Overview

High School Teacher "Common" Costume Blackface Controversy refers to a viral video of a white California high school teacher dressed as African American recording artist Common for Halloween. The video led to the teacher's dismissal.

Background

On November 1st, 2019, Twitter @karrington_kk tweeted a video of their teacher dressed as Common. They captioned the video, "Sooooooooo… one of our WHITE teachers at mhs yesterday decided to paint his face so look like common the rapper yesterday." The tweet received more than 680,000 views, 4,500 likes and 2,200 retweets in less than one week (shown below).

Sooooooooo… one of our WHITE teachers at mhs yesterday decided to paint his face so look like common the rapper yesterday. pic.twitter.com/1WudSddCLZ

— karrington (@karrington_kk) November 1, 2019

The video features the teacher parodying a series of Microsoft commercials that feature rapper speaking about artificial intelligence. Microsoft posted one of these commercials on YouTube in February 2018. It has since received more than 1.7 million views (shown below).

Developments

School Response

The school district has not identified the teacher but, reportedly, has put him on administrative leave.

Chris Norwood, president of the Milpitas school board, denounced costume to the New York Times.^[4] He said:

As an African-American man, the history of blackface reminds me of the cruelty, hatred and fear my parents and people of African ancestry have dealt with in the past and still experience today around the world. Unfortunately, blackface still permeates global society today through social media, comedy and fashion.

In a statement, the superintendent of Milpitas Unified School District Cheryl Jordan and Milpitas High School principal Francis Rojas said:

It hurts to know that this type of cultural insensitivity and lack of cultural awareness still hovers in the background. We are committed to strengthening our school environment through culturally relevant and respectful education designed to address prejudice and racism so that we can prevent bullying and harassment.

Online Reaction

Later that day, the original poster of the video tweeted^[1] that the school told the teacher to "clean up", implying that they had been dismissed.

Many criticized the teacher for not knowing better. Twitter^[2] user @GringoStarr2029 responded to the video and wrote, "The ridiculous thing is that he's a teacher so he must be somewhat smart right? So how the fuck in 2019 can you be smart and not know that doing any form of face whether it be black or whatever is a big no no? Especially in front of students as a teacher. Brutal" (shown below, left).

Twitter user @LedgerTaylor tweeted,^[3] "I just don’t get it, there have been memes and everything this year telling people not to do blackface. There’s always one" (shown below, right).

Search Interest

Not Available.

External References