First
of all, I'm going to refer to white privilege during this post. If
you are unfamiliar with white privilege, I suggest you look it up
first. Also, keep in mind that while I did study white privilege for
a class in college, I'm by no means an expert on the subject, and I'm
not pretending to be.
I
stumbled upon this article about a group of college students who are
expressing disapproval of some of the Halloween costumes out there.
I had shared the article on Facebook and received several different
(but equally well thought-out!) responses. There are also a lot of
thoughtful, varied comments on the page itself. I wanted to share my
thoughts on here. A few people also brought up the interesting
question of “Is it okay to dress like witches?” and “Is it okay
to dress like Jesus/G-d?” While those are excellent questions,
those are separate issues from race, and I'm not going to address
them in this post. I might do another post if I have time. I'll
have to see; it's going to be a busy week.
A
lot of people were in agreement that a white person dressing like a
Native American or putting on blackface is inappropriate. But some
people didn't see the problem with dressing in Asian or Hispanic
costumes like the ones shown in the picture. This was a very
thoughtful, respectful discussion for the most part. But I have to
wonder how much knowledge and understanding of white privilege went
into the discussion.
White
privilege is the easiest to identify when you are talking about our
historical relations with black people and Native Americans. It can
be more subtle, I think, when we're talking about other ethnic
groups, because in our white minds, oppression of those groups is not
as blatant. I think the reason people think that is because
oppression of other races like Asians and Hispanics isn't as
well-known. If it was, it would be easier to see that white
privilege exists in our relations with other minorities as well.
The
subject of costumes is an issue of white privilege when it doesn't
add up if you turn the situation around. If someone who wasn't white
decided to dress up in a Scandinavian folk outfit as a means of
dressing up as a “white person” we would, understandably, take
offense. “White culture” is not a homogenous thing. Not every
white person is Scandinavian, and that costume does not accurately
describe ALL Scandinavians. Racism says that white privilege is
irrelevant and it doesn't matter if we do that to non-whites. White
privilege says, “It would be wrong if they did it, so it needs to
be wrong when we do it.”
