• A sexy Mrs. Claus outfit.
• Black thigh high high heels.
• Red body paint.
• Giant red lobster claws.
• white body paint
• black lipstick
• Elf ears (preferably red)
• A skull cap (preferably black)

There is such a fine line between dressing up in the spirit of the holiday and mocking a people or a culture.  I feel like if one were to dress up as a profession within a culture, such as a belly dancer, or a Samurai, an Egyptian pharaoh, for example, I feel like things like that are fine.  If one is dressing up as a character or person of another race/ethnicity I feel like that’s fine too, as long as they don’t don a bunch of make-up/face-paint to “become” that person, and that’s one of the areas where things get muddled.  I feel like when it comes to assuming the ethnic/racial identity of a people there’s something wrong.  I wanted to dress up as Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, I would have put on a red and black striped shirt, black pants, black converse and had a stuffed tiger,  If my hair were black I might have colored it yellow,  but I would not put on white people colored face paint, there’s something disrespectful and mocking about that.  It’s okay to dress up as someone outside of your race/ethnicity, but deal with the constraints of not being that specific race or ethnicity and if you can’t, find another costume.  Perhaps my feelings about this stem from having my mother show me Birth of a Nation when I was 10, but any form of “blackface” is disrespectful to me.  For any race or ethnicity.  Yes, dressing up as a “Mexican”, a “Native American”, an “Arab”, or a “Black person” (to name a few) is disrespectful.  It is making a mockery of a people, stereotyping their whole culture into one horrifying, racist, westernized joke.  There’s nothing cute, or funny about it.  Now I understand that there is a fine line between cultural appropriation, and cultural diffusion; however the problem I realize is that people don’t realize where that line is.  There needs to be some kind of contextual relevance in what one is doing in order for it to really be considered cultural diffusion, things that are inspired by other cultures, that’s cultural diffusion.  When someone puts a feather in their hair and some war paint on their face and claims that they’re a native american, that’s not cultural diffusion, that’s offensive.  That’s racist.  The thing that really gets me though, is the fact that so many people, of all races/ethnicities, don’t realize that there’s something wrong with that.  They make ignorant proclamations that “everyone gets offended by everything these days.”  that “people are looking for something to be offended by.”  and “everyone wants a cause to fight for.”  Those things do seem true at times, but once again, contextually they don’t apply, there are certain things worth acknowledging are wrong and need to stop.  People who’ve never had to face racism or having one the factors that is consistently used to define them, don’t often seem to understand exactly what it’s like seeing someone dress up as your race, pulling out stereotypes that the media has helped create.  You don’t see white people dressing up like Barack or Michelle Obama, Oprah, Langston Hughes, Condoleezza Rice or Maya Angelou; positive, non-stereotypical examples of black people, you see them dress up as someone ghetto.  Because that’s what we are to the world.  Classless.  It’s offensive.  There are no Pablo Nerudas, Khaled Hosseini’s, Irene Bedard’s, or Margaret Cho’s.  There’s Paco’s, Terrorists, Wild Indians, and Geishas.  I love Halloween but if that means watching people run around mocking other cultures, then I don’t want to participate in it.  It’s not worth it.  I could say “Imagine if someone were to dress up as you, but a stereotype of who you are, missing the complexities and subtleties that create and define who you are.  Or imagine if someone were to dress up as your race/ethnicity and turn part of who you are into a joke.  How would you feel then?”  But people find it so difficult to step outside of themselves and see more than their immediateness that saying that would feel like a waste of breath.

saucy-sarah:

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