Two years ago, I addressed cultural appropriation In Halloween costumes.
And one year ago, I addressed the bullshit Caitlyn Jenner costume for men.
“Gee, Niki”, you may wonder, “What are you gonna do for this year?”
I’m coming for your kids, folks. Hide ’em, lock ’em up.
…or just don’t do this to them:
Like, come on, parent, really? You’re full of shit from the word “retard” and then just kept tumbling into a mass of bigotry, bringing your kid right along with you.
Can’t wait to make a spectacle of your spawnling? Disney’s got you covered just in time for Moana to come out!
Really?
Really??
REALLY???
Disney, you were doing so well with this damn film and then…and then THIS? The first time I saw this thing, my jaw actually dropped. My jaw is threatening to drop from saving the image and putting it here.
WHY? Why are you selling the SKIN of one of your characters? Why are you selling the skin of any culture? To kids?
Every year around this time I wonder if I will have something to gripe about around Halloween and the costuming therein. And every year, I don’t have to worry – it’s always something.
I love Halloween. I love the entire month of October. My birthday’s in October. Halloween is in October. There’s Autumn in October, hot apple cider, caramel, turned fall leaves, and SKULLS EVERYWHERE. What I don’t like about Halloween are the humorless Jokers who KEEP fucking up. Same shit every year. First we have Kid Blackface, sooner or later some jackass is going to smear the feces that is shoe polish or brown makeup all over their face and poof! become *insert black stereotype or dead black person* here. Cisguys suddenly get the urge to don dresses and shitty makeup for this night only, night of jackassery, night of “Oh god, fuck you.” And with the rise of the asshole-proudly anti-PC-alt-right, goodness knows how many of these fucksticks will use the Spookiest Night of the Year as license to be…well…fucksticks.
Hey, who knows, maybe someone will get creative and combine the two and go out as a named dead black transwoman! Wouldn’t that be oh so clever and anti-PC!
…Thankfully I enjoy my Rumchata in October, too. And stouts. Lots and lots of stouts.
How about we make Halloween a celebration of the spooky or funny or heroic characters of your own culture’s past? If you’re Indian, you get Cochise, Sitting Bull, Pocahontas, Skin Walkers, etc. If you’re white, Napoleon, Dracula, Hitler, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and the like. I don’t dress up as Tikoloshe, Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth. Blackface has a history which leaves it forever unfunny.
Celebrate or laugh at yourself, not others. I’m thinking I could pull off George Custer. A few arrows sticking out of a board strapped to my back under an 1870 cavalry uniform . . . if I had an Indian friend who was local, he’d be welcome to be Sitting Bull.
Just imagine the uproar if black people wore whiteface and dressed as the five Dallas cops. But a blackface insult to BLM is “just having fun”? It’s as tasteless as a person with no tongue.
Too many are using hallowe’en as an excuse to be “edgy”, to do or say what they know they can’t get away with the rest of the year. Naming and shaming (with photos) might be the answer.
I’m a middle aged white guy, and though I might see it as bad taste, I wouldn’t be bothered. But I also understand that through sheer luck, I was born on top of the mountain looking down, a dominant member of the dominant culture. I am a fair target for humor and ridicule, simply because it hasn’t and can’t hurt me. The asymmetry between my position and the black man’s position matters. Injured people deserve to be treated differently.