Halloween: Problems with Cultural Appropriation

Published January 2022

Ah yes, another article on Halloween, months after the most recent Halloween.

Concerns surrounding Halloween are constantly being brought to my attention. Halloween is involved with a number of year round problems, such as a lack of representation for people of color in the media, as covered in my last Halloween article. Though Halloween is great and fun in so many ways, it can also be rather problematic, especially in terms of costuming. Cultural appropriation is another very real, year round issue rarely acknowledged by the general public. Many have taken part in cultural appropriation unintentionally, without even knowing it.

Cultural appropriation is defined as inappropriately or inaccurately participating in the customs of a culture other than your own, typically by those with a dominant culture in today’s society. On Halloween, this usually means dressing in ignorant costumes, though cultural appropriation also includes many other wrongdoings, such as wearing dreadlocks as a person outside of the Black community or wearing chopsticks in your hair.

One of the most popular ways people dress in culturally appropriating costumes is by dressing in any costume intended to portray a certain race of people. These costumes are extremely stereotypical and aren’t an accurate representation of the people. It can also be considered belittling and offensive, as cultures of human beings are not “costumes,” they are a part of very real and valid customs of equal importance to one’s own. One of the most common of these costumes is dressing as a Native Hawaiian, a costume where one may dress in a grass skirt and coconut top, with a plastic lei around their neck. This is completely inaccurate to Hawaiian culture. Other culturally appropriating costumes include dressing in a kimono or donning a Native American headdress to portray an Asian or Native American. These items are not for costume; they are part of a people’s culture, a people who should not be seen as costumes at all.

Of course, there is a difference between wearing cultural clothing inappropriately and wearing cultural clothing respectfully, in reference to a culture outside of your own. If you are to visit another country and put on their traditional dress to accurately immerse yourself in their culture and honor their customs, that’s great, as it furthers your education in their culture in a respectful way. The issue is that many people wear cultural clothing as a costume, usually inaccurately to the culture, and sometimes even sexualizing the clothes. In this article from Healthline, writer Crystal Raypole writes that “Since appropriation tends to romanticize or sexualize certain cultural elements, it can perpetuate stereotypes and racism. It also drowns out the voices of people who belong to a given culture by giving outsiders who’ve appropriated it more space.”

Leila Fadel, a writer at NPR, says that the stereotypical Native American costume stems from a moment frozen in history by non-Native American individuals; a style based on “a violent time in the 19th century as white settlers moved west, displacing Indigenous people on the land.” The article notes that because of these narrow-minded impressions, Native Americans “aren’t seen as modern-day people at all. That’s also what makes it really difficult for people to understand that what they’re doing is offensive.”

This concept is very much entwined with Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Single Stories, a notion shared in her The danger of a single story TED Talk. This TED Talk is widely known by students today, as it is often shared with classrooms as a part of their racial curriculum. According to Adichie, the Single Story is created by “show[ing] a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” When society presents only a single aspect of a people, that becomes their identity in society. Culturally appropriating costumes are one of many contributors to these Single Stories, as the stereotypical Native American, Native Hawaiian, and other racial dresses are repeatedly shown to society in a way that makes it seem as though those inaccurate outfits are all the cultures are.

Some inappropriate costumes also include changing one’s physical appearance besides their clothes. One might change their skin tone, eye shape, or hair. The reasons behind why these are wrong are based on a long and complex negative history of discrimination, causing potentially well-intended actions to hold so much negative weight. Darkening your skin tone for a costume, a procedure known as blackface, is completely ignorant and cannot be justified. If you are not Black, you cannot wear dreadlocks. You cannot change your eye shape to look more Asian. Simply stated, the same dominant group of people who mistreat, judge, mock, and ridicule people of color for these features cannot take the features for their own when it benefits them.

Dressing as a racial stereotype is not acceptable by any means. The question is: where do we draw the line? NBC’s sit-com Superstore addresses this in their Season 4 episode Costume Competition, in which two characters, Amy and Matteo, try to sabotage their work place’s Halloween costume competition by claiming that the costumes of others are culturally appropriating, thus forcing them to drop out of the contest. In this scene, Halloween Costume Stereotypes, the characters of Marcus and Cheyenne question why it’s inappropriate for them to wear dreadlocks or a grass skirt and coconut bra, when neither of them are Black or Hawaiian, while Amy (who is not Italian), dressed as Mario from the Mario Franchise, is allowed to wear a fake mustache. Amy tells Marcus and Cheyenne that “it’s because those costumes objectify a whole culture. I am not dressed as an Italian,” she says, “I am dressed as a character who happens to be Italian.” Superstore then goes on to make light of the topic, as Amy and Matteo will do or say anything to keep the contest going, but Amy’s point is still valid. In an article by Jordan Mendoza from USA Today, one of Mendoza’s interviewees Mia Moody-Ramirez notes that “just wearing the costume of a character should be good, but adding features such as blackface, different hair or putting on tattoos can be offensive.”

Be mindful of how your actions affect others year round, especially during Halloween. There are so many fun, completely appropriate costumes to choose from! Dress as whomever or whatever you’d like, as long as you are careful not to offend. Doing so is more fun for everyone and creates a better, safer environment for all those involved.