Orange and Black

Folks in New York and New Jersey are celebrating Halloween for the first time in three years after the October Surprise snowstorm of 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 ruined the previous two.  Another storm that is set to bear down on the Greater New York City area for November 1, All Saints' Day, will be much less severe but still has enough strength to put off Halloween festivities tonight as it goes through the Midwest.  And with the latest news of racist Halloween costumes, some folks may wish for more meteorological disruptions for late October.

The actress and dancer Julianne Hough went to a Halloween party dressed as Crazy Eyes, a prisoner character on the TV show "Orange Is The New Black," who is played by a black actress named Uzo Aduba, and so Hough made herself up to look black.  The blackface schtick caused a backlash, and  Hough quickly apologized, saying she was only trying to look like Aduba, who just happens to be black.  Hough obviously knew that she was being racist even though she didn't mean to be, else she wouldn't have apologized.  (Similarly, when Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi played the Blues Brothers, they may not have worn blackface, and they may have created Elwood and Jake as vehicles to promote their sincere interest in the blues, but their use of sunglasses and porkpie hats perpetuated racial stereotypes of Delta bluesmen nonetheless.)  More recently, though, there have been Halloween get-ups that could be nothing but racism on purpose - a pair of white guys in Florida dressed as George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin with the white guy dressed as Trayvon in blackface . . . and a bloodstained hoodie.  And this disgusting racism is not confined to just the United States; in Italy, there was a big Halloween fashion party using Africa as a theme, where designers and models dressed to look like either Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer or characters from The Lion King.

A friend of mine hates Halloween because it has the ironic effect of allowing people to wear disguises that show them for what they really are.  I can't argue with that in these cases.  Even if Julianne Hough isn't racist, her upbringing - she was raised in the religion of the Latter-Day Saints, a faith known for its deep-rooted stereotyping of black people, in the Mormon homeland of Utah - may very well have influenced some of her perspective of others, and her Crazy Eyes costume showed just how clueless she is about race and racism.  The other two examples are blatant endorsements of ugly racial and ethnic stereotypes by people who knew what they were doing and is thus exponentially horrid.  We can't stop people from being racist, but people who are racist shouldn't use an excuse for dressing in costume to display their racism.  Alas, we can't stop that either.