’s Saturday show.” You can even read this comprehensive timeline by Indigenous journalist Alan Clarke, written back in 2016, which lists a spree of incidents leading up until then. In the same year, we had Opals player Alice Kunek who posted to Instagram a photo of herself going to a party dressed as rapper Kanye West in blackface makeup. In 2016 we had a a Perth mum proudly declare that dressing her son in blackface as AFL player Nic Naitanui was a “QUEENING moment” and that anyone who was offended had a problem - which was widely defended by public figures. If you have a casual look through the last four years of blackface headlines, you can see multiple reports of people being called out for blackface depictions, from celebrities to amateur football clubs. We had an international furore when a Serena Williams fan turned up to the Australian Open in full blackface. This, was of course, treated as a hysterical moment of cancel culture, with the notion of blackface’s offence to Black people in this country up for “debate”. The last time I remember blackface and appropriation in Australian TV being a topic of discussion was literally only last year, when during the Black Lives Matter protests, Netflix pulled most of Chris Lilley’s shows due to blackface depictions. But blackface being treated as a “scandal” and a “debate” is not only old news in Australia, it is reoccurring news, and makes it hard to believe that people can truly be completely unaware of the racist ramifications. This seems to have become a common defence when people in Australia get called out for incidents of blackface - ignorance. Yet Scarlet’s blackface drag happened between 20, a time when blackface was very much in the public discourse. Part of Scarlet’s apology has been based around both “being an idiot” and not knowing better. In response, Scarlet Adams reposted an apology from 2020 to his Instagram, followed by a new one addressing their time on Drag Race specifically. The photos include multiple incidents of blackface and cultural appropriation, including a costume featuring an Aboriginal flag t-shirt and blacked out teeth, said to be taken on Invasion Day. When Drag Race Down Under was announced earlier this year, photos re-emerged of Scarlet Adams (Anthony Price) in blackface, after Indigenous queen Felicia Foxx posted them on her Instagram. Using blackface on the show as a teachable moment should be incredibly embarrassing for every Australian - what a thrill that our contribution to the largest drag platform in the world is showing our full racist ass to the international community. The show instead made the somewhat questionable decision to broadcast this moment, and use Scarlet Adams and her blackface redemption arc as a point of entertainment. The issue could so easily have been solved by casting more than one Indigenous queen on the show, or by simply not choosing to cast a queen with a blackface past. However, watching a room full of mostly white queens discuss blackface, without a single Indigenous person in the room to speak for themselves, rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
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