I tried on the offensive Halloween costumes you’ll want to avoid

The weather is getting chillier, Pumpkin Spice is becoming everyone’s favorite flavor and reruns of Hocus Pocus are on TV. Halloween is in our midst, and with it, so is cultural appropriation.

Ok, let’s backtrack a bit.

The tradition of dressing up around Halloween in the U.S. started out in the mid- to late- 19th century, brought over by Scottish and Irish immigrants. They called it “guising,” and it involved children dressing up and performing for food or money, which eventually gave way to “trick-or-treating” after WWII ended.

Back then, however, you wouldn’t see any sexy nurses or cat ladies walking around. Instead, there would be children dressed in the creepiest home-made costumes imaginable.

Just Google “vintage Halloween costumes.”

The fear today, however, isn’t having little kids looking like they came out of the movie, Sinister. Neither is it your worries of being unoriginal because everyone else also happened to wear a cat woman costume to the party.

The real concern is whether or not you recognize that you are appropriating someone’s culture, or insulting a group of people by wearing an offensive costume.

Earlier this October, the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and the Alpha Phi sorority chapters at UCLA decided to host a “Kanye-Western” themed party, which would have totally been fine if they had decided to dress up in Tims, leather pants and some sort of oversized black sweater with holes in it that mirrors his new Yeezy line.

Unfortunately, they decided to dress in baggy clothes, gold chains and put padding in their pants in an effort to make their butts look bigger. Some partygoers even went as far as to wear soot on their faces.

Once the party was discovered by some of the Black students at UCLA, protests ensued, and with good reason. Blackface should never be a costume.

So with the eve of Halloween upon us, let’s strive to wear costumes that don’t appropriate culture or insult whole groups of people.

Recently, Buzzfeed made a video titled, “Native Americans Try On ‘Indian’ Halloween Costumes,” and the reactions the participants had ranged from mocking sarcasm to just plain frustration.

One of them said that such costumes keep “Native Americans in the past. As if [they] aren’t real people today.”

They make a good point. Cultural appropriation and offensive costumes aren’t just limited to Native American-themed outfits. You don’t wear a currently existing people group as a costume.

But not everyone realizes how damaging it can be to the groups that these costumes are misrepresenting.

You can go into any Halloween store in town and find costumes like the following that you should definitely avoid (mind you, we had to go through very obvious judgment by staff to try these outfits on so even they think something is wrong with these type of outfits).

The “Buckskin Beauty”

The “Blessed Babe”

The “Tequila Pop Dude”

The “Noble Native American”

The “I Am Cait” (yes….this actually exists)

The “Geisha”

The “Bolly Ho”

All in all, people just have to have a little more empathy.

Someone might think that wearing a poncho and sombrero to a party in order to dress up as a “Mexican” is all fun and games.

But the reality is that it is seriously offending many people who don’t want their culture to be represented as funny or for it to be turned into a slutty costume someone can wear and make fun of.

So, ladies and gentleman, go out and brave the cold October air with your badass ninja couple outfits or your groovy 70’s hippy costumes. But seriously, don’t dress up as some sort of religious figure, and don’t dress up in a culturally insensitive and almost assuredly inaccurate costume.

The Cornell community can do better than that.