Every Halloween, people seem to get more and more creative with their costumes, trying to outdo the year before. Unfortunately, some ideas don’t come across as they were intended. It’s safe to say that culturally offensive costumes have been around as long as the holiday has. What is now trending is the portrayal of current events, and not just any current events, the ones that are gritty, gruesome and tragic.
Insensitivity seems to be the criteria for the more unique costumes of Halloween, with this season featuring costumes like an Ebola doctor and sexy Ebola nurse, Malaysian airline flights 370 and 17 zombie flight attendants and pilots, sexy ISIS militants, football player Ray Rice and his battered wife, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson and deceased Michael Brown — and these were just the ones that received heavy news coverage.
Last year, it was the Boston bombing and the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman case that had people raging on social media.
For Ebola-inspired costumes, many people recycled the Breaking Bad hazmat suits from last year and added bloodshot eyes and a little blood here and there for effect. Or, if you wanted something brand new, online retailer BrandOnSale, which dubbed itself a “unique costume shop,” had the sexy Ebola nurse costume for sale. The costume consisted of a short white dress, face shield, breathing mask, safety goggles and blue latex gloves.
ISIS costumes took on various forms. One group of young women wore black corsets and tanks, spandex short shorts, high heels and mimicked niqab. Some people went a more traditional route, copying the Arab style of dress. Others wore costumes that looked a bit more on the ninja side.
The Ray Rice costume worked as a one-man or couples costume. If solo, the costume consisted of males, even little boys, wearing a purple football uniform with Rice’s number and dragging a black female blow-up doll in a dress. If a real female happened to be a part of the package, she often was in a dress and had a painted black eye. Some white couples even went in blackface, mixing the nuanced insensitivity with age-old culturally offensive and racist elements of Halloween.
The two-man, Ferguson-inspired costumes consisted of two males, one dressed as a police officer and the other dressed in stereotypical attire of a black youth.
Who doesn’t want to be the talk of the party, right?
For all of you who thought that these costumes would make you the center of attention, you were right. In fact, it made you the talk of social media and then some, but for all the wrong reasons. You were the person who people looked at with disgust, the one who people tried to stay away from so as not be photographed beside, the one who ended up having their faces, along with their insensitive and offensive costumes, posted all over the Internet.
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is taste. We as a people have the right to express ourselves and have a constitution that allows us a plethora of ways to do so. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Unfortunately, respect and common sense are traits many people lack. There is an alarming number of people who are victims of physical and sexual abuse, hundreds of victims of the two Malaysian flights, dozens of victims of the Boston Marathon Bombings, some who died and others who sustained irreversible bodily damage, tens of thousands who have died from Ebola and the hundreds of dead victims of ISIS, a handful of which were American journalists beheaded for the world to see. How anyone could think that these were things deserving of admirable imitation is beyond me.
Using their pain as a punchline for your Halloween costume is cruel, shameful and disgusting, and it shouldn’t have to be explained why.
No one can stop you from dressing as something as awful as those mentioned for next year’s holiday, but we can warn you: few will laugh with you, many more will condemn you.
Photo courtesy Creative Commons.
