Trudeau has not whitewashed his stupidity, but he is not a racist

Photographs last forever. Friendships don’t. Standards change. Those are the three interlinked reasons why Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, didn’t get away with blacking-up in his youth. He rightly describes it as “dumb”.

Meaning that, at the time of the impersonation, he wasn’t cognisant that pretending to be black might offend black people. Yet, even over here, by the time Trudeau was about six years of age, the Black and White Minstrel Show had been taken off the air by the BBC and the Lyons Tea minstrels were into the brown phase that came before they were handed what might be called their “Tea45s”.