Halloween Costume Horrors

Halloween has just passed for another year; I got exactly zero kids trick or treating at my house, partly, I think, due to the location of my house which is nestled neatly in between giant apartment buildings, and partly because of the threat of hurricane Sandy which battered the north east coast of the US, but hardly had an impact on us here is little ol’Halifax, but I digress. Halloween is probably my favourite “holiday,” Some great songs have come about because of it,

 great costume ideas, like your favourite superhero, and sadly some horrible costume ideas. This is what I’d like to talk about, the racial stereotypes found in many Halloween costumes, the discourse that surrounds this issue, and how the ideology of racism is reinforced.

There are many costume websites each selling more or less the same themes,"the Indian," "the Mexican," "the Asian," and many others. Now I'm not interested in destroying Antone's fun, I just want to suggest that people think through what the message is that they are representing.

Peggy McIntosh, writes in her article title White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack, that one of the ways that she is able to exercise her white privilege is "remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of colour who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion." This I believe speaks to how we as a culture have been able to not only ignore the richness of other cultures but to neatly package them so they fit into our ideology of the world. Dressing up as an "Indian," for example, you are reinforcing the image of the Aboriginal as the, in the case of males, "violent primitive warrior" with his war paint on and tomahawk in hand ready to scalp any white person he comes across. For Aboriginal women it is the "sexy Indian" costume that is most predominate, now sadly the over sexualization of Aboriginal women has led to some staggering number of assaults, murders, and disappearances. A fact sheet, by the Native Women's Association of Canada, from 2010 outlines some of these facts. What follows is a short film that further explains these problems of violence.

Survival, strength, sisterhood: Power of Women in the Downtown Eastside

 



So as we can see these stereotypes, far from being accurate, are harmful to the communities, and individuals that belong to these racialized groups. With the example of Aboriginals what we see is the symbolic violence exercised against them, through appropriation of culture and the continued reinforcement of the hierarchy of colonialism transforming, into forms of physical violence