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ALLIES PREPARE – IT’S ALMOST HALLOWEEN!

Oct 12

4 min read

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I always get an uneasy feeling this time of year. Halloween approaches, and I grip for the stereotypes on parade that are sure to come. It makes me wonder how far we have come in cultural awareness and sensitivity.

 

Allies, if you, too, cringe at seeing yet another “Muslim terrorist” or “sexy geisha” costume, here is some wording to help you explain your unease.

 

The simplest way I know to tell whether I might be misusing a culture is to remember that cultural appropriation is about power over, not shared power between equal human beings.

 

One of the guidelines I use is to ask myself: Is using this cultural object or custom mostly TAKING?

 

When there is a true exchange, it is mutual and consensual. There is equality between the parties. There is no undertone of “better than” or mocking or treating something as “weird” or “exotic” or trying something for a while because it’s part of the newest trend and then discarding it.

 

RESPECT means honoring the fullness of each human being. To treat an entire ethnic group as a costume is to reduce the people in that culture to caricatures. Every ethnic group has a diverse and broad culture with great variety within it.

 

Caricatures paint people as one-dimensional “cute,” “exotic,” or “dangerous” non-human objects. When people are not seen as human, equal to you, like you, it is a license for mistreatment, discrimination, and worse.

 

When you and your cultural group can be reduced to a caricature, it means that someone has the power to reduce you. It means that your humanity is not seen and is also always a painful reminder of the long history of violence because your group was treated as non-human.

 

What does it say when a store can sell an orange jumpsuit and a mask and call it an “Illegal alien” costume? What does it signify when white college students dress in blackface for Halloween?

 

These and many other examples mean the depicted people aren’t seen as equal. They are a source of humor – not of inclusive humor; I’m all for that – but humor that looks down on someone or a group and gets to say, “Look how weird or pitiful they are.”

When you add dressing up as a “thug” or some criminal to that “black face” or see costumes of “dirty Mexicans” with “brown face,” the message is: “I get to degrade you just because I can. And because I have little to no contact with actual Black or Latino people, Asian or First Nation people, I don’t see the hurt I’m causing.”

 

When we don’t know the history of communities of color, we can use people’s cultural symbols and objects without context, which is what gives any object or custom meaning.

 

Through these caricatures, negative stereotypes are reinforced. These same folks aren’t thinking of dressing up for Halloween as President Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor. Rather than dressing up as a “Muslim Terrorist,” why not dress as one of the many Muslim scientists who invented breakthroughs in medicine, surgery, physics, algebra, geometry, astrology, and chemistry?

 

Some may see a feathered headdress as a “costume” or a fashion statement, but for many Indigenous Nations, it symbolizes a call to strength, freedom, and spiritual enlightenment. Adrienne Keene of the Cherokee Nation writes, "Eagle feathers are presented as symbols of honor and respect and have to be earned." Feathers have diverse meanings within different tribes but are often symbols of connection to the Divine, not used for decoration. To receive an eagle feather is a momentous occasion, transcending individual use and celebrating a culture’s stories, values, and way of life.

Today, teenage girls in a sports bra and cutoffs run around at music festivals with eagle feather headdresses. Is that not disrespectful to a symbol a group has cherished for centuries?

 

By perpetuating stereotypes such as dressing up as a “Black gangster,” – an image is kept alive that affects who gets jobs or who gets profiled by the police. We can’t have a true democracy where every person counts, and every voice is heard when we have negative, cardboard images of each other.

 

Individuals may not be responsible for the fact that the police are 21 times more likely to shoot and kill a young Black man than one of his White peers. But because people come across these stereotypes every day – for Halloween, yes, but every day with jokes, films, and advertisements– people can wind up believing those stereotypes, and, therefore, that kind of thinking can have life-and-death consequences.

 

Whites who have been fed a steady diet of negative stereotypes are not likely to demand that the criminal justice system change. We need White allies to speak up and advocate for people of color’s rights. We are either adding to the stereotypes and, therefore, the excluding and discriminating behaviors resulting from them or challenging them and changing our system to inclusion.  

 

I also understand that human beings influence each other. Our arts are a blend of people picking up on each other’s cultural expressions. However, if a group’s “stuff” has been misused over the centuries, if a group has had little power to feel that anything is theirs, seeing people from the dominant group use the “stuff” and call it their own and, often, reap monetary rewards people of color group never did or could, is going to cause resentment.

 

It’s easy to talk about and blame others who we think are responsible for the racial tensions we experience today. But something as simple (and complex!) as choosing a costume can add to or diminish our country’s racial divides.

 

Many questions remain: