'A major mistake': David Byrne regrets Talking Heads' blackface, brownface skit

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I don’t think people should do blackface of course, but I find it hard to see the connection between racist things like this and the recent police shootings we have seen. There are real issues surrounding poverty, crime and overpolicing within black communities to be looked at, and this kind of campus activism just seems like a distraction.
 
People shouldn’t be “punished forever”, especially if they’ve become more aware and racially sensitive since the time the event occurred.
 
If he were the Governor of Virginia, or the Prime Minister of Canada, he’d got nothing to worry about. All covered.
 
The number of performers who wore blackface or brownface in the 80s was legion. There was even a hit movie called “Soul Man” about a white young man who takes tanning pills to get a blacks-only scholarship to Harvard Law School. While it wouldn’t be acceptable today, I also don’t see how it relates to any sort of poverty or brutality problem going on 30-40 years down the road.

As for Byrne being too hard on himself, he was a well-educated man from a racially mixed area when he chose to wear the blackface and he should have thought twice about it when he did it. I don’t see a point in apologizing now for a movie that everybody who wasn’t young in the 80s has forgotten about by this time.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
I don’t see a point in apologizing now for a movie that everybody who wasn’t young in the 80s has forgotten about by this time.
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Or never knew about in the first place. Does he have a new project in the works? Maybe that’s what prompted the sudden apology?
 
The article stated that even he had forgotten about the skit.
I myself saw and enjoyed the movie but I don’t remember that part of it at all. I remember the live musical performance parts as being very good.

I suspect maybe he was trying to get bookings somewhere and got called out on this skit so he felt he had to address it.
 
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