Halloween is just around the corner. For us students, this means that months of hardcore planning and creativity will finally be showcased in the span of two crazy “Halloweekends.”
I’m sure that, by now, you have already brainstormed your costume or might even have it sitting in your closet. Some of you maybe even decided on your 2025 costumes the day Halloween ended last year.
But as Halloween approaches, so does the decades-long debate about offensive and culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. Ultimately, the question of whether something is cultural appropriation, or cultural appreciation, is a burning topic that society still seems to struggle with.
Because 2025 follows years of progressive social movements like Black Lives Matter and the Stop Asian Hate movement, I wonder: Why is cultural appropriation during Halloween an issue that never seems to die? And, more importantly, how does this manifest in my own environment — college?
When I think about what I want to wear for Halloween, my first thoughts are, “What looks cute?” “What would I look good in?” These underlying thoughts go for most college students, too — think about the iconic quote by Cady Herron in Mean Girls.
Take a belly dancer costume, for example. This is a common Halloween costume not because people want to respect Middle Eastern culture — but because the outfit is considered attractive. The same goes for other costume choices, like white people dressing up as Indigenous princesses with no actual character in mind. As a result of our desire to look good on Halloween, we modify the cultural elements in our costumes to fit the look we want to portray.
That’s exactly where the phrase, “our culture is not your costume,” comes into play.
The truth is, our generation has become so focused on Halloween’s culture of hyper-sexualization and fetishization, that we forgot the gravity of cultural appropriation. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to try looking cute on Halloween, because I do the same. What I mean is — we’ve become so hyperfixated on the way we look that considering cultural appropriation is rarely our first concern.
In a generation where society has become more culturally blended, there are different perspectives everywhere. Hence, one person doesn’t represent a whole body of people who could find a costume offensive. For example, one Mexican person might see someone online wearing a Day Of The Dead skull costume and love it, while another might find the outfit disrespectful to the spiritual tradition. In the end, it’s all about understanding various outlooks that you might not realize are there.
We are also an online generation. Our lives revolve around technology and, most importantly, social media. We’ll see someone post their Halloween costume online and read the comments brutally attacking them for cultural appropriation. The fact that our generation is so chronically online makes me wonder — do we act a certain way because we are scared that we’ll fall into “cancel culture?” Although we should learn to dress in a culturally sensitive way, it shouldn’t be done just because people fear “cancel culture.” Even more, we shouldn’t rush to cancel each other online because it does not provoke effective reflection.
At the end of the day, we are college students. We celebrate Halloween with provocative costumes and parties not because we care about the holiday’s history, but because we are young, reckless and want to have fun. If I walked into a party dressed up as a sexy nun, I doubt anyone in my social circle would care, nor would they begin to question that it might be insensitive to Catholics. And that’s exactly why we might think it’s okay to dress however we want. However, this doesn’t apply to everyone, and there are still people who do keep these boundaries in mind.
As we pick out our Halloween costumes this year, the central question we should be asking ourselves might not start with “Is this culturally sensitive” but instead, “Why do I want to wear this in the first place?”
If you’re a college student getting ready for your first Halloweekend of the year and you’re wondering if your costume is culturally appropriate — you might want to evaluate what this means internally. If you’re only wearing your costume because you’re afraid of online critics, you might want to think a bit deeper — and reflect beyond how it affects just yourself.
Sylvia Park is a second-year business administration and psychology combined major. She can be reached at [email protected].
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