A TORY Brexiteer MP has claimed people have “lost their sense of proportion and sense of humour” over blacking up.
Desmond Swayne spoke to the Telegraph’s Chopper’s Politics podcast, expressing confusion at outrage over him dressing up with blackface as James Brown at a party years ago. Photographs of his costume emerged in national newspapers last year.
The MP told the podcast: “I am disappointed that people have lost a sense of proportion and a sense of humour, and that there are things you just can’t say and can’t do, even if they’re done for the best possible reasons.
“Going to a party and having fun in fancy dress seems now to be something that one has to take great precaution about in these woke times, and we all do unless we want the opprobrium of the great and good.”
Swayne, who this week was furious at England’s new face covering laws, calling them a “monstrous imposition”, questioned why people find blackface offensive.
“Why is it offensive? Now my children tell me: ‘Dad, of course it is offensive, of course you can’t do that.’ But why?
“Are you saying a black man can’t get into a fancy dress party as a white man? That we must stay in our racial silos? That we can’t interchange? I just don’t see the world that way.
“There is not a racist bone in my body. I can’t see why we have got to this stage where there are things that you can’t touch and can’t go to.”
Many people find blackface a deeply offensive practice. It originated about 200 years ago when black people were mocked for the entertainment of white people in minstrel performances in the US and Europe.
The performances did not just involve dark make-up, but included exaggerated insulting impressions of black people.
A campaign worker for Show Racism the Red Card, Ben Holman, has said: "The use of blackface is an out-of-date practice which is rarely seen these days demonstrating that public attitudes have long since moved on and that crude portrayals of black people should be considered unacceptable in modern day Britain.”
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