Even if he wins the election, Trudeau’s legacy will be diminished

MONTREAL — Chances are the teaching staff at Justin Trudeau’s prestigious Montreal college did not blink an eye when he painted his face black to sing a Harry Belafonte song at a high school talent show in the late ’80s.

Inasmuch as the young Trudeau was not mocking Afro-Americans but rather purporting to honour Belafonte, it likely did not cross his teachers’ minds that he was performing a racist act.

Fast forward to 2001 and Trudeau’s teaching stint at a private school in British Columbia and again, his brownedface appearance as Aladdin at an “Arabian Nights” party does not seem to have raised many eyebrows.

While the issue of blackfacing was already a live one some decades ago, the evidence suggests many blithely assumed the concept had more to do with the intent than with the face-painting act itself.

That would certainly have been a widespread notion not exclusively in Quebec where Trudeau spent many of his formative years but in many and perhaps most parts of Canada.

I attended high school and university in Toronto and raised a family in some of the most diverse neighbourhoods Ontario and Quebec have to offer. I am decently versed in Afro-American and Afro-Canadian literature. Still it was only over the last decade, as controversies over the use of black-faced actors on one of Radio-Canada’s popular year-enders and, a few years later, in the production of a play, that I really grasped the full measure of the concept.

Presumably, Trudeau would since similarly have had the opportunity to take stock of the political time bombs that lay dormant in his not-distantenough-for-comfort past.

By the Liberals’ own standards and those of the other mainstream federal parties, a candidate who had indulged in repeat acts of blackfacing would likely not have been accepted. Had Trudeau’s brown-faced pictures emerged back when he was running for the leadership, someone else might have succeeded Michael Ignatieff.

All of that being said, Trudeau has now served long enough to demonstrate that his government has no underlying racist tendencies. If anything, some voters would argue that on race and gender the Liberal leader has pushed the envelope too far in the other direction.

So yes, Trudeau is guilty of having kept silent about his past blackfacing every inch of his successful way in politics. But while he can be called a self-serving hypocrite for that, it does not make him a recovering or a closet racist.

The next question is whether he can recover from a bombshell that has shaken his campaign to the core. By all indications, he and his team will try to ride out the storm. But the damage to the Liberal leader extends beyond a few lost days in the midst of an election campaign.

Should he recoup enough ground to prevail next month, he will go on as prime minister as a diminished figure on the international scene. That stands to be particularly true in parts of the anglosphere like the United Kingdom and the United States where the word blackface probably has the most resonance.

When it comes to political leadership many countries — starting with the two mentioned above — currently live in spectacular glass houses. This week, Trudeau lost, if not or not yet, his reelection bid, at least much of the legitimacy to throw stones on Canada’s behalf.