Image courtesy of color-blinding
It's October 23 which means it's ALMOST Halloween. Halloween brings a lot of fun things: parties, candy, pumpkin-flavored everything, dressing up and being silly. But because we can't have nice things, Halloween can also bring about costumes that are tasteless and racially offensive.
Here at Within Color, we've tackled cultural appropriation before (Alicia's intro, Jen's post, and my post) but it seems important to talk about it again now that people are looking into costumes that could be seen as offensive.
According to feminist blogger Veronica Arreola, who is also assistant director of Center for Research on Women and Gender at University of Illinois at Chicago, dressing up as something like La Llorona is different from dressing up like a sugar skull. "One is mythology, and the other is a stereotype that comes with a lot of baggage." Arreola says it's like dressing up as the Greek goddess Athena and paying tribute to a specific character instead of impersonating a stereotype that doesn't represent the culture as a whole. "La Llorona is a folk tale, our bogeyman, our witch from our culture. That as a costume is better than the idea of someone dressing up in a sombrero or poncho and deciding 'I'm Mexican today!'" Arreola said.
While the Ohio University message was great, it lead to lots of people making fun of it. The biggest example was white people pretending to be "red necks" or "trailer trash" and saying that they're not like that too (which is a whole other topic re: poor people--of ANY race--being invisible, etc). This Open Letter (unrelated to the STARS campaign) published in Native Appropriations by contributor Adrienne Keene explains the reason why "jokes" like these are harmful:
You walk through life everyday never having the fear of someone mis-representing your people and your culture. You don’t have to worry about the vast majority of your people living in poverty, struggling with alcoholism, domestic violence, hunger, and unemployment caused by 500+ years of colonialism and federal policies aimed at erasing your existence. You don’t walk through life everyday feeling invisible, because the only images the public sees of you are fictionalized stereotypes that don’t represent who you are at all. You don’t know what it’s like to care about something so deeply and know at your core that it’s so wrong, and have others in positions of power dismiss you like you’re some sort of over-sensitive freak.And for anyone who thinks "No one is THAT blatant," I urge you to click here, here, and here and come back to me.
You are in a position of power. You might not know it, but you are. Simply because of the color of your skin, you have been afforded opportunities and privilege, because our country was built on a foundation of white supremacy. That’s probably a concept that’s too much for you to handle right now, when all you wanted to do was dress up as a PocaHottie for Halloween, but it’s true.
There's a lot more that can be said but to keep this short, a few more links for your perusal.
How to Inform a Friend that their Costume is Racist (via The Sexist)
How to Dress Up Without Using Stereotypes (via The Root)
Is Your Halloween Costume Racist? (via Marketplace)
And to quote Malachi Segers, "Halloween can get complicated quickly. Perhaps the best piece of advice I've heard is to think ahead. Like, try to imagine yourself wearing an African Princess costume at a Halloween party and actually meeting someone from Africa. Awkward right?"
**Edit: This year's STARS costume does a GREAT job at addressing what was potentially missing in last year's message. Take a look here.
