Let’s stick to non-offensive costumes this year. Photo courtesy of Glam.
BREANA WILSON | OPINION COLUMNIST | [email protected]
Imagine. You are invited to a Halloween party. At your local Halloween store, you might come across some costumes like “Reservation Royalty,” “Voodoo Queen,” or something equally hideous. Halloween is a holiday where cultural appropriation is rampant and normalized.
Many of these costumes have very racist undertones and are rooted in colonialist ideas. They try to portray the cultures they supposedly portray as wild, exotic and strange.
Companies such as Spirit Halloween and Party City are mostly associated with the sale of costumes aimed at indigenous, African American, Creole, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American cultures. This allows companies to profit from the misrepresentation of entire cultures.
Kamarie Fuller-McDade, first-year biochemistry and multilingual major, believes that capitalism has essentially enabled these corporations to take advantage of these groups.
“[Cultural appropriation] leads to marginalized groups even culturally appropriating each other, causing POC and other groups to fight each other while the corporate 1% make a profit [off] during Halloween,” McDade said. “So it’s like a two-in-one thing. Marginalized groups fight each other instead of focusing on the people who cause it, which is the 1% and 1% benefit of the party in general.”
Two strong examples of marginalized groups stealing from other marginalized groups would be Beyonce and Coldplay stealing from Indian culture in the “Hymn for the Weekend” music video, as well Alexis, an American Jewish drag queen wearing a Native American headscarf. Both cases were for profit or fashion purposes, showing how capitalism’s tight grip on culture refuses to loosen.
Many companies have received enough feedback that they realize it is wrong to sell these costumes, but they refuse to take them off the shelves.
Dylin Eazell, fifth year speech, language and hearing sciences major, believes it is unacceptable for companies to be complacent in acts of cultural appropriation.
“I think there’s a whole market for it, where people think it’s really funny and weird,” Eazell said. “A lot of the classic ones, like sugar skulls from Mexican cultures [and] geishas from Asian cultures… They are just disrespectful and based on negative stereotypes that are really harmful to the community.”
Many people who wear these suits are painfully unaware of the damage they are doing by wearing these suits. Some think these suits are just a piece of fabric made for one time use, but they are much more than that. These costumes are deeply rooted in oppression and racism and are used to mock or erase the true history of these groups. By participating in cultural appropriation, they are perpetuating stereotypes and harming marginalized groups.
For Eazell’s examples of geishas and sugar skulls, these specific costumes tend to be oversexualized or displayed through a lens clouded by colonial views, which has resulted in the misrepresentation of these cultures. This and the fact that people continue to buy them from large corporations results in further damage to these groups.
First-year political science major Justin Deem-Loureiro, an Indigenous student, feels like people aren’t aware of the damage they’re doing and don’t see the consequences of their actions.
“It’s disturbing to see people’s cultures, especially the culture of indigenous peoples, used as a costume,” Deem-Loureiro said. “Many natives see their culture completely ignored, and that hurts because people never really understand the real concerns of indigenous peoples. [Change] get an education [and] learn about the land you are on, the tribes that lived here first and acknowledge their existence by showing respect. And that starts with the cultural misappropriation of the native culture.”
Many of these suits, such as those appropriating indigenous and African cultures portray these groups as barbaric or uncivilized, which is by no means true. When people continue to wear these costumes, they promote negative stereotypes about these groups and allow their erasure.
The lack of empathy and increased drinking during Halloween is an ideal situation for those with no better judgment to say and do offensive things that dehumanize specific groups. Eazell agrees that people need to be educated enough to know right from wrong when it comes to what they decide to buy off the shelf.
Deem-Loureiro believes that a lack of education has caused people to give up on taking cultural acquisition seriously.
“I think [cultural appropriation is] wrong because I like white people, it’s something to joke about,” said Deem-Loureiro.
Unfortunately, society has normalized this. People in power have gotten away with cultural appropriation for decades. With their influence, it’s very easy for people to let them get away with it, thus normalizing it in the process. When people see that those in positions of power can get away with doing things like this, it enables them to do the same. Prime examples of this would include Katy Perry AND the king’s fur performing in traditional clothing from various non-white cultures, late night talk show host Jimmy Fallon doing blackface for a sketch and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doing brownface in 2001 at a Halloween party. All of these were for profit or just for fun. The reaction of the public has been little to noneand these cases seem to be joked about whenever these celebrities are mentioned, showing how little people understand cultural appropriation.
We need to be educated enough as a society to realize how wrong this is, yet we continue to fail marginalized groups who are disproportionately subject to cultural appropriation. We refuse to accept their age-old struggles and use them as a single suit for a house that we will forget in the morning.
So the next time you enter a Halloween Spirit, just choose to be a sex rat or something that isn’t racist.
