Video: Is This Australian MJ Spoof Racist?

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The video above is of a skit broadcast at the weekend on the Australian TV show Hey Hey It’s Saturday, on the Nine Network. In the skit, a troupe of dancers do a silly imitation of the Jackson 5. Nothing very noteworthy about that.

Except that they blacked up.

Is this racist? Plenty of people think so. The singer and actor Harry Connick Jr, who was a guest on the same show, was appalled. Helen Coonan, a liberal Australian politician, called it “disgusting”. Rob Hulls, Victoria’s acting premier, said the act was offensive.

The troupe’s leader, Dr Anand Deva, has apologised for any offence caused. (He’s the one who’s painted his face white to impersonate Michael Jackson. Nobody seems much offended by this.) He said, “It certainly was not meant to be racist in any way at all.”

Dr Deva points out that he himself is Indian, although I’m not sure that that alone counts as proof that the joke wasn’t racist – an Indian can be racist about other races, just as a white person, or indeed a black person, can.

Curiously, I don’t recall much outrage when David Walliams blacked up in Little Britain:

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Normally I’d say performing in blackface was in poor taste.

But then, Michael Jackson spent the last 25 years of his life in whiteface, and I can’t say I was offended by that.

Telegraph / Thanks Neyha & Joy C!