“obiwanwasabi: I’ll bet my immortal soul that most of you bleating about it wouldn’t have bat an eyelid if that nice young man hadn’t pointed out how wrong it was and how bad you should all feel.”

This is the most mind-bendingly stupid thing I’ve read today, and I’ve read a lot of dumb.

I don’t mean that as an insult, though you’re free to take it that way.

Please bear with me as I explain this to you point by point:

This has nothing to do with cultural inheritance.

This has nothing to do with ethnic background.

This has nothing to do with long-forgotten plantation traditions.

This has nothing to do with what we’re supposed to think is racist.

What’s going on here? It’s very, very simple. Five guys have painted themselves black because they think that being black is hilarious and silly.

See that? Let me say all this again: it doesn’t have to do with American traditions surrounding the old conventions of the minstrel show. It doesn’t have to do with our own liberal guilt, our rush to be politically correct in the midst of difficult racial tensions. It doesn’t have to do with the complex relationship between black people and white people in the United States or the presumptuousness that leads Americans to think that their problems are everybody’s problems.

Okay? Seriously. Put all of that out of your mind – clear it all away, all the stuff you’ve heard about minstrel shows and black slaves and the American south and all of that business – and then take a deep breath. Now that your mind is clear, look once more at the case of a set of guys who put on makeup to make themselves look like members of another race in order to be funny. Just look purely at that case: a set of guys who put on black makeup so that they look like black people, in order to make people laugh. There is one large, looming, unmistakeable message; can you make it out? What message does it send when a group of guys put on makeup and try to look like members of another race in order to make people laugh? Come on, think hard…

That’s right. The message it sends is:

THOSE PEOPLE SURE LOOK FUNNY!

And this act would send that message if you were Australian, Japanese, Laotian, Burmese, American, or whatever. For the last and final time: it’s a universal thing. You can’t just pass it off by saying “oh, well it’s different for us in our culture” - some things transcend culture, and this is one of them.