Unmasking Racism: Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Other

Abstract

We explore Halloween as a uniquely constructive space for engaging racial concepts and identities, particularly through ritual costuming. Data were collected using 663 participant observation journals from college students across the U.S. During Halloween, many individuals actively engage the racial other in costuming across racial/ethnic lines. Although some recognize the significance of racial stereotyping in costuming, it is often dismissed as being part of the holiday's social context. We explore the costumes worn, as well as responses to cross-racial costuming, analyzing how "playing" with racialized concepts and making light of them in the "safe" context of Halloween allows students to trivialize and reproduce racial stereotypes while supporting the racial hierarchy. We argue that unlike traditional "rituals of rebellion," wherein subjugated groups temporarily assume powerful roles, whites contemporarily engage Halloween as a sort of "ritual of rebellion" in response to the seemingly restrictive social context of the post-Civil Rights era, and in a way that ultimately reinforces white dominance.

Halloween, Organization, and the Ethics of Uncanny Celebration

“…Yet Halloween is not a comfortable calendar custom to participate in and even in its late twentieth and early twentyfirst century incarnations it is regularly a site for controversy, danger, and offence. These might be controversies and scandals involving race and gender (see Mueller et al 2007;Lennon et al 2016), or the perceived threat of demonic BlackEyed Children (Lockley 2014), predatory Killer Clowns (Evans 2016), or worries over safety as seen in the public panic in the United States throughout the 1970s concerning poisoned candy and chocolates containing razor blades that persisted into the following decades. As folklorists Dégh and Vázsonyi (1983) observe, such perceived threats and panics are often based on urban myths that capture public imagination and spread.…”

“…Unlike other religious and civic celebrations, Halloween invites participants to come face-to-face with difference, alterity, and with it new and potentially unsettling subjectivities. This is an inherently uncanny relationship between self and other that is arguably present in many forms of everyday and organizational experience (Beyes and Steyaert 2013;Royle 2003), but one that is heightened during an engagement with Halloween (Mueller et al 2007). In seeking to situate Halloween within the study of organization, our article begins by exploring its affective and aesthetic function as a kind of uncanny 'tension-management ritual' (Etzioni 2000), in which the structures and conventions of 'normal' organization are temporarily suspended and inverted through acts of 'ritual rebellion' and 'playing out' (Nelson 2000).…”

Women’s revealing Halloween costumes: other-objectification and sexualization

“…Researchers have studied Halloween as an event on college campuses (Belk, 1990;Miller, Jasper, & Hill, 1991;Mueller, Dirks, & Picca, 2007) and gender stereotyping of children's Halloween costumes (Belk, 1990;Nelson, 2000). Miller et al surveyed over 1200 mostly college students about Halloween and dressing in costume.…”

Public Sociology or Partisan Sociology? The Curious Case of Whiteness Studies

“…Therefore, to eliminate the concept of race would be a "theoretical and political error" (Andersen 2001;Renzetti 2007), because to do so would encourage the growth of colorblind ideologies. Even though the "emerging etiquette of race" (Applebaum 2005) and the passage of government mandates that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race have limited blatantly racist utterances and actions, racism reproduces itself through new, covert, or aversive practices that protect the status quo (Emerson and Smith 2000;Harrison 1998;Hyland 2005;Lynn and Parker 2006;Marvasti and McKinney 2007;Mueller et al 2007;Santas 2000): "Indeed, it is my contention that it is especially when white people believe themselves to be good and moral antiracist citizens that they may be contributing to the perpetuation of systemic injustice" (Applebaum 2005:277; italics in original). Those who would reject this contention do not realize that their "stance" is white (Applebaum 2005).…”

“…It "unpacks" white privilege (McIntosh 1988(McIntosh , 1990, brings to the forefront the impact of racism on the lives of nonwhites, "liberates students from the logic of the present system" (Sanders 1999:175), and creates a communal understanding that builds consensus and encourages social change (Cooper et al 2006;Green 2003;Kanpol and Yeo 1995;Manglitz et al 2005;Mueller et al 2007;Tate 1997;Taylor 1998). The pedagogy of whiteness studies claims to be a model for education that recognizes the "multiplicity of situated knowers" (Kanpol and Yeo 1995) vis-à-vis imposing a Eurocentric worldview as the standard against which others will be judged.…”