Saturday is Athens’ notorious Halloween block party, and, as I’ve made my custom during each of the last four years, I have absolutely no idea what my costume will be.
My procrastination has served me well in the past. Although, my cop-out “teacher” costume freshman year (consisting of a suit jacket and a ruler) and my store-bought 1920s gangster costume last year (chosen to match my significant other’s flapper getup) didn’t exactly win me any awards, I have to say I managed to pull off a pretty impressive Flavor Flav two years ago.
Don’t confuse my inability to effectively plan a costume in advance with apathy toward the holiday. Actually, I love traversing Court Street and admiring the creativity of the wide array of costumes.
But for every few hilariously executed costumes, there is usually one or two that make me wince — whether they be students dressed as “illegal aliens” or visitors donning traditional Arabic garb with fake explosives strapped to their chests.
And apparently I’m not the only one taken aback by these prejudice-induced outfits.
The “We’re a culture, not a costume” poster campaign, rolled out earlier this week by Ohio University’s Students Teaching Against Racism group, has gained national spotlight for courageously speaking out against costumes that turn heads not for their skimpiness or their creativity but because they highlight racial stereotypes.
I couldn’t have been more proud to see my fellow OU students taking a stand and boldly confronting the racist stereotypes we all so often pretend don’t exist. At the same time, I couldn’t have been more disgusted by the near immediate attack this campaign came under by those attempting to write it off as an attempt to make Halloween more “politically correct.”
Writing this campaign off as a liberal push for political correctness is too easy. It means you don’t have to think of the effect that your choice to dress as a “suicide bomber” has on Arab American students. Disregarding the campaign means you can sleep at night no matter how uncomfortable it made your African American peers that you thought “plantation owner” was an appropriate costume.
We’re all adults, and we’ve certainly all got the right to dress in whatever costumes we choose — whether that be the barely-there outfits that appear each Halloween, outfits that may be racially or ethically insensitive or whether we choose to wear no costume at all.
But, if only for a moment, STARS’ campaign has forced us all to consider how those with different backgrounds than our own will interpret our costumes this year.
When given the choice of exercising my First Amendment rights by donning a racially or ethnically insensitive outfit or going with a more mild costume that’s more considerate to the diverse set of people who’ll populate Court Street Saturday night, I’ll always choose the latter.
Even if that means I have to break my “slutty ladybug” costume out of retirement.
Wesley Lowery is a senior studying journalism and editor-in-chief of The Post. Email him at wl372808ohiou.edu
