Congressman revealed as MJ Superfan (went to 2005 trial)

No MJ super fan would do blackface in their right mind, unless he has a weird and twisted way to be a fan.

I don't know, to me context and intention matters. For example, im my country we have these shows on TV where celebrities dress up as famous singers and sing their songs. A part of the game was to also look like that famous singer. If the original singer is a red head the mimic will wear a read wig and if it's a black singer they painted their faces brown. Not in an offensive, clown-like, blackface way, just to look like them. Maybe now they don't do that anymore because we are too of course influenced by American sentiments and we learned since then what blackface is and and that it's considered offensive to black people in the US. But it really wasn't meant like that on that show here.

In this article about this congressman they mention:

"Historians who study blackface and racism in the United States said a costume like Mr. Lawler’s would have been relatively unsurprising at schools across the country in 2006, even though there was already growing sentiment that the practice was offensive no matter the context."

So it was still possible in 2006 to be oblivious to it being offensive. I think we have to judge things in their proper context. I say the exact same thing about when MJ was accused of antisemitism because of TDCAU: context matters. Intention matters.

Of course, I can't tell what was on this guy's mind when he did this, but considering he's a huge fan, my immediate assumption is not that he did this out of racism and as a way to mock MJ. And yes, I know that you can be an MJ fan and a racist and maybe he's one, but it's also possible that he didn’t do it with racist intention.

Blackface BTW traditionally, is a very specific type of painting your face black. It's a black mask with clowish white mouth, making black features deliberately grotesque or scary or clown-like with the intention of mocking or making black people look scary or inhumane. I'm not sure every time a white person paints his face brown it's that, but I understand that now it's considered that and so you shouldn't do it. But again, to call someone a racist to me context and intention matters. Just like in the case of antisemitism and TDCAU.