How Do You Tell Your Boss Their Halloween Costume is Racist?
Halloween is almost here. And within those pop-up Halloween shops that reanimate the corpses of old department stores every year lurks more than the possibility of buying overpriced but cheap costumes.
Before you do your costume shopping this year, before you got to work in costume, and before you go to any costume parties, read this beautiful guide by Amber Rose. Costume accordingly and have a great time.
But also, prepare a mental script of what you might say to anyone in your life, (calibrate by relationship), who inadvertently appropriates another culture as a costume so you don’t make the same mistakes I did. Yes, plural.
Once upon a time, I was wearing my Jem wig to work with a pink dress. No electric guitar but I found a purple sequin belt at a secondhand store and made my own giant star-shaped earrings out of pink cardboard.
When my boss came in neither of us recognized each other’s costume.
After explaining my rockstar cartoon character I asked, “And you?”
“I’m ethnic!” she announced with a ta-da outstretch of arms.
My jaw dropped and likely hung open. No words came to my brain, let alone out of my mouth and into the world.
Her ensemble didn’t even approximate what white people typically get wrong when they appropriate other cultures. And I come from a town where, like a meme I saw once, white librarians really do wear dashikis downtown. Hippie subcultures indeed owe much of their fashion missteps to cultural appropriation. And it’s not just white dreads or cornrows.
For what it’s worth, know that this woman is a powerful advocate for vulnerable populations. Her entire illustrious career was in protecting and advocating for vulnerable groups. This woman would be the first one to speak up and speak the loudest if someone used a racial slur. I think the only thing she despised more than injustice was bullying. I knew that she intended no harm. But I also knew it wasn’t ok.
So did I, also a white woman, explain to her, in front of two coworkers, that her costume was inappropriate and offenseive from concept to execution? That you can’t borrow someone else’s adjective to make it to your noun for the day? No.
Did I follow her into her office to talk to her privately? Did I find a gentle way to tell her that I knew she didn’t intend any harm but she still needed to go home and change so that nobody would be hurt by her mistake? Also no.
Was I more motivated in my panic to not offend my boss than to do the right thing? Yes.
It seems so simple now, but instead, I made it absurdly worse.
My mind was racing but the first clear thought to break through the swirling noise in my head was selfish: protect your job. How in the fresh hell was I supposed to discipline my boss? My second thought was less selfish but woefully misguided: help her make this less offensive by making “ethnic” more “accurate”.
But accuracy wasn’t the problem. Appropriation was.
“Here,” I reached into my desk drawer. “You should probably wear bigger earrings.”
Bigger earrings??? What is wrong with you?? My mind had gone barren wasteland but for one random stereotype planted who knows when, still thriving like that one little seedling in WALL-E. Cue self-loathing. Even cowardly silence would’ve been better. Saying nothing and hoping an equal would talk with her so a subordinate wouldn’t have to would’ve been better.
But no. I helped a good woman make her accidental racism worse. Because in the depths of my white mind “ethnic” women wear big hoop earrings. And I kept a spare pair of earrings in my desk. And they happened to be big hoops. So when a white woman wanted to imitate non-white women, I didn’t stop her. I piggy-backed on her mistake instead.
Hoop earrings are not themselves appropriation but I am not free of internalized racism. Some racism is so ingrained it can be shocking to discover even a thin vein of it in yourself.
But anti-racism allows for a learning curve. Although it’s embarrassing to make mistakes, and it feels terrible to inadvertently hurt people, lick your wounds, my friends. When we feel guilty, the best apology is to change. And remember, “white guilt” is just a dog whistle for compassion. Be compassionate.
When someone inadvertently appropriates a culture, or in this case an imaginary amalgamation of cultures, helping them make their costume more “accurate” is not the solution. Explaining to them that people aren’t costumes is the only solution.
Don’t shame them, just help them. Help them understand broader context than what they previously understood and suggest costumes that don’t commodify marginalized cultures. Smile and admit some of your own mistakes. Creating a sense of camaraderie can remind them that we all have the opportunity to improve instead of exacerbating what can feel like the good/bad binary between you, the “right one”, and them, the wrong racist one.
If they push back don’t waver. Intentions matter but they should just be the introduction of an apology, not a license to carry on as is. Explain to them that cultural appropriation is not cultural appreciation, no matter how much they know about a culture or admire it. Explain that wearing someone’s life like a costume is not a celebration, it’s a commodification. Remind them that you know they’re a good person and because you know they didn’t mean to offend anyone that’s exactly why you know they’ll take context to heart and course-correct.
If someone close to you dresses up like any kind of Native American (guilty, second grade), geisha, gypsy (guilty, eighth grade), (or uses the word ‘gypsy’ instead of Roma or Romani), Dia de Los Muertos Catrina (guilty, 2014), hula girl or any ethnicity that is not their own it’s your responsibility to have the awkward conversation with them. As they say, if you see something, say something. Even if they try to shrug you off as the sensitivity police. Even if they call you a snowflake or a “libtard”. And even if they’re your supervisor. No matter how they might react letting it go unchecked perpetuates the spread of the but-I-didn’t-know defense.
Stick with professions, cartoon characters, TV or film characters, mythological gods or creatures, or a specific person: centaur, firefighter or male stripper, Jem or Rainbow Bright, Medusa or Poseidon, Hillary Clinton or Obama.
And if you go as a person who is not your ethnicity wearing attire that is specific to them is sufficient — Obama’s tan suit or any pantsuit for Clinton, a sparkly long-sleeved leotard for Beyoncé, or a tennis outfit and racquet for Serena Williams.
If you don’t know that blackface is racist and never acceptable please take some time to read about the painful history dating back to medieval Europe where it was widely used on stage to depict fallen angels and spiritual depravity, through its peak popularity in 1830s NYC minstrelsy, continuing through the Civil War, waning during the Civil Rights Movement, but never fully disappearing despite widespread criticism beginning as far back as the antebellum US. It continues to reappear at The Oscars, the Metropolitan Opera, and from too many politicians and celebrities who should know better.
Caricaturing people and reducing them to the most dehumanizing stereotypes is exactly what underpins the longevity of blackface. And turning people’s actual culture into Halloween costumes is an extension of that demeaning legacy.
What I did is not as bad as repeatedly screaming racial slurs at someone and threatening them in a CVS parking lot. It’s not as devastating as the seemingly endless cases of police brutality in the US against people of color. But every white person’s “not that bad” misstep accumulates and that weight of those thousand cuts is carried by POC — not by us misstepping not-racist white people.
Why not make this life less painful for our fellow travelers?
Full disclosure: I never said anything to my boss. And I doubt anyone else did either. Neither one of us are racist yet we both made racist mistakes.
The shortest distance between “I’m not a racist” and “I am anti-racist” is a learning curve I thought I was already in front of. I hate that my reaction was racist and made a bad situation worse. But I have my scripts ready so that, should something like this happen in my world again, I can positively redirect a mistake instead of reacting with my own.