Why Your Halloween Costume Is Racist: A Handy Message for That Person You KnowYou may think it&rsquo
Why Your Halloween Costume Is Racist: A Handy Message for That Person You Know
You may think it’s an easy task to avoid committing a slew of race-based offenses against various communities while celebrating Halloween. And you’d be right! It’s not hard at all. But as 2018 has taught us, just because the bar is on the floor doesn’t mean a whole lot of people won’t find a way to trip over it.
So on the off chance that you’re reading this while hot gluing feathers to a headdress for your “Native American” costume, or know someone who is, here are a few tips on how to avoid being a jerk this Halloween, and sidestep the grim prospect of your racist party pics being dragged on social media from here to the afterlife.
Let’s start with the basics. Going to a Halloween party where your costume concept is merely “a non-white person” is bad! Dressing up as a Native American (that headdress I mentioned earlier — put the glue gun down!), a Mexican (moustache, serape) or a Black person (Blackface: don’t!) always relies on harmful tropes about real, living, breathing people for whom those stereotypes carry serious weight.
Take the “sexy Pocahontas” costume, for example. Native women still face some of the highest ratesof domestic violence and sexual assault of any marginalized group. And as far as Blackface is concerned, it has its roots in minstrel shows, which degraded Black people for white entertainment and helped solidify violent notions against Black people to keep them oppressed.
Still, some people don’t get what the big fuss is about when it comes to Blackface. I direct you to one Megyn Kelly, who on her morning show (which exists?) recently defended the use of Blackface thusly: “Because you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on Blackface on Halloween, or a Black person that puts on whiteface for Halloween. And back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.“
Yes, a lot of things were “OK” in the past, Megyn! That’s kind of the whole gist here. We don’t have to go very far back in history to see that Black people and people of color have suffered — and continue to suffer — from systemic injustice in this country. Jim Crow was once “OK” in the eyes of the law in the U.S., and so was slavery! As we try to right those wrongs, we move forward. In that endeavor, what was acceptable yesterday is, thankfully, not always acceptable today.
But that’s all in the past — why does it matter? you ask. Well, the thing is, it’s not the past. Let’s not even get into the fact that the past has an intimate impact on the present. Stereotypes against Black people still contribute to violence against Black people to this day, as well as injustices like housing and employment discrimination.
