When faced with news that 1/3 of Americans think blackface is okay if it’s part of a Halloween costume, comedian Sam Jay told Roy Wood, Jr., “I think you gotta let kids do it … no kid wants to not fully Halloween.”
To illustrate her statement, Jay added, “You don’t want to be a ninja turtle up to here, and it’s just your head sticking out. And you’re like, ‘It’s me Antoine, but I’m really Michaelangeleo.’”
Jay said she recently encountered the prospect of blackface as a costume this Halloween. “Listen. I have my friend, his kid, he wanted to be Kevin Garnett for Halloween, right? So he put on the Kevin Garnett jersey, then he went to his mother’s makeup and he was gonna darken his face. And, of course, his parents said, like, ‘No, you can’t do that. That’s offensive to Black people.’”
“There was a part of me that felt bad for him, because now he’s just a white boy in a Kevin Garnett and he could have been that on any day of the week,” Jay concluded.
A 2019 Pew Research Center survey indicated 53% of Americans “think it is generally unacceptable for a white person to use makeup to darken their skin to appear to be a different race as part of a Halloween costume.” Of that 53%, 37% believe it is never acceptable to do so.
But one-third of respondents said that it is “always or sometimes acceptable.” The survey also found that 39% of white respondents believe blackface is always or sometimes okay, whereas only 19% of Black respondents felt the same way.
You can watch the clip from “Have I Got News For You” in the video above.
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