I feel I am reasonably well qualified to comment. I have danced black face. I have performed a mummers play in black face. As the son of an east European immigrant I have been the recipient of racist abuse which was part of the reason that my family changed our surname. Things do and should move on. When I suffered said abuse it was in a backwater Northern town in the 1950s. Never happened after 1964 when I attended senior school with a different set of people who did not know my original surname. In the light of recent news I am both relieved and angry that my surname is no longer east European and even more so that my sons and grandsons will never be called names, spat at, or worse for having a foreign surname or speaking a different language.

Sorry for the apparent drift but now you know part of my story I can get back to the thread. I never had a concept of colour being a definition of someones character. When, in those heady days of Bernard Manning and co, jokes were made based on racial stereotypes I never really understood them. When, in the 1980s and 1990s I danced and acted in black face it never dawned on me that some may see it as offensive and I argued strongly, using all the previous points, that black face was completely innocuous. However, it was pointed out, possibly on here, that it may be seen as parody and stereotype and could therefore be regarded as offensive. This planted the seed in my mind.

Some time later, possibly early 2000s, I had been away to the West Indies and returned with souvenir Rasta hat and mini steel drum with every intention of using both at the folk club one night. Well, the night came and, for the first time ever, a black man came into the club. The hat and drum stayed firmly in my bag and from that day on I have not blacked up. I have no idea if the black man would have been offended or not. The point was, if I did NOT do it, there was no chance whatsoever of him being offended. Apart from by my poor singing of course.

Sorry to ramble on so I suppose I should get to the point really. The type of racist thugs that beat a poor Polish man to death because they believe everyone else dislikes immigration could happily latch on to an excuse to take the piss out of black people by masking it (pun intended) as tradition. All I ask is, why risk it when there are many perfectly good alternatives?

Thanks for listening.

Dave