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
