Why Shouldn’t Race Be a Costume?―A (Qualified) Defense of Wearing Cross-Racial Make-Up During Halloween
1 Department of Philosophy, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 11 Jan 2022 / Accepted: 30 Mar 2023 / Published: 28 Apr 2023
Abstract
Over the past decade, many politicians and celebrities in North America have found themselves embroiled in scandals that involved them having worn black make-up and in at least one incident white make-up. In most of these cases, the used make-up was part of a costume for Halloween, Purim, Carnival, or a themed party. This article challenges the view that wearing cross-racial make-up on such occasions as part of personal costumes—as opposed to costumes that are integral to specific cultural traditions, such as the New Orleans Zulu parade—is always wrong. To do so, it assesses the five most promising objections to this practice. Although some of these objections count against certain uses of cross-racial make-up, I show that in several high-profile cases where such make-up was worn, none of them had force, whether because the objections themselves were implausible and/or because they did not apply.
Keywords: cross-racial make-up; blackface; whiteface; Halloween; offense; costumes
OPEN ACCESS
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
CITE
de Vries, B. Why Shouldn’t Race Be a Costume?―A (Qualified) Defense of Wearing Cross-Racial Make-Up During Halloween. Controversial_Ideas 2023, 3, 6.
de Vries B. Why Shouldn’t Race Be a Costume?―A (Qualified) Defense of Wearing Cross-Racial Make-Up During Halloween. Journal of Controversial Ideas. 2023; 3(1):6.
de Vries, Bouke. 2023. "Why Shouldn’t Race Be a Costume?―A (Qualified) Defense of Wearing Cross-Racial Make-Up During Halloween." Controversial_Ideas 3, no. 1: 6.
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