In early October 2009, a blackface parody of the Jackson Five performed on the Hey Hey It’s Saturday reunion reached not only an audience of over 2.5 million people in Australia, but also millions of people around the world after guest judge Harry Connick Jr accused the skit and the show of racism. The incident was widely discussed within various online communities, and whilst widely condemned internationally, online comment sections and responses to online newspaper polls suggested that the overwhelming opinion within Australia was that the skit was not racist. This paper considers the way in which such denials of racism were performed in online comments to a number of newspaper articles and polls.Clemence Du
