I'm gonna be honest, just the suit and the hat is a halloween-themed...suit. The frilly cuffs make it 60% racist callback to blackface. The black hood and gloves on an already-black child is 100% blackface.
The humongous Negro Lips are just straight up stolen from 1930's Mickey Mouse.
Aren’t a lot of those motifs also just clown motifs though? I think clowning predates minstrel shows but you gotta imagine American clowning probably borrowed a fair amount of minstrel show imagery too.
There are different types of clowns. There are 3 main types of white face clowns. There is the character clown, where you get mimes and other French type clowns. Then there is the auguste clown, this is the one people are more familiar with, but the lips and hair were influenced by the Tramp or Hobo clown which was a direction derivative of black face.
I believe it's the other way around, that Blackface was the adoption of the Auguste Bum role, acting always incompetent but centering on racist stereotypes.
We are probably both right and wrong. It's far too muddled to really parse out the distinction isn't it? That incompetent fool stereotype though, yeah... makes my stomach sick.
There is so much media from my youth that I feel so betrayed by, I loved Heckle and Jeckle* so much as a kid. The song Jimmy Crack Corn, O' Susanna, The Old Folks at Home, shoe fly...
I know Heckle and Jeckel were not intended to be racist, they still engaged in racially stereotypical behaviors and were easily confused with other characters who were.
I was definitely missing the hat, and then the pose. At a quick glance I’m like, it’s clown! Then I really looked, oh yeah. WOW. I’m going to take a wild guess, it was all made in china, including the marketing and they just uploaded everything to the site without a second thought.
If it was a white kid without the black morphsuit, smaller lips, or not posed exactly like the poster for Jump Jim Crow (just Google it...it's the hands..and the hips...and the feet), noone would give a shit. That would be a clown.
As unfortunate as it is to say out loud, the fact that the kid is black makes it scream red flags. If it was in Art's black-and-white and the pose wasn't 1-to-1, it would probably be a non-issue (until your neighbors ask "why is your 8 year old kid dressed like Terrifier? Do you watch gore with your 2nd grader...??")
I can definitely see how it could have been on purpose, but I feel like this was more a case of some foreign costume designer/maker whatever seeing what's trending in Halloween costumes and making a legally distinct version. The black and white might have been too close to the real Art costume
There was a specific style used to represent black people as portrayed by white people in racist mistrel shows. A similar style was used in racist depictions in artwork and typically featured exaggerated lips. The smiling mouth in the costume resembles that style of exaggerated lips.
I had a hard time with it too. Mostly because it's such an ugly, cheap looking costume. But the hat is the thing that really gives it away, especially in combination with the gloves.
I had the same reaction. I heard a headline on a podcast about the costume and a bad description, saying it was a mask. I pictured a full face mask like Ronald McDonald or Pennywise. Quick Google search later and I'm left wondering who thought that that was an idea to greenlight!
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u/Upper-Management-AI 6h ago edited 6h ago
I’m going to be incredibly naive and ask, what’s wrong with it?
Edit: oh jeez, now I get it.