By now, you know the story. Liz Cambage Tweeted a photo of Australian Opals teammate Alice Kunek in blackface at an end-of-season WNBL event. This is Australia's fourth blackface incident in 2016, and it's only February. That's February 2016, not February 1967.
The disharmony this will likely cause in the Opals team ahead of the 2016 Olympics, and the weird non-apology from Kunek are already being discussed by media outlets across the country, but the issue of Australia's unusual obsession with defending blackface is yet to be addressed.
Below are just a handful of bizarre responses to Liz Cambage's Tweet. Rather than taking this as (yet another) opportunity to learn from (yet another) blackface incident, these Australians – likely representing a vocal minority of the country's diverse population – are instead turning on Cambage.
It should come as no surprise that these people remain mostly anonymous, and those who do have a personal avatar, appear to be white males.
It beggars belief why people turn against those who are offended by blackface. If it's not Cambage, as in this situation, it's Seth Sentry. Or Baro. Or Thelma Plum. If someone tells you blackface is not OK, it's a particularly ugly form of racism, it has a long history you most likely don't understand, and is essentially the sort of thing that causes pain and distress for others, then respect what's being said and move the fuck on.
Instead, we have an angry minority of people defending their god-given right to paint their faces and marginalise minorities if and when they feel like it. These people don't draw an income from painting their faces, so stopping this fuckery won't take money out of their pocket. It's not a long-held part of some sacred culture, so knocking off the blackface isn't going to affect their lifestyle in any conceivable way. But still these petulant bigots act as if blackface is just another perk of holding a white privilege membership card.
These are screenshots as opposed to embedded Tweets, but that's because people who like to run off at the mouth on social media are generally pretty quick to delete things when the heat gets too high. And if we're generalising here, they also tend to have super ambiguous profiles with no direct links to their actual identity – maybe because they know the bigoted views they so passionately defend are in fact, wrong?
