It took just 24 hours for members of the University of Colorado faculty to step back last week from an initiative that could have made the school a national laughingstock, although just how far they’ve retreated is not entirely clear.
Last Thursday, the Boulder Daily Camera’s Brittany Anas reported that the Faculty Assembly had been notified of a resolution proposed by its diversity committee criticizing the use of blackface paint at sporting events and other locales and calling for the campus community to “vigorously address” the practice.
By the next day, however, the chairman of the Boulder Faculty Assembly, Joseph Rosse, was assuring the reporter that blackface at sporting events was not the draft resolution’s target, even if it had been mentioned, he said. No, the problem was the use of blackface on Pearl Street during Halloween. “It’s really about blackface as a costume and not so much to do with students dressing in school colors for athletic events,” Rosse said.
Let’s hope the resolution has nothing to do with sporting events, rather than “not so much to do with” them, when its final version is considered next month. Putting on blackface obviously can be deeply offensive in most contexts when a non-black person is pretending to be, or to caricature, a black person. Such stunts have their roots in 19th century minstrel shows, which were often racist. But those who know anything about CU sports realize that the purpose of blackface among student fans is entirely different.
CU’s colors are officially silver and gold, but sports fans can be forgiven for thinking that black is an official color as well. After all, it has dominated home football uniforms for years — as well as most CU sports apparel available to the public.
In other words, CU students who paint their faces black do so for the same reason students at other universities paint their faces purple or yellow or green — as a sign of school spirit.
The faculty’s diversity committee no doubt understands this, which is why its objection to the practice in a draft resolution is so bewildering. It’s as if they were determined to find fault with a practice everyone else understands is innocuous.
Is the diversity committee on sounder ground with its concerns about Halloween revelers? Probably not, although students who wear blackface outside of a CU sporting event are indeed at risk of offending someone. Then again, the CU faculty doesn’t regulate expressive behavior — good or bad — on Pearl Street.
At a time when higher education funding is under terrific strain in Colorado, the last thing CU needs is a faculty resolution that reinforces the image — a mostly unfair image, as it happens — of academics as lacking in common sense and obsessed with issues of race and gender.
Surely professors have better things to do than wring their hands over how 19-year-olds paint their faces before going to cheer at a game.
