Thump.
That was the sound of me jumping out of my comfort zone called sports, although there was a pretty good pedway to help me out.
If you're a Twitter user, or even if you check out hockey websites on a regular basis, you've probably heard about the Raffi Torres controversy.
Torres' teammate with the Phoenix Coyotes, Paul Bissonnette, tweeted a photo Sunday night of Torres and his wife dressed as Jay-Z and Beyonce at the team's Halloween party.
Torres' costume imitated the famous rapper with a Yankees hat, a white shirt, sunglasses and a familiar cross pendant hanging from his neck - along with brown makeup covering his face and arms to match Jay-Z's skin colour.
Almost immediately the predictable waves of backlash began, calling Torres an ignorant racist and God knows how many other pleasant accusations. Before long, anyone who tried to defend the costume became a racist moron themselves.
Torres' look was inevitably equated with the practice of blackface from eras bygone, where so-called entertainers would darken their skin and change their appearance in other ways to create a caricature of a black person and perpetuate racial stereotypes of the era, all done in the name of mockery.
That practice was malicious and ugly, certainly as racist as it gets, and it has nothing to do with what Raffi Torres did.
Torres is a big fan of Jay-Z and, let's be frank here, you can wear the guy's clothes and accessories and everything else, but it's pretty hard to look exactly like the guy with a different skin colour.
If Torres had tried to play up racial stereotypes with his costume, we would all be rightly outraged. But he didn't. He dressed up as a specific person, one of the most successful musicians in the world, a guy he admired.
Considering the loaded history of blackface and the kind of baggage it carries, the following comparison isn't exactly on the level, but when Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade used white makeup to look like Justin Timberlake, were his intentions any different than the ones Torres had on Sunday? Of course not.
And that's what this boils down to: intent. What Torres did is not blackface. Calling it blackface lumps him in with the bigots from vaudeville.
Could you call it insensitive? Perhaps. Racist? Go stand in the corner.
It's 2011. Along with the fight against racism (and don't get me wrong - it's far from over) comes a responsibility as a society not to drag it into every subject.
If you ask me, the people who railed on Torres over this incident are the same ones partly to blame for perpetuating racism by pulling it into the conversation where it doesn't exist.
Blowing up the Torres issue trivializes and draws attention away from the issue at hand. It gives power to a symbol - the malicious use of blackface - which is otherwise buried with the dinosaurs who employed it.
People are people. Stop looking at everything in a racial context. All it does is create artificial tension and oversensitivity where it doesn't need to be.
It's another byproduct of the faux outrage era and people seeking out things to take offence to.
Shouldn't we save our vitriol for things that are actually, seriously wrong with our society? Because there's a lot of it to sort through, including actual racism.
Josh Lewis can be reached by phone at 634-2654, by e-mail at [email protected], on Twitter at twitter.com/joshlewis306 or on his Bruins blog at bruinbanter.blogspot.com. On another note, why do NHL teams still insist on including the phrase "per team policy, terms undisclosed" with every press release about a contract signing? Everyone knows within five seconds anyway.
