Category Archive

I keep getting asked what I dressed up as this weekend for the big Halloween party on campus. I was a bit hesitant in my response, because at this point I still hadn’t decided whether or not I could handle the event. I was probably going to go, I had this great 90s dress I’ve been wanting to wear that I cannot pull off on a random Wednesday. Furthermore, I wanted to do some article research, having recently decided to be an opinion writer for our school paper. Let me tell you, this is entering a lion’s den to some extent. And it’s actually an entirely separate post that I’m still not ready to write that involves racism and sexism in the classroom and my choosing mainstream journalism in an attempt to keep from feeling like a quitter. A lot of students argue that Halloween is the one holiday that’s all about fun and is sort of this horrifying combination of debauchery and identity swapping, but the reality is, in the way that it is practiced in mainstream America, Halloween is never all about fun for me - it’s usually about trying to deal with the problematic costumes around me.

I’m to focus on two examples here because there is simply too many things to cover and these two examples really got me thinking this weekend.

First, I saw these students dressed as homeless people jingling bowls and hats to beg for money from the crowd. They had gone all out: dirt smudged faces and tattered clothing and unwashed hair and expressions that attempted to emote wear-and-tear. The argument for the costume I suppose is that part of Halloween should be about dressing up in identities that are completely different from our own. But I think the reality is that Halloween is the time where people can get away with dressing up in particular costumes, a way of being racist and classist and homophobic without being called out on it because they aren’t actually saying anything or expressing opinions, they’re “just dressing up”. It’s “just a costume”. I’m going to make a few assumptions here, but I think the students who chose “homeless people” as their costume are probably in the exact opposite situation as homeless people on campus: they are provided housing. They are getting an over $100,000 education. They aren’t starving, they aren’t living in the streets, they have access to showers and probably have enough money to purchase new clothes and live a comfortable life. The privilege of being able to dress up otherwise is offensive and classist, and reflects a kind of ignorance that even now I’m having trouble processing.

The second costume I want to talk about is one that I seem to have seen a lot on websites and over the weekend: the Pocahontas/ stereotypical Native American costume. With regards to the argument “Pochontas is from Disney and I was dressing up as a Disney character” my response is that Disney has racially problematic representations of individuals and helps to perpetuate many stereotypes about particular groups of people. So hiding behind Disney isn’t really going to help justify your costume. So often, the majority of individuals around me, myself included, ignore and exclude the history of indoctrination, imprisonment, destruction, and annihilation of Native Americans in California and the United States. When students dress up as Native Americans they are suggesting that the history of violence and oppression against Native Americans is something that can be forgotten, that their history and identities can be reduced to a culturally appropriative costume that can be donned by anyone on Halloween, that racist representations of Native Americans is appropriate.

My point here is that the “geishas” and “gangsters” and “belly dancers” and “maids”, the people who have the racial privilege to be able to dress up as “terrorists”, and “ethnic people” need to think about the racial and class privileges that allow them to do this….

Many people seem to choose costumes that are outside of normalcy - there is this combination of stereotyping and further marginalizing and often culturally appropriating communities. This is about exercising one’s privilege by dressing up as the Other - so when I see a white woman dressing up in the everyday clothes of someone from India, for example, there is something that allows that individual to feel comfortable in exploiting and appropriating another culture and identity, while also disregarding the history of that community, for a day that is apparently “all about fun”.

Yuck.

I’m writing about Halloween in conjunction with The Day of Red not only because they are happening on the same day but because there’s something to be said about costumes and the violence that these costumes are ignoring and making invisible. We need to think about the violence that occurs everyday against women of color and why there are so many women that think it’s ok to dress up in ethnic costumes, that do not encompass the history of violence and silence that affects the actual communities of women who are being stereotyped and caricatured.

We need to think about cultural appropriation of cultures and the kind of violence that appears in that process and in those cultures and what it means to simply walk around with particular aspects of the Other culture but without that trauma and without that violence (colonial and imperial and physical and emotional and patriarchal) that is deeply embedded in those communities.

We need to think about why there are people who can dress up today as Native AMericans, Geishas, Mulan, Princess Jasmine, Arabs, South Asian People, Belly Dancers; who can dress up today as beaten and murdered and bruised and bloody women from stories and myths, while there are Other women of color who are dead and who are stripped of their agency and who are raped and traumatized and beaten and silenced everyday.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on this show for a while now.

I have seen pretty much every promotional video about this show and I’m attaching the one that sends the clearest message regarding the plot-line of the show:

When I saw this video, I actually thought it was a skit from a late night comedy show. Turns out, it is the real deal, folks. This is a show about a white middle America family with a young awkward teenage boy whose mother tries to get him a friend by signing up for an exchange student. Turns out, the exchange student is a Muslim Pakistani boy, who follows every ridiculous stereotype for South Asian men who are “fresh off the boat” - this clothes, his naive enthusiasm and wonderment for the United States, his lack of social cues, etc. The thing that struck me the most though, is his thick accent. It sounds fake, it sounds contrived. It sounds like the makings of some racist television.

I have a feeling that the show is supposed to be a clever commentary on the xenophobia that plagues many predominantly white communities and families. The scene in the classroom for instance when the teacher says something like “Raja, in this country we raise our hands when we want to talk” then proceeds to ask if people are angry at him because “his people blew up the towers”. This is the only scene that appears in any way redeemable to me.

But this is the problem I really have with this show.

People, as a general rule, who watch mainstream television, are not that smart.

They don’t necessarily have a critical eye for the nuances of racial and political commentary. So when a character like Raja shows up, there aren’t going to be a whole lot of people who look at him as a smart and possibly witty caricature of how America perceives Muslim people. Instead, they are going to proceed to think that all Muslim people are awkward outcasts, that they all have really thick accents (think Apu from the Simpsons) and the boys are emasculated by their “foreign” values and cultural or religious practices. This is the kind of show that perpetuates stereotypes.

I guess the argument would be that it is a show about coming together despite differences. Two boys who are social outcasts from their big bad high school, can come together over food and religion and music. They can both feel like Aliens in America together.

This is some big, bad bullshit to me. This show is falling into the myth of the melting pot - we can all come together and overlook, even erase our differences and be happy living and working together. If we focus on our similarities, then our histories of institutional racism and sexism and homophobia will melt away. Enter the color blind zone. Of course, what’s even more complicated about this show is it isn’t advocating for color blindness so much as nation-blindness. “People are awkward in America, too. White kids are dealing with bullies and socially uncomfortable situations here, just like when a person of color visiting from another country comes to the United States” - This is such a problem, I’m having trouble stating why exactly it is. It just seems so obvious to me.

I’m going to say one last thing about this which is that I think it’s easy to focus on individual conflict and circumstance and ignore the larger framework that the circumstance is taking place in - what an endearing plot, to meet someone who understands what it’s like to be an outsider. I can only imagine what kind of lessons Raja is going to teach his host family and host brother, through his exotic culture and religion.

Also, it’s 2007. I really think it’s time to stop using cliched “ethnic music” whenever a brown person appears on screen.