Halloween is a time to dress up in costumes and celebrate with loved ones and friends. A pinnacle day where everyone across the nation comes together to dress as a brand new, or just different, person.
From sexy cardiac arrest nurses to officer pat-me-downs, how do we as individuals stand out from the rest?
With new and upcoming movies being released, this surely brings new ideas to the playing field. However, when times are tough, it’s important to be aware of the type of outfits you all will be putting on.
As per usual, it’s a sign to head to the Halloween store and gather a group of costumes to see some inspiration. These stores, which often find themselves in the carcusses of closed big boxes, are full of trinkets and embellished costumes to appeal to everyone and their fancy.
They are also full of offensive dress-up garb that may make you more cringe, less scary.
Think cultural appropriation. Think sexualization.
In one aisle, a hat with dreadlocks tucked under a colorful top waits for someone who thinks it’s ironic and not insulting. Somewhere else in the store, the “Queen of the Tribe” is a blonde haired, blue eyed woman wearing 1950s Western garb with a Oregon Trail type wagon behind her tight-fitting ensemble that looks nothing like authentic native dress.
These costumes aren’t just masks, or wigs, or outfits, they are identities people are born with. For the costume wearer, it’s a single point in time. A night. For those of us who are being parodied, it’s the identity we are born with. It’s our internalized struggles pitted against us. It’s our cultural attire as a power struggle as we battle to find our inner voices.
It’s the fight between understanding the fine line of internalized racism and fun.
For us, we can’t conveniently take off the culture we were born with. So if you try to appropriate being a “Cholo” or doing blackface during a college party, you sweep the generational trauma under the rug. We see these costumes as our history, the struggles of our people who had to sacrifice millions of generations for a better living. It’s the millions of bloodshed that took us to find our place and accept who we are.
For others, they can wrap it up in a plastic bag and call it day.
They can be labeled as the most exotic or best dressed for that one Halloween night. For many of us People of Color, we can’t. We couldn’t hang our cultural identity when we were labeled as habitant for a virus or lynched and brutally tear-gassed for simply protesting for equal rights. We couldn’t hide our identities, when our homes were raided because we were “savages” and “barbaric.”
We see it as a form of mockery when you wear cheaply made polyester outfits to represent us.
While you’re getting praised for an attire that makes you standout, we’re out here discredited because we’re considered a distraction for the way we have our hair naturally or the way we cover our hair.
To you, it’s a fun costume. To us, it’s so much more. And so much deeper.
So while cultural appropriation makes headway through the Halloween season, it’s important to remember that these cultural attires are more than cheap and processed bamboo hats or even chemically enhanced face paint. It’s more than the mockery you call a “appreciation.” You’re generalizing our experiences. You’re viewing us as costumes rather than people.