How to Avoid Being Called Racist This Halloween Season

Readers beware! “Appreciation” can quickly turn into appropriation.

Photo Credit: The Everett Collection

We’re now in the scary season, gals and ghouls! Bust out your Halloween's finest, blast a classic Halloween song and get into the spooky spirit.

I don’t know about you, but I love Halloween! It's my favorite unofficial holiday, and it happens in my favorite season, fall. I love visiting pumpkin patches (also known as Vons) and picking out the biggest pumpkin in the batch. I enjoy dressing up in my best glamorous drag or as a less elaborate Mortal Kombat character. And it warms my heart as I hand out candies to five-year-old trick or treaters in adorable costumes.

Although the season is meant to be fun spirited, we're bound to encounter people who take it too far in the costume department. People's lack of care and problematic racial and cultural sensibilities reveal themselves and create a mockery out of the so-called costumes they adorn. Karen will dress up with an Indigenous headdress; Chad will wear blackface, and Becky will style her hair in cornrows.

Inevitably, and as if reading a script, the response to being called out is some variety of "it’s just a costume, what’s the big deal?” and “this is cultural appreciation.” However, there’s a difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, appropriation is defined as the following:

“The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the practices, customs, or aesthetics of one social or ethnic group by members of another (typically dominant) community or society.”

There are vast examples of appropriation across the globe and especially within American society. For instance, the use of Indigenous people as football mascots is one of them. The entire British Museum collection is another, and even more highly contentious, the use of African American English Vernacular (AAVE) by non-Black people. Still, appropriation often masquerades as “appreciation” and does so with unbridled entitlement.

On the other hand, appreciation is a practice that includes a mutual and beneficial exchange between two different cultures. Unfortunately, American whiteness does not have a strong track record of ethically engaging with other cultures. In fact, its historical record shows a violent past that intentionally tried to wipe out Indigenous cultures and subsumed white ethnic cultures to hoard power and privilege. How does the past influence the present? Well, whiteness has created a condition where people seemingly want to engage with bits and pieces of, say, Black culture, but without actual Black people. That’s why white people are seen as “cool” when they adopt AAVE, but Black people are criminalized for it.

In a racialized society like ours, we have to be critical about how we engage with other cultures to not perpetuate white supremacy and racism. So, without further ado, here are some Halloween "costumes" to avoid, so you aren't labeled a racist:

For more on this piece please visit medium.com/@joeypierre