With Halloween nearly a month away, the annual (if somewhat one-sided) crusade against ethnically-based Halloween costumes has begun. Last week, Opinion columnist Alexander Adames penned a cautionary piece advising students not to wear costumes “designed after a particular culture.” Echoing sentiments voiced in previous years in other college publications like the Harvard Crimson, Adames argues “donning a culture as a costume is offensive because it attempts to parody a person’s heritage” and that “culturally-based Halloween costumes are tasteless, offensive and reinforce negative ideas against various groups of people.” Indeed, there should be religious and cultural limitations as to what should be a considered acceptable for a Halloween costume. But Adames is wrong to assume appropriating clothing from other cultures in any form is automatically harmful.
The first claim Adames makes is “donning a culture as a costume is offensive because it attempts to parody a person’s heritage” and that people who wear such costumes “decide to take on that identity” of their respective costume. While it's possible today’s costume wearers may in some limited fashion act out the person or character they are dressing up as, it would be dubious to claim the goal of costume wearing on Halloween is to seriously role-play or adopt new identities. Representing all the complexities and nuances of a culture through a costume is not the intent of Halloween costumes; many costumes — such as this banana costume — don't even allow such role-playing to happen. For the vast majority of Americans today, Halloween is a cultural holiday built upon lighthearted fun and capitalist hype, not serious social commentary. Americans of all ethnicities should understand this lightheartedness to be an implicit and underlying assumption of the holiday before wagging fingers at all ethnically-based costumes.
The Halloween costume debate fits into the larger context of a resurging wave of political correctness sweeping across American colleges, a wave indicative of cognitive distortion problems present in our collegiate generation. In his self-help book “Feeling Good,” Professor Emeritus David D. Burns of Stanford University outlines common cognitive distortions that indirectly fuel today’s PC stances. For example, he defines the term “magnification” as “exaggerating the importance of things,” an action commonly seen in sensitive students who find even the smallest hints of cultural discord aggressive. Conflating the adornment of any ethnic or cultural costume with aggressive stereotyping is one such example of magnification, and only serves to make mountains out of molehills.
What about the appropriation of white culture? Is it okay to dress as a redneck hillbilly or an Irish kiltsman? Herman Kaur Bhupal and Judy Park from the Harvard Crimson claim it is impossible to culturally appropriate mainstream white culture, arguing “historically, ‘white culture,’ defined as mainstream Western culture in this context, has not been systematically subjugated” and is immune to the “systematic oppression, exotification, and stereotyping” commonly practiced against other ethnicities. What Bhupal and Park fail to see are the numerous examples of stereotyping and oppression historically and currently practiced within white culture itself. Terms like “redneck,” “WASP” and “white trash” are just some of the stereotypes that have historically existed and continue to exist within white culture today. Oppression against white Irish, Italians and Scots plagued this nation for years, all people who today can easily be identified in broader Western culture. To claim it's okay to appropriate any type of white culture but not okay to culturally appropriate non-Western culture is ignorant to the history of oppression within mainstream white culture itself.
Within the broader debate of cultural appropriation, many have rightly pointed to mainstream white culture’s tendency to selectively appropriate aspects of other cultures without giving credit to the original cultures. A good example is the afro, a common African-American hairstyle often seen in negative light when worn by blacks but defined as edgy when pulled of by whites. Such selective cultural appropriation is clearly unacceptable, especially if we continue to discriminate the original cultures for participating in their own culture which we ourselves enjoy. But the solution to the problem of cultural appropriation is not to simply abandon any and all cultural exchange; such a notion is unthinkable in today’s increasingly globalized world.
There are of course limits to the types of costumes people should wear. For example, adornment of religious symbols or impersonating religious or holy figures of other cultures is clearly inappropriate. But to discourage people from wearing costumes with any cultural or ethnic reference is far too restrictive. Instead, costume wearers should look to be inventive but also mindful if they choose to wear a culturally-based costume; for example, instead of wearing a generic “Asian” costume, perhaps one could wear a costume representing specific Asian figures (like a Japanese anime character). Acknowledging the existence of other ethnicities and cultures through costumes shouldn’t always be seen as offensive.
Hasan Khan is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at h.khan@cavalierdaily.com.
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