My son Danny will turn 13 this Wednesday – he had his Bar Mitzvah yesterday, in fact – and last week I took him shopping to try to figure out a Halloween costume. When I spotted a dreadlock wig, I hit instantly on an idea that I was surprised hadn’t occurred to us earlier: Danny, an avid Michigan football fan, could be Denard Robinson, the quarterback who has had some electrifying performances this season. I showed the dreaddies to Danny, without explanation, and he had the same immediate thought. Even better from my perspective, he had already wheedled a No. 16 Michigan jersey from me just a week or so before, so we already had the otehr key component of the costume. He could also borrow a pair of maize-colored football pants, we had socks that at least faintly resembled Michigan socks, and of course he knew to leave his shoelaces untied; Denard Robinson, sometimes called Shoelace (now also the name of our new kitten) is well known not to tie his laces. So we were all set – except for one thing.

Denard Robinson is African-American – and we are not. So I bought Danny some brown face paint. When one of my nieces, a professional makeup artist, was about to leave on Sunday at the close of the weekend’s Bar Mitzvah festivities, I told her it was a shame she couldn’t stick around a little longer to make up Danny’s face. When I explained why, she was horrified that I would let Danny go out in blackface; one of her older sisters was as well. My wife was intially reluctant, but relented, and Danny happily went off with his buddies with his face and neck, as well as the narrow space between the socks and the pants, dark brown.

It seems to me that Danny analyzed this situation correctly. If he were just dressing up as a generic football player, he said (in so many words), it would be in bad taste to color his face. But he was going as Denard Robinson. We could not replicate all aspects of Robinson’s appearance – it will be a while until Danny will be 6 feet tall – but this one we could with relative ease. It is inconceivable that one manufacturing a Barack Obama mask would not attempt to replicate the color of Obama’s skin, among other features. Was coloring Danny’s face so different?

I suppose that one could argue that a skin mask has to be some color, so one might as well copy the skin color of the person being modeled, but we didn’t have to go out of our way to color Danny’s face, and the fact that we did shows that we were focusing on Robinson’s race. But the fact is that, at least in our society, race is a salient part of one’s appearance – to blacks as well as to whites – and of course Halloween costumes are entirely about appearance. On a narrow view, it seems to me that Danny’s costume would have been considerably less successful had he not colored his skin. And on a broad view, I think the very fact that this an issue, that one might hesitate to take such active recognition in a Halloween costume of the race of a well-known public figure, reflect the difficulty we have in holding frank discussions relating to race.