Halloween: Behind the Costume

For Halloween this year, students are doing more than just protecting their “sweet tooth” from a cavity. They are protecting their identity. Students at Ohio University have taken Halloween into their own hands and decided to use visual messaging to counter racially stereotypical costumes. Students Teaching About Racism in Society (S.T.A.R.S.) is a peer education organization providing multicultural workshops at Ohio University. This year, they have unleashed the “We’re a Culture Not a Costume” campaign on the Ohio University campus in response to a “black party” that white students on campus hosted last year.

According to S.T.A.R.S. President Sarah Williams, students who attended the party went blackface (painted their skin brown or black), wore “grills” and clothing popularized in corporate media portrayals of African Americans. Fried chicken and watermelon was served as the main course. This year, S.T.A.R.S. organized a poster campaign with full color headshots of teenagers and young adults of varying ethnicities holding up snapshots of white students posing in costumes that mock, stereotype and caricature their respective heritages. The top of the poster reads: “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume.” While the caption adjacent to their face reads: “This is not who I am, and this is not okay.”

Students in Ohio are not the only ones to take a stand against the misrepresentation of themselves and their culture. In September, students at University of California Berkley protested the Campus Republicans’ “Increase Diversity Bake Sale.” At the bake sale the group posted a race-based pricing structure, with white men paying $2 per pastry at the top and Native Americans paying $.25 per pastry at the bottom (Women received a $.25 price break on all baked goods). Organized in opposition to California Senate Bill 185, which was vetoed by Governor Brown last week, Campus Republicans claimed the bake sale was a satirical event designed to oppose affirmative action-like legislation in the California university system.

The bake sale invited debate. A counter demonstration of several hundred people gathered to support SB 185. One student argued that the only way the bake sale could be made comparable to the injustices Affirmative Action strives to correct is “if the flour, oven, and all baking materials were stolen from the people that are required to pay the lowest prices. And if the baked goods from all prior bake sales were made for free by the minorities while white students reaped all the profits.” The bake sale also invited students to wear costumes of Native Americans in order to purchase their baked goods at the lowest price.

Halloween is not the only time of year that a costume can be used as a weapon to make a person feel marginalized, unsafe and one dimensional. Most Trick-or-Treaters will not intentionally pick costumes that insult the heritage and culture of their families, neighbors and friends. However, many commercial costume retailers, like Party City, will continue to market these minstrel-like costumes as long as there is a demand.

The costumes pictured come from a page of the Party City web catalog. The costumes depicted are sold in the adult-themed section of the catalog, which typically plays on a submissive, hyper-sexualized misrepresentation of women. On top of the inherent objectification of women that happens in adult-themed media at large, Party City intends to increase sales by employing the basic persuasion technique of “beautiful people.” More advanced tools of persuasion are implied in this ad, all based on sexual myth and exploitation. Extrapolation is a persuasion technique that relies on huge conclusions based in little fact. There are sexual assumptions and conclusions that tend to be drawn from scantily clad women in costumes of cultures that historically have been dominated and exploited by the United States. Paired with the sexual overtones of this advertisement, is the use of nostalgia. These costumes invoke this idea of “the good old days”, where it seems to be implied that women and people of color used to know their place and were generally expected to put their culture on parade for the privileged.

Just as there is more to this advertisement than meets the eye, costumes have much more significance and meaning than a discounted price tag might suggest. The socio-historical and cultural impact of racially-themed and adult-themed costumes should be on the mind of all party-goers, Campus Republicans and parents of Trick-or-Treaters. Making conscious consumer choices to not purchase these offensive costumes or support the corporations that market such products would go a long way making sure the fantasy of Halloween is free from the reality of racism and sexism.