You can’t be anything you want to be and here’s why

Halloween costumes and cultural appropriation

The thought “What am I going to be for Halloween?” begins plaguing undecided minds by mid-October. As a child, selecting costumes was much easier than it is when you become an adult who is aware of the absurdities, inequalities, and injustices that are commonplace in the world today.

As a child, I happily dressed up as a princess year after year before realizing that I could wear a nice dress any time, but could only be a witch or a bunch of grapes or a fortune-teller once a year.

Children don’t analyse how popular culture depictions of princesses position women as passive characters who are forced to wait for princes to save them, so they can start their ‘real’ lives together. Children don’t think about why idealized mothers in fairy tales are usually absent while ‘evil’ stepmothers work to keep princesses and princes apart (read: good matriarchy is dead, all other matriarchies are evil). Children don’t interpret happily ever after as a celebration of maintaining the patriarchy through yet another successful transfer of the virgin from the father to the husband. I certainly didn’t think of these things as a child, and children shouldn’t have to worry about the ways in which their costumes might be problematic; that is a job for the adults in their lives.

Ideally, adults have the critical thinking skills needed to be more mindful about their own Halloween costume selections. Not because adults aren’t allowed to have fun on Halloween and express themselves — unless you’re trying to express yourself through hate speech and propaganda, in which case the Criminal Code says you’re not allowed. The point is that what you choose to dress up as says something about you and you should be aware of what you’re saying. It is important for adults to understand how their costumes will be interpreted by others, so that they can avoid unintentionally being sexist, racist, homophobic, or anything else. You would think that the stores would help you out with this by simply not selling any costumes that are outright offensive, but stores are going to stock what will make them money, and more importantly, what is offensive for one person to wear may not be problematic for another person to wear. We’ll loop back to this later.

As with most holidays, the further removed we get from how they started and their significance, the more easily we are swept away by marketing trends. To get a better idea of how to pick an appropriate Halloween costume, I thought it would be helpful to consider how Halloween originated and what costumes people were wearing and why those costumes were significant.

The Celts — who lived roughly 2,500 years ago in various groups around most of western Europe — wore costumes “typically consisting of animal heads and skins” on Oct. 31 as they celebrated Samhain (pronounced sow-in), according to the website History. Samhain marked “the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death.” Samhain was celebrated on the eve of the Celtic new year — Nov. 1.

In 1000 A.D., Nov. 2 was deemed by the church as a day to honour the dead; it was called All Souls’ Day. “It’s widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related church-sanctioned holiday,” reads History. “All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils.”

All Saints’ Day, celebrated on Nov. 1, was later called All-hallows or All-hallowmas “and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween,” according to History.

The tradition of Celts wearing costumes and masks, hundreds of years ago to avoid being recognized by ghosts — or so ghosts would mistake people as other spirits — was slowly turned into the secular holiday Halloween as various European ethnic groups brought Halloween to North America. The superstitious and religious aspects of Halloween were mostly lost by the 1900s; this included its frightening and grotesque aspects.

Rather than dressing up as ghosts and witches and demons (aspects that were more commonly seen even during my own childhood) Halloween has become increasingly commercialized. Today, Halloween costumes are more informed by popular culture (read: capitalism). As movie franchise culture booms, people are encouraged to wear the latest costumes, from the most recent popular films and TV shows (perhaps partly because this means you definitely can’t use the same costume again next year).

This “what’s popular now?” approach to Halloween costumes becomes problematic when what’s popular to wear this year isn’t necessarily what’s appropriate for you to dress up as for Halloween — possibly ever. For example, given the popularity of movies like Moana and Black Panther in the last couple of years, you will see Halloween costumes of characters from these films. Some will argue that they are being a particular character, and they bought the costume from a store, and all their friends are doing it, so it’s not racist or culturally insensitive because their intent is not to be racist or culturally insensitive — really they admire the characters and the culture they come from and are therefore celebrating that culture by dressing up; to them, it’s a compliment.

Well, at what point does a costume cease being a compliment and start being offensive? Is it okay for people who aren’t black to dress up as Prince T’Challa, because they’re just clothes and Black Panther is a fantasy film? Is it okay for people to do Prince T’Challa’s accent to go with the costume, because that’s just commitment to the character? Is it okay for people to then darken their skin with tanning lotion to be more “authentic,” because everyone in Wakanda is black? Is it okay for people to do full blackface to really embody the character of Prince T’Challa?  

Understanding the notion of cultural appropriation isn’t to hinder someone from having a good time, it’s to keep them from doing things that harm other people’s opportunity to have a good time. Understanding cultural appropriation is important because it prevents people from doing things that are outright racist and culturally insensitive in the present, even if they may not see that until decades into the future (e.g. a lot of actors did blackface, but failed to see how offensive it was until much later).

So, in that vein, let us try to understand what cultural appropriation means. Cultural appropriation occurs when members of the dominant culture unknowingly or knowingly adopt elements of a minority culture without understanding or respecting those elements or their significance in the cultures from which they are taken, copied, or commodified.

Often, the most criticized examples of cultural appropriation have to do with elements that are in some way significant to the cultural or religious traditions of a minority culture being used superficially for the purposes of fashion or entertainment. Popular examples of cultural appropriation are non-Natives wearing Native headdresses and non-Indians wearing bindis at music festivals.

There is an ongoing debate that questions the negativity associated with cultural appropriation and argues to allow for cross-cultural exchange. The term exchange, however, implies that two or more parties are choosing to trade their cultural goods with each other. In other words, for cultural exchange to take place the consent of the minority culture must be acquired. Cultural appropriation, in contrast, does not require the minority culture’s consent. In fact, cultural appropriation has often occurred despite members of the minority group from which the cultural elements were taken stating outright that they do not want those elements to be appropriated by the dominant culture; that those elements are meaningful to them and that they do not condone their use by people who do not understand their significance or are desecrating what they view as sacred.

There is a difference between wearing the clothes of a certain culture because you are attending their festivals or events and misappropriation. For example, there is a difference between you wearing a sari to an Indian wedding and you dressing up as an Indian woman for Halloween with a copy of the Kama Sutra from Indigo under your arm.

Dressing up as a stereotypical caricature for your own entertainment and with little regard for someone else’s culture or religion is not okay. There are simply some things that certain people are not supposed to do, and feeling like you’re above that is a feeling that should be examined more closely.

So, now that costume-picking season has arrived, remember to ask yourself: “Who might this costume offend and is it worth offending an entire group of people who deal with oppression and discrimination on a daily basis, because I think this costume would be cute, funny, or edgy?” Even just starting to think about the answer to that question means that this Halloween you’re going to be an adult who is more socially aware of your choices; you’re going to be an adult who has greater empathy for people different from yourself; you’re going to be an adult who strives to be a better citizen of the world — and that’s something to be very proud of, because the world could use a lot more of those types of adults right now.