Racist Halloween Costumes

Halloween is a holiday/recreational day where people (usually kids and teenagers) dress up however they want for the fun of it. Past the fact that halloween costumes need to be scary or horrifying, people have come to terms to dress up as whoever they want to be ; whether it is a celebrity, an inanimate object, or a cartoon character. Although now, some people have actually pushed and stretched the line of being whoever they want. This being said, I am talking about people dressing up as someone else's culture. Using their culture as a costume : an Indigenous person, Japanese, Mexican, and Muslim.

The picture above shows a halloween costume for those who want to "dress up" as a Native American. The costume completely disregards the Indigenous culture and what everything represents for those within this group, and for someone who isn't a part of the culture or even know a single thing about them is disrespectful and ignorant. The costume above is actually entitled "Sexy Native American One-Shoulder Costume", I cannot imagine how people of the Indigenous culture could manage to witness or see such discrimination against them in this day and age. 

As our society continues to grow and evolve to accept other ethnitcites, halloween is still a time where people's costumes end up being controversial and borderline offensive. Not only is the Indigenous culture something that people have used as a costume, but there has been pictures uploaded onto social media platforms of people dressing up as muslims and claiming that they are "terrorists" for halloween. Which is completely outrageous for them to stereotype and generalize that all muslims are terrorists because there are plenty of white people who actually are terrorists. So if they wanted to dress up as a terrorist, they could have been themselves for halloween because anyone can be one ; it is not acclaimed to be a part of one's culture but one's character. 

Taking the Indigenous studies course myself, it has given me a lot more insight to their own culture, but that doesn't mean everyone else is ignorant. You do not need to study a culture for you to act accordingly to respect it.