Or an Indian, Chinese, Native America, Mexican …
There’s another post on my fl list that says puts it even more bluntly, but its locked. However, I found another blog that breaks down the sentiments quite nicely. My identity is NOT a costume for you to wear! (The Native American via Ancient Eygpt costume is in a class by itself. Jesus!) Halloween is for fantastical fanciful monsters creatures of myth and lore and legend. Insulting caricatures of minorities do NOT fall under that description. And YES, it’s insulting, NO its not fucking respectful, or fun!
REPOST: Don’t dress up like what you think is a Jamaican this Halloween. -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman
I completely agree that treating someone else’s race or culture like a costume is offensive and not okay. But I disagree that Halloween is only for “fanciful creatures” – what about dressing up like a firefighter, astronaut, doctor, ballerina, police officer, bride? (Of those, the only one I’ve been personally for Halloween was a bride… I was eight, okay?) It seems to me that whether a costume is a real thing people can be or whether there might be someone at the party who is one (depending on your social circle, this is a lot more likely for the doctor or the cop than for the astronaut – er, that sounds like I mean a doctor and a cop won’t be in the same social circle, when what I mean is, most of us don’t hang out with astronauts) isn’t really the reason race costumes aren’t okay – they’re not okay because they’re racist, that’s all.
great post. I wrote one myself called My Body is Not Your Halloween Costume, inspired when I saw some douchey ads for “fat chick” costumes.
I think it’s important for people not to turn the identity and/or body of anyone who is oppressed into a Halloween costume.
Costuming oneself as a negative stereotype is way out of bounds. Regardless of what race or ethnicity is being portrayed.
Now, say a white guy wants to costume himself as the President of the United States. Would it be unacceptable for him to put black makeup on his exposed skin? What about exaggerating any specific physical characteristics of the President?
Now, say a white guy wants to costume himself as the President of the United States.
In priniciple, going as a specific public figure seems ok. But I tried visualizing a white guy in an Obama costume and just couldn’t come up with any way to make it anything less than utterly tacky. Sorry. I can’t give a well reasoned explanation but my gut says “No, no, NO!”
This is from my (white) perspective, but given the history of blackface the well has essentially been poisoned there; I don’t think there’s really a respectful way for a white person to dress as Obama…there’s too much (justified) baggage involved. But that’s just my feeling.
RonF, the white guy would buy an Obama mask. Unless he looked uncannily like a paler Obama, there’d be no reason for him to put on blackface except so that he could play innocent and say “Gee, why are you mad at me, I’m just trying to look like Obama!”
But, as you’re aware, unusualmusic isn’t talking about dressing up as a specific public figure. There’s a huge difference between “I’m Bob Marley” and “I’m a Jamaican.”
Masks suck. Ever try wearing one all night at a party? Especially if you want to eat and drink. They also cost a lot more than a tube of greasepaint.
Now, if you want to talk artistic merit, that’s in the eye of the artist and the beholder. The secular aspect of Halloween is all about being what you’re not, and looking ridiculous doing it is very often part and parcel of that.
The possibility of an intersection between “co-opting a racial/ethnic identity/culture” vs. “Lampooning a public figure” was exactly what I wanted to explore.
Greasepaint sucks. Ever tried wearing it all night at a party? Ever seen what you look like five minutes after you get there when you have an itch to scratch or you take a drink or sweat a little?
That’s a pretty shallow intersection to explore. It’s certainly possible to go in costume of a non-white public figure in an offensive way – wearing an Obama costume and carrying a bucket of fried chicken everywhere – but I’m not getting that there’s a fine distinction between a costume of a public person who is of another race, and the costume being the fact that it’s someone of another race. “I’m Jet Li!” != “I’m a Chinese guy!”
Indeed I have worn greasepaint all night. More than once. Outdoors running around and in front of a roaring campfire on a couple of those occasions. The trick is to rub a goodly amount of Noxema (or similar product) into your skin first. That doesn’t completely cure the problem, but it helps a lot.
And yes, I see a clear difference between dressing up as the current President and dressing and making me up as, for example, a “pickaninny” (as my parents once did with me almost exactly half a century ago). I was curious as to whether others did, and to what degree. There seems to be some difference of opinion on the matter, too.
And yes, I see a clear difference between dressing up as the current President and dressing and making me up as, for example, a “pickaninny” (as my parents once did with me almost exactly half a century ago). I was curious as to whether others did, and to what degree. There seems to be some difference of opinion on the matter, too.
I’m conflicted about this. It seems to me that if there’s anyone who should be a fair target for caricaturing it must be the president of the US. However, the idea of a white guy (or gal) in blackface, for whatever reason, completely creeps me out. There’s just too much baggage there for it to work as a lighthearted costume. Maybe there’d be some other way to suggest Obama? Fake ears perhaps? Clever acting? Simply darkening a white guy’s skin isn’t going to make him look like Obama anyway…What would you do if you wanted to go as George Bush but hated masks? Think along the lines of specific features and characteristics.
