Avoid cultural appropriation on Halloween, or any day
It’s never acceptable for a white person to dress as someone who has been colonized
It’s likely no coincidence that the upcoming Change the Redmen Name protest at McGill University takes place on Halloween.
The annual costume party continues to be a platform for cultural appropriation, in which misguided white people play ethnic dress-up, donning Indigenous headdresses, reviving blackface, wearing sombreros or playing Asian for kicks and giggles. One could make a link between such freewheeling use of non-white cultural signifiers and varsity and professional sports teams’s historic use of Indigenous references in their team names and logos.
On Thursday, Nov. 1, McGill’s Indigenous Studies Program hosts Understanding Cultural Appropriation, a talk moderated by Change the Redmen Name protest organizer and McGill rower Tomas Jirousek.
Appearing on the panel is Jennifer Guiliano, associate professor in the Department of History at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and author of the book Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America.
“There is a huge connection,” Guiliano told the Montreal Gazette, connecting the dots between ill-advised Halloween costumes and sports team names and mascots. “One of the lasting effects of colonization is that we’ve wiped Indigenous identities off the map. They’re written and talked about as if they don’t exist; or if they do, they fit into clear, direct tropes — like every Indian has a headdress or every Native wears beaded clothes.
“When someone dresses up for Halloween and assumes an Indigenous identity, they’re not dressing up as someone Indigenous; they’re dressing as a stereotype. These costumes are not culturally specific, and are not in any way accurate. They’re not about Indigenous people or communities. They’re really about celebrating what is in effect a genocide.”
And yet it keeps happening. As evolved and aware as we think we have become, white people continue to cross the line, as evidenced by Quebec’s recurring blackface controversies — remember the P.K. Subban fans who showed up at the Bell Centre in blackface and afro wigs in 2013? Or the Outremont schoolteachers who welcomed students wearing an approximation of First Nations headdresses on the first day of class in 2016?
Festivals such as Osheaga have banned headdresses, which is both commendable and sadly necessary. But what’s behind white people’s apparent need to assume attributes of other cultures, whether it’s just for a night or the duration of a sporting event?
“People take on other identities to shore up how they feel about themselves,” Guiliano said. “A lot of the time, when people dress as (black) celebrities or rappers, what they’re signalling is that they want to belong to that aspirational culture or they want to be part of that community. There are all kinds of examples — not just African-Americans and African-Canadians but Latinx people, or people dressing up as tropes of immigrants or migrant workers.
“There’s an underlying fascination with people who are different from ourselves. People take on these forms of expression because they get to behave in ways they don’t otherwise. The other thing is that businesses make money off people’s fascination with other identities, whether it’s people buying the jerseys of black athletes or buying Sioux headdresses and going out with their friends, playing cowboys and Indians for Halloween.”
The classic defence in such scenarios is that it’s all in good fun, or done with good intentions, from Théâtre du Rideau Vert’s 2014 blackface controversy (in which a white actor wore blackface to portray the hockey player in a year-end revue sketch) to the recent uproar around Robert Lepage’s SLĀV and Kanata productions, and McGill’s contention that the Redmen name was originally coined as a reference to the team colours and not to Indigenous people.
“What (white) people have to realize is that, for them, there’s no harm,” Guiliano said,” but for the lived reality of someone from that community who is struggling to afford college, or a family that has survived decades of boarding school, when they’re confronted with something meant as a Halloween joke, they see it as a personal attack.
“Cultural appropriation has realities attached to it. People forget that there are actual people involved, with psychic and emotional repercussions in their communities.”
For white people considering costume options for Halloween, Guiliano offers this simple, enduring advice:
“It is never appropriate for someone who is white to dress up as a minority or someone who has been colonized.”