A lot of effort behind a very stupid decision

How do you wash blackface off your collar? Seriously, can you mix blackface clothes with whites? From initial conception, to the moment when a posse of Ha¯ wera Mt View Lions Club members dumped their dapper outfits into washing machines and rinsed away their smudges in lavender-scented forgiveness, the entire blackface process demanded that choices be made.

Ha¯ wera’s blackface embarrassment is a case study in just how much effort goes into moral stupidity. It is also, I hope, something that everybody involved can learn from.

In case you didn’t know, the Mt View Lions appeared in blackface in Ha¯ wera’s A&P parade. Yep, they rolled down the parade route trailing racist vibes like rancid burley from a bucket.

While the initial Stuff story ran more than a week ago, there have been follow-ups that kept the story – and my anger – horribly alive. First we discovered that golliwogs were on sale at the same event, then we found out the float won second place and a potential $300. By the end of last week, we discovered the town’s mayor voted for the float – kinda accidentally, apparently.

The Lions involved obviously didn’t spend much time working on the float itself. It was a trailer with some balloons, and a banner on the front. Presumably the real work went into making the black faces. I understand that applying makeup is not easy. It’s not like plonking a Maga hat on your head and strolling out into the world with a smile on your face. Getting an even application, shaping and contouring the white around the eyes and the oversized lips, that all takes time.

I imagine it must be tough – but very important – getting clear separation between black and white. The lazy blackface artist will stop at the chin, but the committed artist will spread the black all the way down to the collar – smoothly, evenly, like Marmite on white bread. Otherwise, blackface with a white throat kinda emphasises any extra weight in the jowls. A soggy dumpling effect.

Anyway, throughout this entire process, repeated over and over for a trailer-load of grinning Lions and their entourage, there must have been time to think about what was going on here. After all, black faces don’t just happen (unless you’re actually black). You don’t just trip and fall into a black face. Like I said, decisions were made.

Does anybody remember the old British TV musical variety programme The Black and White Minstrel Show? Yep, such a thing existed, within the lifespan of people who still have some colour in their hair. I remember as a young kid looking at our giant, humming Pye colour television and seeing a bunch of blue-eyed people with darkchocolate faces and tightly curled wigs, grinning at the camera through their own thin lips and the thick painted-on white ones. Grown-ups, I thought, were weirdos. Well, that was 40 years ago. It makes me dizzy to think pretend-black people are still jazz-handing their way to bigotry in 2018.

Perhaps there is an element of naive ignorance at play in people who think there’s nothing wrong with blackface. If there is an enduring flaw in New Zealand’s Pa¯ keha¯ culture, it is an appalling ignorance of history. When this ignorance – of the sheer, brutal horror of the past and its consequences in the present – is combined with our particular mean-spirited humour, and our enduring spirit of she’ll-be-right callousness, you get this stubborn urge to party like it’s 1899 in Ha¯ wera.

The truth is, no matter how nostalgic we get for the good old days, the past was a nastier and less innocent time than today. It’s always been like that. Here and around the Western world, we – whether it be Ma¯ ori, Pasifika, indigenous, African, Asian, Indian, Jewish – were all measured against the Wasps, and they found us wanting.

God, I’m sick of the running jokes and long-dead punchlines: the painted faces and pretend buck teeth and big hook noses and grass skirts and wobbling heads. I don’t agree with all of the identity politics stuff all of the time, but if you don’t want everything to be about race and ethnicity, then stop deciding to paint your white faces black, for starters.

The good thing is that, despite what went down in Ha¯ wera, there are plenty of decent people who understand the difference between right and wrong. And I understand that we all make mistakes, and hopefully there are some people in Taranaki who have learned from theirs. I really respect them if they have. We can all keep improving and making better choices.

After all, I’m confident that, with each generation, we keep treading onwards and upwards. Millennials aren’t weaker than Boomers, they’re just less callous. Every generation makes its own moral decisions and recreates the world with a little less black facepaint.

Black faces don’t just happen (unless you’re actually black). You don’t just trip and fall into a black face. Decisions were made.