Leaving aside the ethics — I’ll get to that in a minute — there is no logical reason to use greasepaint on one’s face to look like Obama. For one thing, doing it the way RonF is suggesting wouldn’t even make sense — Obama doesn’t have shiny, greasy, mottled gray-black skin. No human being does. For another thing, the man is positively pale by black people’s standards; at best a pale white person might need to put on a little medium-toned foundation to match his coloring. Maybe a spray tan.
The question I always ask myself when contemplating whether something is problematic is, would we do it for white people? I saw lots of people dress up as Dubya back when he was the laughingstock of the Oval Office. Their costumes usually exaggerated his ears, because he’s perceived as stupid, whether he is or not. He’s also fairly pale by white-man standards — he’s no John Boehner, anyway. Never saw any of those “Dubyas” apply white greasepaint. Ditto people dressing up as Lincoln, etc. — and that includes black folks I’ve seen who’ve done so; I’ve never seen them pull a whiteface. They stuck on the Lincoln beard and hat, wore a Nixon mask and mimicked his “I’m not a crook!” schtick, whatever. But that’s because our society treats whiteness as neutral — which it isn’t. It has power and meaning in our society. As does blackness, but its meaning is entirely different. By de-emphasizing the skin color of a white prez, and exaggerating Obama’s skin color, anyone trying to dress up at him is trying to make a statement, non-verbally. And given our culture, that statement probably isn’t a good one. It could be. But given the number of negative stereotypes about blackness in American society, and the relative paucity of positive ones, the odds are against that statement being positive.
nojojo:
On that basis, given the number of times it was done when Bush II was President, it would be perfectly O.K. to portray Obama as a gorilla or chimpanzee.
A white man dressing up as a white president isn’t going to put on white makeup to match up his skin color exactly, he’s going to use his default complexion. And a white man dressing up as a black president isn’t going to try to use black greasepaint to match his skin color exactly either, he’s just going to change from “white” to “black”. Presuming in both cases we’re not talking about a professional actor. As far as what statement he’s making beyond “I’m Obama”, that’s your projection with no fair basis for presuming anything else.
Meanwhile, I went to my brother and sister-in-law’s house Saturday night for a Halloween party? Guess what my brother-in-law dressed up as? Yes, indeed, the very title of this post.
Cheers, Nojojojo.
RonF @9, I’ve worn full-face masks many a time at Halloween; they were a lot more comfortable than greasepaint. If you want to eat and drink, you take the mask off, then put it back on. You don’t end up with mask smears on your clothing and it doesn’t matter if you sweat a little.
The ‘chimpanzee’ comparison to Bush only makes sense if you pretend there was never any history of analogizing black people to apes and monkeys.
RonF, the “it” I meant was whiteface/blackface. As I said, I don’t see people — by which I also mean non-white people, since you only mentioned white people in your response — commonly donning whiteface makeup to play white presidents. There’s a reason it happens mostly to black people, and it’s perfectly fair, and right, to point that out.
I have an issue with the notion that not only is it wrong to dress up as a person of another race (or as a person of another culture), but it’s also wrong to dress up as something that represents another culture or religion.
My reason for this is because, at least in the U.S., this means that monsters, characters, and jobs that are typically associated with white people are acceptable, while monsters, characters, and jobs that are typically associated with people of color or other minorities are unacceptable. It’s a stance that once again treats whiteness as “neutral” and everyone else as an exotic other.
For example, I see very little criticism of costumes like Paul Bunyan, angels, or BP executives. But I’ve read a lot of criticism of costumes like samurai, Shiva, or rappers.
I’m not sure there’s a solution to this (I certainly don’t think that anyone ought to try to get more offended when they see a cowboy costume, say). But I think the double-standard is problematic not because “white people are victims, too!” but because cultural critics are perpetuating the notion that European-American culture is not a culture, but is instead the culture, and everything else is somehow secondary.
I’ve never seen anyone complain about Hindu people dressing up as Shiva.
On the other hand, I suspect if you had lots of Hindu people dressing up as Jesus–only some strange, not very accurate interpretation of Jesus–people would look askance at it. And then if you imagined colonial power in reverse, that India had once owned Britain and exercised control over its citizens, and felt itself empowered to make decisions about the legitimacy of its religious practices; if you imagined an entire history of subjugated white, European and American Christians, complete with attempts to gain legitimacy by making the trinity seem polytheistic instead of monotheistic and so on…
Then you might have a parallel situation, yes?
One of the black students at the IWW dressed up as a lawn jockey a few years ago. I didn’t see anyone complaining. For the record, white people also can’t use the n-word in the same ways and with the same connotations as black people can.
Racism: not a neutral.
(For the record, I felt your argument was well-intentioned, and I hope my response isn’t read as angry or shaming… I just think it fails to take enough account of power.)
Phil,
a) Paul Bunyan is fictional. It doesn’t make sense to associate him with any race; he doesn’t exist. But if you want to get nitpicky about it, he’s a creation of French Canadian culture, born from that oppressed group’s struggle to escape second-class citizenship at the hands of the Protestant majority. Makes perfect sense to me that oppressed groups in America might identify with him. Race isn’t the only axis of identity.
