Does anyone want to argue that photos of students wearing Halloween costumes consisting of straw hats and with their hands clasped in a subservient matter shouldn’t be offensive to Asian Americans?
The photos found by the blog Fascinasians were from a fraternity party put on by Delta Kappa Epsilon at the University of North Carolina.
Much has been debated online about whether people of color are being overly sensitive about these costumes. A blog in this morning’s New York Post was headlined “No, dressing as a sushi chef isn’t racist.”
“Sorry, I can’t really laugh at something that tore my family apart and that just changed the entire course of my family’s trajectory and people like me,” Linda Vu, a sociology major, said about the UNC fraternity party.
“Any time you have people dress up as a certain ethnicity, it gets pretty racist pretty fast, ” said sophomore Shannon McKerlie.
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That was exactly my point when I joined a chorus of those opposed to the kimono and sushi chef costumes sold by Pottery Barn. It’s not necessarily the costume, its what people do with them that ultimately becomes the bigger offense.
The photo from UNC just reinforces that point. If we had audio from the party, its likely you would hear more than one party goer mocking an Asian accent.
Am I being too sensitive? If you’ve grown up watching kids doing exactly that at the playground, at the bus stop, in the school corridor, perhaps you’d feel the same way too.
RE: Vietnamese Halloween costume photos surface from UNC Frat Party: I think you said it yourself: dressing up as another ethnicity is not necessarily racist. It’s when people behave badly while wearing that garb that it becomes racist. What about when Asians dress up as French mimes or maids? Russian princesses? A Malay dressing up as a Japanese? No one bats an eye.