Posted: Nov 02, 2016 1:27 pm
willhud9 wrote:purplerat wrote:Come on will, you know the vast majority of people dressing as "Indians" for Halloween haven't a clue about, nor are attempting to accurately represent any specific culture. It's generally just a mish-mash of often racist pop-culture portrayals of "Indians". It's no different than if somebody threw together a much of Asian stereotypes and said they were dressed as an Oriental.
That is literally the definition of racism - to broadly and boorishly define people by their ethnicity. If somebody dressed as an "African" for Halloween mish-mashing a combination of different hip hop and urban stereotypes what would you call that other than racist?
Because again dressing as a culture =/= racism.
You cannot dress as a race. That concept does not exist. If someone dressed as a Powhatan Indian and said, "Im dressed as a Native American" they wouldn't be wrong, but they wouldn't be right either. Since a Powhatan Indian is technically a native American the statement is factual, but not all Native Americans are Powhatan.
Ignorance does not equate with racism either.
Again that is not what racism is.
The strict technical definition of racism is the belief that members of a race share characteristics and abilities unique to that race.
If that belief is not there than racist intent is not there. The observer doesn't get to call it racism just because he or she is offended.
If you think there's such a thing as "Indian culture", meaning you are lumping thousands of groups of people into a monolithic block that has no historical or modern basis because they all share a very general ethnicity that's racist. Ignorance isn't an excuse.
Do you think somebody dressing as an "Oriental" or "African American" using various stereotypes pulling from various groups within a somewhat general ethnicity that wouldn't be racist? Like if I wore low-riding pants, a FUBU jacket with a grill and a bunch of gold chains along with an afro wig and called my costume "African American", you would see no racism there?