The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #155810   Message #3669103
Posted By: Jack Blandiver
14-Oct-14 - 02:26 PM
Thread Name: Black-faced Morris dancers
Subject: RE: Black-faced Morris dancers
Goes to show the ignorance shown about our traditions, blacking up is historic, not racist.

Racism is quite a tradition in this poxy country of ours as the VERY RECENT proliferation of 'niggering' (to use the not so very-recent traditional term for the practise) in REVIVALIST Morris Circles proves only too well, which goes hand in hand with other mainstream traditional racism now finding popular support even amongst certain of my folkie cohorts. Poxy as I say.

In the UK the only black faces you see at folk events are morris dancers and local security guards, like when we played at the Moseley Folk Festival a few years back and I actually felt moved to apologise to the chap on the backstage door as a bunch of blacked-up neo-pagan morris-dancers (or whatever the fuck they were meant to be) capered past and he looked on with understandable alarm. Depressed was not the word.

Ignorance about our Traditions, huh? Well, my England is multi-cultural - the only ones that bother me are racial diversity and respect of same; anything else is anathema, so - no room for blacked up morris-dancers & their idiot apologists for whom ignorance has become quite a tradition in itself.