"My Culture is NOT A COSTUME" An offence within cultural costumes

When it comes things like Halloween, we always intend to have fun with friends, make some laughs or scares, but the most important part of it all is coming up with your own crazy idea of a costume. Costumes always have a variety of different identities, either if it is a cosplay of a screen character you like, a scary one from a basic ghost to a terrifying Jason Voorhees, or just anything!

While all of this is fun to do, costumes can sometimes be of an offence to some people. Badly offended. We may not realize this at some times but when it comes to this issue, it mostly involves with costumes that refer to a specific culture.

During the late year of 2017, the magazine group that goes by the title 'Teen Vogue', uploaded a video that showcases a few young women, each of a different culture, who are offended highly because of the costumes that resembled their own culture. They are offended because they see these costumes as a sign of mockery. They talk about how cheap it was by design and could tell the cheap materials that were used to resemble it. Everyone could tell that these costumes are designed stereotypically. Each women commented differently on their thoughts of their co-opt costumes. For example, there was a costume which resembled a basic stereotype Chinese red dress, and Chinese American Emily Fong claims that just because she's of Chinese descendant, doesn't mean she wore that for her whole life. Or another example with an Indigenous First Nation, Valerie Reynoso, sees that the costume was very inaccurate and it offended her as it resembled a genre of a savage or wild people.

When I first viewed this video, it really has made me come to a realization that a few costumes in the world can really do some damage on culture and to individuals. As I saw how unhappy these women  were as how offended they are, it also makes feel bad as they look very depressed that their entire existence is just a joke viewed by some parts of society. It makes me shocked because from all my past experience of dressing up for halloween and getting out there with friends was a fun time of my life one time. But nowadays, after seeing this it makes me more cautious with the costumes I wear or see and it also makes me sad, along with knowing that this video is not from long ago, so it makes this issue pretty fresh. In my experience I don't have much to say about inappropriate costumes as I had rarely seen one in a big while.

As this issue is a big offence to the cultural communities, we can stop it by simply reminding people to be very careful as they can with what they have for a thought of a costume. Remind them that there a limits of wear. But lets not discourage them way too much, or we're just taking their fun away of brainstorming for a costume.