Saturday, October 10, 2009

Analysis: 'Blackface Jacksons' embarrassing to Australia - CNN.com

Analysis: 'Blackface Jacksons' embarrassing to Australia - CNN.com: "That the cause of the furor is a childish, inappropriate racial 'joke' is even less of a surprise. Australian popular culture has a long held an often embarrassing tradition of wrapping racism in supposed humor.

Movie star and singer Harry Connick Jr. condemned on air an Australian television skit featuring a group of performers who wore blackface to impersonate the late pop star Michael Jackson and his brothers.

Connick was a judge on the Australian variety show 'Hey Hey It's Saturday,' when the blackface group 'Jackson Jive' performed 'Can You Feel It' wearing huge black wigs, blackface and one spangled glove each. The Michael Jackson impersonator wore whiteface.

In the 1950s a popular song lampooned a 'misfit' Aborigine whose 'boomerang won't come back.' Popular entertainer Rolf Harris was even less sensitive in a verse of his song 'Tie me kangaroo down sport' proclaiming that on his death one of his friends could free his captive Aborigines: 'Let my Abos go loose, they're of no further use, so let my Abos go loose.'"

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