By snoadmin
Every Halloween the costume store fills with even more ridiculous and expensive costumes. Some of them are simple, some complicated. Most of the women’s costumes are just sexy versions of various professions. However, some students at Ohio University don’t like the way some costumes are depicting their culture, and they are taking a stand.
Sarah Williams and her group STARS have released a series of posters called “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume.” These posters depict students of different races holding a picture of the costume representing their race while looking depressed. The posters are accompanied by the phrase, “This is not who I am, and this is not okay.”
“To treat a character like Batman or Superman as a Halloween costume is one thing, but to treat an entire ethnicity as a costume is something else. It suggests that people conflate the actual broad diversity of a culture with caricatures and characters,” said Jelani Cobb, African studies professor at Rutgers University.
This campaign means well, but it is making a big deal out of nothing. These costumes are not meant to represent an entire race. It goes back to the very root of Halloween, which is to dress up as someone or something you are not.
Halloween is about making light of the things that offend us and the things that scare us. It’s about finding the darkness in humanity and making fun of it. It’s acceptable on Halloween to wear any costume as long as you’re aware that it is not supposed to mean anything. It’s okay to dress up as a fat McDonalds-munching American, or a zombie Uncle Sam; Americans shouldn’t be offended.
The best way to take power away from a stereotype is to laugh at it and accept that it is not true. These costumes are so exaggerated and silly that it actually emphasizes how ridiculous they are. These are fictional characters just like vampires and zombies are, everybody knows they aren’t real. If there are people who are basing their opinions of an entire culture, race or religion off of a Halloween costume, they have major issues.
If we start drawing lines on Halloween costumes we will start having to scrutinize everything. If a Geisha costume is considered racist, does that mean a ninja or samurai is racist? Does wearing a grass skirt count as a stereotype? If you start to break costumes down like this, almost all of them are offensive in some way.
We spend every day complaining about this and that, but Halloween is the one-day — besides April fools — where we are allowed to get a laugh out of whatever people dress up as. Let’s put all the serious bullshit aside for once and enjoy us a good laugh on Halloween.
You can make a spoof out of anyone and anything nowadays; so don’t let any costume make you feel singled out.
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