Here's an idea for Halloween! Put your white kids in blackface, then send them out to collect for UNICEF! If that sounds horrid, tasteless, offensive and probably criminal, read on ...

With Halloween coming up and Rebecca doing such a great job of bringing the UNICEF connection to the page, it seems a good day to give yet another reason not to support the organization by stuffing their begging boxes with anything other than little notes explaining that not even a dime will be forthcoming.

Not that we need more reasons. As Lisa on the Guatemalan blog points out so well, UNICEF should be ashamed of itself, and not trying to send legions of innocent children out to fill the coffers without full disclosure of what it has done with all the money given so far. (Paying for First Class airfare, convoys of new SUVs and matching caps for entourages for PR-spinning, star-studded appearances in countries where children are starved, raped and murdered on a daily basis ... how's that for 'Trick or Treat'? ... does not fall into the category of money-well-spent, but I would like to see the tab.)

So, we don't NEED more reasons, but we get them anyway.

Here's a doozy ...

UNICEF's latest ad campaign ... and yes, it's as much an ad campaign as any selling peanut butter or presidential candidates ... consists of a series of still photos of grinning white children in blackface.

Yep.

And as you can see, the blackface looks very much like mud.

In this series of four ads, the image is combined with text that translates to: ’I’m waiting for my last day in school, the children in Africa are waiting for their first one”; “In Africa, many kids would be glad to worry about school”; “In Africa, kids don’t come to school late, but not at all”, and “Some teachers suck. No teachers sucks even more.”

As is pointed out on the "ligali: equality for African people" website, critics of the ads are stating that they "do nothing more than propagate the fabricated notion that all Africans on the Continent merely languish in poverty passively waiting for 'kindly' western intervention," and that the "... imagery of the blacked up European children is wholly unnecessary serving only to caricaturise [sic] and humiliate African children and people worldwide, imparting on audiences that African children are subordinate and inferior to Europeans."

Here's a bit of reaction from the blog Black Women in Europe:

Besides claiming that every single person in "Africa" isn't educated, and doing so in an extremely patronising [sic] way, it is also disturbing that this organisation [sic] thinks blackfacing [sic] kids with mud (!) equals "relating to african children". Also, the kids' statements ignore the existance [sic] of millions of african[sic] academics and regular people and one again reduces a whole continent to a village of muddy uneducated uncivilized people who need to be educated (probably by any random westerner). This [is] a really sad regression.
Bottom lines of this campaign are: Black = mud = African = uneducated. White = educated.

This blogger wrote to UNICEF in Germany (publicrelations@unicef.de) and received a reply, but even the considered defense is so clearly clueless that it reads like a practice in "how not to get it".

The Der Schwarze Blog is asking for people to join in promoting a list of demands for "fair UNICEF advertising" that includes an apology.

Perhaps a copy of your mail to UNICEF would make a nice contribution for Halloween ... or feel free to stuff a copy of this blog in the box!