The Duke University women's lacrosse team has come under fire after a photo was posted on a university website that showed a player in blackface. The photo was said to have taken at a Halloween party at head coach, Kerstin Kimel's house, where a group of juniors dressed up like characters from the Little Rascals movie. One player dressed as "Buckwheat" and painted her face black as part of her costume for the party. The photo from the Halloween party was posted on GoDuke.com last week along with a player's blogpost, but it was removed early Monday. According to the article, Kimmel issued a statement apologizing for the costume, "Some of our costume choices were insensitive and entirely inappropriate. No offense was intended, but that does not matter, because we should have realized how these choices would be viewed by those outside of our program," she said. "On behalf of our coaching staff and our student-athletes, we apologize to anyone we may have offended and understand (that), while we believed we were making decisions in good fun, we should have been much more sensitive to the implications of our actions."
After seeing this article earlier this week in the news I was surprised to see that things like this are still happening in our generation. I have heard the term "black face" before, but to be honest I was not completely sure what it meant. According to Merriam-Webster.com, the definition of blackface is "makeup applied to a performer playing a black person especially in a minstrel show; also : a performer wearing such makeup." Whether "blackface" may have been done out of ignorance or innocent fun, I still think it is so wrong to do something of that nature. I believe that we should educate ourselves on subjects such as these to avoid incidents like this from occurring. I believe if educate ourselves, we can make smarter decisions each day.
Link to Article
http://www.wral.com/duke-apologizes-for-player-s-insensitive-halloween-costume/11765746/
Link to Video
http://www.wral.com/news/local/video/11766051/#/vid11766051
Definition of Blackface
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blackface
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