Last year, two white men, one dressed as a KKK member, and the other wearing blackface, won a costume contest at a Royal Canadian Legion hall in Campbellford, ON. The story made headlines in national and international newspapers.
In her editorial covering the issue, “I’m not a racist, but I play one on Halloween,” Arthur editor Meaghan Kelly critiqued the Legion’s response of apologizing to those who were offended, without making any effort to do more to change the thinking of those who were not offended, or who didn’t see the incident as a big deal.
This year, an Ohio University group called Students Teaching Against Racism in Society (STARS) has created a poster campaign to combat the idea that it’s okay to dress up as “a race” or, usually, an offensive racially-based stereotype, for Halloween. The posters feature a variety of people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds holding up photos of actual racist Halloween costumes. The posters read, “We’re a culture, not a costume,” and “This is not who I am, and this is not okay.” The campaign has been covered everywhere from CNN to Bitch Magazine to the CBC.
Amanda Hess of The Sexist has written a helpful blog post called “How to Inform a Friend Their Halloween Costume is Racist.” She writes, “Your friend may think you’re trying to ruin her Halloween fun. But really, racist stereotypes ruin a lot of people’s fun every day of their lives, and delicately making that clear may convince your friend that changing up the costume isn’t too much of a sacrifice.”
Another favourite anti-racist Halloween resource is Thea Lim’s “Take Back the Halloween!” originally posted on Racialicious in 2008. Lim argues that what we choose to wear on the day we have to look “abnormal” or “different” says a lot about our day-to-day assumptions about who and what is normal and expected. This isn’t about one costume, one day of the year, but about the everyday racist assumptions that prompt someone to choose costumes that are othering.
Lim writes that as a person of colour, especially as a kid, she “felt uncomfortable or silly dressing up at Halloween; that the idea of dressing up as ‘something different’ didn’t compute, because every day [I] felt like ‘something different.”’
I love that this is a year that we’re discussing racist Halloween costumes before they happen, but judging from the whiny comments about “PC Police” on pretty much every article covering STARS’s work, I don’t think everyone is on board just yet.
I thinkthis quote from Carrie Lieland Love’s post about the STARS campaign at the Ironing Board Collective blog is particularly excellent. She asks, “Since when is respecting everyone’s humanity ‘uptight?’ Sorry if you don’t know how to have fun without being an asshole.” If it’s “just a costume”, it should be easy to pick something isn’t gonna make you look like a racist douchebag, right?
