Mid-October means mainstream news articles (social engineering pieces) warning us against the hidden racism in certain Halloween costumes. They generally give poor reasoning, or none at all. They rely on emotional appeals and logical fallacies to make their "point", which usually is that white children can't dress up as non-white characters or figures.
Right on time, Canada's state media CBC has announced that Pocahantas is off-limits for Caucasians. As is the norm nowadays, they purport to be anti-racist, but are in reality extremely racist against fair-skinned people.
The article eventually gives reasoning: "Dressing up as another cultural group diminishes it to a caricature" and equates that with "appropriation", which it defines as "borrowing elements from one culture and removing all context and meaning with the intent of using them for your own purpose or profit."
The example given is a white child wearing a feathered headband, because that removes the context and meaning from indigenous people.
Then, it asks why dressing up as a pirate isn't offensive to pirates. The answer given is another question: "Are pirates a group that has been subjected to a history of oppression and discrimination? Because indigenous people have."
So, it's okay to dress up as someone from a culture that has never been discriminated against and oppressed. But it's racist to dress up as someone from a culture that HAS been oppressed. That's their bottom line.
I call Bullshit.
(As for pirates, I actually DO believe they were oppressed. Maybe they deserved it, but they were certainly a hated group at various times, and simply associating with somebody deemed a "pirate" could get you hanged in town square.)
That aside, is the author not aware that of the humans taken as slaves through history, a large portion were fair-skinned? Just the Irish themselves suffered in the millions, and for centuries. The article's definition would ban dressing as U2's Bono, and nobody - including Bono himself - would find anything wrong with it. Because there isn't anything wrong with it.
Since slavery and other forms of oppression have been done to people of every culture and ethnic group, and since every human comes from at least one ethnic or cultural group, this definition means dressing up as ANYONE is racist. Bullshit.
The article's reasoning is inherently flawed. It's not even a complete argument. There's no valid reason given for this discrimination against white people, or the overall division it promulgates. The article itself is racist, through and through, by very definition of the word. Maybe it is wrong to dress as someone from a particular culture or ethnicity, but this article has done nothing to advance that point.
This piece is all about division, broadcast to a national level on the front page of our mainstream media, and paid for out of our tax dollars. No mention of the truth, which is that we are all One. One race, one branch of the tree of life, one love, one species. Nothing about our commonalities, nor our shared destiny, our bond as cousins within the human family, our relationship to all life on this planet, from the amoeba to the mighty oak. Just division and narrow hatred, sponsored by the state.
What else is new?!
DRutter
There should be a union without discrimination, at the end we are all human. Thanks for sharing!
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What about the 1920s flapper girl costume? Is that off-limits because of the feather in the headband?! :O Girls want to dress up like Pocahontas for the same reason they want to dress up as a princess or fairy. It's stupid gaslighting, and everybody knows it. It feels racist against white people because we're being told how to dress and what symbols we're allowed to use, but it's also censoring culture. Just look at all of the symbols and brown caricatures like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben we're banning.
Most people feel comfortable because they don't want to dress up, but what happens when you can't practise yoga or martial arts or you can't eat pad thai or chow mein and can't learn oragami or how to speak Punjabi? Don't see anything on that list that applies to you? Well, the list is growing, and don't forget how random certain prohibitions can become, like the okay hand signal.
If there's lots of racism in the news, it's a good time to call your family...because the are, at the moment, being less propagandized than normal about COVID.
It's sad somebody's cute kid got used in a photograph on an article talking about racist costumes for children. He did nothing wrong, but was used as a poster-boy for racism.
Has nobody heard of egalitarianism? It's equality for all humans.
Being anti-racist always means being racist. It's equality we need.
holy shit. Well then I think it's off-limits to take pictures of animals - since all animals are under threat of extinction and therefore people should not be allowed to use their images since they have been oppressed.
Yes, animals would be off-limits by this article's reasoning.
They really should make an effort to be clear in their wording, if they want to be taken seriously by anyone with critical thinking skills. Sadly, that's not a large portion of their readership, so they can get away with this kind of blatant nonsense.
and honestly, I do have a problem with how humans continue to steal from animals and continue to use them for profit - but what you say in this post - this is just the kind of absolute tyrannical hogwash that will continue to homogenize humans and stamp out creative thinking and make a police force out of the dumb order-following a-holes.
I have a problem with it too. It's a big part of why I went vegan. I was vegetarian before that, but realized I was still doing a LOT of unjust harm to sentient beings, and I didn't need anything I was getting nutritionally from the breastmilk. Eggs were the last animal product to go, because I don't actually see a huge problem with eating them occasionally, if they can be obtained ethically (but that is almost impossible even in backyard operations where the birds are essentially pets). I don't freak out if there's a little honey in something, but my wife and I are what most people would call vegan. We don't think anyone should harm anyone/anything else that is sentient, that has emotions like fear and love, or that doesn't want to die. It's good to see attitudes changing on this, bit by bit. I would like to see things go a lot faster though, and maybe that's coming soon. As more and more people wake up (in general), more people realize the trillion dollar meat industry is full of shit. My wife @MediKatie is writing a post about the parallels between the elites using/consuming common people, and common people using/consuming livestock such as cows.
I am vegan too. As above, so below: We farm, therefore we are farmed.
Thanks for being vegan and not contributing to the farming of ourselves and fellow creature.
We served "vegan food" to family members recently, with mixed results! It was a little sad to see young people unwilling to eat something, simply because it was made without any animal products. The pizza we served was fantastic!
I bet it was - I know your plight all too well...we are few and far betwixt
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