Justin Trudeau’s Unfortunate Blackface Incident

Written by William Urbanski.

As you may have heard, my boy and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently got himself in political hot water after photos emerged of him in blackface (or more precisely “brownface,” as the incident took place during an Arabian Nights-themed event). For a bit of context, these photos were taken more than 20 years ago when Trudeau was still a school teacher in the Vancouver area, and long before he’d started his political career in earnest.

Many people have grown tired of Trudeau’s escapades, and there’s been no shortage of people claiming this incident will mark the end of his political career, a career during which he’s projected a carefully crafted image as a tolerant, enlightened leader of a culturally diverse country. What all these naysayers overlooked is one simple fact: Calling someone out for something they did over 20 years ago amounts to precisely jack squat.

Trudeau’s political opponents (who were no doubt in some way responsible for the timely release of the photos) were banking on the foolish “outrage culture” trend to help them achieve their ends. For those unacquainted with said culture, it’s the phenomenon of people getting extremely upset over something someone said at some undetermined point in the past and then making an effort to shame them online. It’s basically using someone’s past foibles or blunders as an excuse to take the moral high ground over them. Outrage culture appears to be somewhat effective because it works on the premise that people should care if you’re offended. But guess who really cares if you’re offended? Nobody, snowflake.

Allow me to explain. The foundation of outrage is feeling offended for something that happened to someone else – for something that one isn’t directly involved in. A personal example highlights the ridiculousness of this whole trend.

When I was doing my master’s degree in Berlin in 2017, one of the classes was a fairly large group of about fifty students from various parts of the globe: Africa, Afghanistan, South America, India, etc. In this class, we had to do short group presentations introducing various topics dealing with diplomacy, and the professor, who happened to be French, made it extremely clear that the presentations were to be no longer that fifteen minutes. Most groups finished at or close enough to the cut off time, but one group, made up entirely of Afghani students, was approaching the 45-minute mark when the professor quipped that “time must work differently in Afghanistan.”

While that was perhaps not the most tactful comment, I don’t feel it was particularly discriminatory or anything like that. A group of students, mostly from Europe, didn’t feel the same way. They absolutely lost their minds, accusing the professor of being a racist and proceeded to spend the next hour loudly voicing their ill-informed opinions, creating a confrontational environment that both achieved and resolved nothing. But guess who was not at all offended by the teacher’s comment? All the Afghani students who explicitly said they were not bothered in the least. They even explained that they misunderstood the time limit completely. This neither stopped nor discouraged the contingency of idiots in the room from hijacking the rest of the class time for that day. It also didn’t stop them from complaining to the university and having the teacher replaced. The students that caused the uproar were so focused on punishing the teacher’s alleged faux pas that they never stopped, even for a moment, to talk to the Afghani students they were supposedly fighting for. 

Getting back to Trudeau’s latest PR disaster, on the same night as the incident in question, Trudeau took photos with two men apparently of South Asian descent who have publicly come forward, stating that they were not offended at all. So the people who have been using the Trudeau photo have been doing it out of a desire to morally condemn a man who is actually a pretty good leader and not out of a desire to help a group that was apparently discriminated against.

Is wearing blackface ever a smart thing to do? Absolutely not. Is it “morally reprehensible,” as Trudeau’s political opponents would have voters think? Well, I feel like it’s a bit of a stretch to encourage the condemnation of any individual based on a picture. People do stupid stuff all the time, and when we see a photo from 20 years ago, there’s no way to determine the context of what happened. There’s probably a handful of behaviors that all of you reading this do today that in 25 or 30 years will look offensive, foolish, or racist even though now nobody gives it a second thought. 

In the interest of all of us just getting along for once, what I propose is a statue of limitations, let’s say ten years, on being mad about a stupid thing someone may or may not have done. It looks like my homeslice, J.T., got caught doing something silly a long time ago, but let’s do the world a favor and save our collective anger for a world leader who’s doing stupid things today, like the hopefully soon-to-be-impeached American president.

(The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and are not to be construed as the collective opinion of the Gwangju News, the Gwangju International Center, or Gwangju City Hall.)

The Author

William Urbanski, managing editor of the Gwangju News, has an MA in international relations and cultural diplomacy. He is married to a wonderful Korean woman, always pays cash, and keeps all his receipts.