That said, if they chose to do it in whiteface, I might have a problem with it. And if there was, as Mandolin said, a history of brown people appropriating and belittling “white cultural” touchstones, and so on.
b) Angels are a product of Judeo-Christian and Islamic culture — all the “People of the Book”. So any one of those groups has an equal right, IMO, to embrace their own culture. The fact that angels have historically been depicted as white is another matter — that’s the result of Western imperialism and racism. So brown people dressing up as angels would be a reclaimation of their own culture, provided they’re Christian and could do so knowledgeably.
c) BP executives — I would personally love to see costumes of those guys; did you see any this year? ::lol:: But a) not all of BP’s execs are white; b) the oil spill didn’t only affect white people, so it’s hardly exemplary of “white culture” alone; and c) thinking about how I would do such a costume myself, it’s not the execs’ race that stands out as their salient characteristic. It’s their hubris. A good BP oil exec costume would find some way to focus on this — maybe a really snazzy suit, a fat cigar, I don’t know. Their race is irrelevant. So I would have a problem with a BP exec costume in whiteface because it would be a bad costume.
The problem of cultural appropriation lies not just in the use of another culture’s “product”, for lack of a better word. That usage is irrelevant in and of itself. It’s when that usage is associated with a power differential — when it’s used by a dominant/oppressing culture in order to further the dominance/oppression, in however small a way. That’s when I have a problem with it.
Aside from that, what Mandolin said.
I am immediately to drawn to Phil’s argument, and if I was 19 years old instead of 42, I would say “Phil iz a jeenius”. And like Mandolin, I don’t think Phil is writing in bad faith. It’s not a wrong argument.
But she’s right that it doesn’t take power into account. White people wearing blackface sends a message about group power to blacks, one that the sender might not have intended but one which is nonetheless very clear: you’re not in charge of the visualization and representation of your own people, we are.
The nice thing is that power is contingent and history moves on. A hundred years ago, an Englishman dressing up as an Irish or Scottish figure of history or myth would be incredibly offensive to the Irish or the Scots, were they sober enough to notice*. These days there are probably some Irish or Scottish ultranationalists or irredentists who would throw a wobbler, but precious few. I’d laugh, if it was a funny costume.
Maybe the day will come when the historical resonance of blackface for a black person is similarly deracinated, when black people will read about injustices in the 18th or 19th or 20th or 21st century and say “huh, that’s interesting” the way I think it’s interesting to read about Cromwell – “somehow related to me, but not my problem and not A problem”. On that day my daughter’s (g-g-g-grandchild) can wear blackface to go for Halloween as Michelle Obama, the famous 21st century psychopath who went on a bloody rampage in the White House, who happened to be black.
Not yet, though. When? I’d wager that it’ll be around the same time that seeing the n-word in print has about the same emotional impact a “No Irish Need Apply” sign has for me – abstract regret about this unfortunate history.
*I’m Irish and Scottish (and Italian), so I’m allowed to make fun of, and deploy conversationally and presentationally, our stereotypes. See how that works, Ron? :)
Only white people have angels as part of their religious tradition? That’s news. BP executives are part of white people’s cultural heritage? Also news. And you have seen criticism of black people dressed up as John Henry? You think somebody dressing up as Jesus or the Virgin Mary is going to get smiles and hugs all around when they go trick-or-treating in Utah?
It’d be a bit closer to parallel then, you’re right. There are real cultural and historical reasons that the culture of white people gets treated as the default, but that doesn’t change the fact that, well, it gets treated as the default.
I appreciate your disclaimer, and I don’t find anything to refute in your points. I’m not trying to argue so much as figure out where my own discomfort with the stance I talked about comes from. (And it’s definitely not a sense of “I deserve the right to be offended”–I would love to see any kind of reductive Jesus costume that a human being wanted to try, etc.) It just strikes me as an extension of white privilege that the iconography of your culture gets to be viewed, generally, in a more playful way.
In fairness, so is Shiva.
I think the thing with Halloween costumes is that there are different distinct ways that a costume can be insensitive. You could be openly mocking a race/culture/religion, you could be unintentionally treating a race/culture/religion as an “other,” or you could be just “getting it wrong” or misrepresenting the race/culture/religion.
I think there’s an important difference between race and culture, though.
I am proud to report that I dressed as an Applied Phrenologist. I had a dr jacket (with “Applied Phrenologists” on the back), also my name: Dr. C. Ranium. I carried a little styrofoam headform with the areas identified in sharpie by the science of phrenology. I also have masters degree in science.
One year I did go as John the Baptist but that is my culture to mine. It was also gross, my head was on a platter. Grosser, in the wee hours of the party people ate the little cheese cubes I had glued to the platter that my head was upon, with the cheese. College. Ewww. Given my circles I do not think I offended anyone.
Once I was an eggplant.
If you are dressing up as another race, you are just lame. No one’s culture is that bereft of potential.
So black people can only go as black people?
First of all, the contextual difference between blackface and whiteface is too huge to be ignored.
Second of all, who said white people can’t dress as black celebrities? Just do it without using blackface. There’s a bunch of ways other than skin color to indicate who you are dressed as.
I agree, Amp. I was addressing @24 – “dressing up as another race is lame”.