Blackface scandal should focus on impact on real people

By Star Editorial Board


Justin Trudeau’s brownface/blackface dress-up sessions are indeed dreadful — dreadful both in themselves and for what they say about him.

We need not repeat here all the reasons why it is so wrong for white people to colour their skin in a way that mocks and demeans others.

People of colour can speak for themselves and since the photos and video of Trudeau in costume and “makeup” started emerging on Wednesday evening they have done so at length.

Perhaps most eloquent has been NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, the first person of colour to lead a party into a federal election. He spoke thoughtfully and personally about the real harm done by this kind of racist dress-up on people “who are going to think about all the times in their life... that they were made to feel less because of who they are.”

The focus, in other words, should be on a lot more than how all this will affect the parties and leaders fighting for advantage among voters in the current campaign. It should be, as Singh quite rightly suggested, on the wider impact of acts like Trudeau’s and the biases behind them, and what we can learn from this sorry incident.

For Trudeau himself, it speaks to a lamentable lack of judgment, not just when he was a callow teen but as a grown man of 29 with a responsible job as a teacher of young people at a Vancouver high school. And for it to take place not in the dark ages of the 1950s or 60s, but as recently as 2001, when blackface was universally condemned as racist, is truly staggering.

No wonder Trudeau frankly admitted on Thursday to being embarrassed by his Aladdin act then, and the two earlier incidents of blackface that have come to light.

He should be embarrassed and that goes some way to explaining why he kept quiet for so long about what he did. This was shameful behaviour and it seems from his public remarks that Trudeau realized that quite some time ago.


A braver (and smarter) person would have handled things differently, given the pictures were bound to come out eventually. He would have fessed up long before, if only to mitigate the damage of having it all explode in the middle of an election campaign.

But what does his past behaviour say about Trudeau’s character? How are Canadians likely to respond to his appeals for forgiveness? Will they judge him as sincere when he admits he had a “massive blind spot” about the damage his behaviour inflicted on racialized people and vows to do better?

We won’t know until the vote on Oct. 21, but we suspect most voters won’t conclude that Trudeau has been exposed as a secret racist. That’s certainly not how he has conducted himself as Liberal leader and prime minister over the past four years.

That cuts both ways. On one hand, his critics will argue that the contrast between Trudeau’s lofty rhetoric about diversity and his past behaviour reveals him to be a classic hypocrite — talking big in public while acting quite differently behind closed doors.

That will be a powerful argument for the Conservatives, in particular. It will make it much more difficult for the Liberals to wrong-foot them by pointing to retrograde statements by Tory candidates to tar Andrew Scheer as intolerant, or worse.


At the same time, though, Trudeau’s government has taken concrete actions to fight discrimination and support diversity, everything from cabinet appointments to funding anti-racism measures to setting generous immigration quotas.

People who feel badly let down by the brownface/blackface incidents will have to measure all that up and decide whether Trudeau is a lost cause or a flawed individual with the potential to do better.

The answer to that will depend a lot on how much credit Trudeau and the Liberals have built up among visible minority communities and others committed to fighting intolerance.




Voters, in the end, are realistic. When it comes to elections they don’t expect parties and leaders to be perfect. They know they must choose among imperfect options, and they tend to be a lot more forgiving than the shouting partisans and ideologists who dominate the TV panels and Twitter threads.

In the end, voters will have to factor in Trudeau’s past behaviour as one important thing to weigh up among others, including his government’s record and the plans put forward by all the parties over the next month.

Trudeau has been humbled and diminished since the heady days of 2015. But this affair is about more than him, and it should serve as the start of a bigger conversation about race and diversity.