The Anti-Racist Halloween Project

I would like to give you all a homework assignment for this year. We have a full year to complete it.

Based on the constant barrage of racist halloween costumes each year (see here and here and here), I would like to challenge everyone to put their heads together and come up with some costumes that showcase American racism.

You can really come at this from any angle--you can present a white-face caricature of a white racist, or you can do something more creative or abstract.

Please post your ideas and we can discuss the best way to present them. Remember, the goal is not to make white people angry for the sake of making them angry, but to constructively address American racism.

If you want to constructively criticize ideas so that we can be the most effective, please do so. If you want to be cynical and shoot down this idea or some of the costume ideas because that's what you tend to do in general, email me and I'll start a different thread to discuss this issue. (Sorry, but actions like this tend to bring out the cynics and destructos.)

Since many of the people reading this are in different communities around the country, we don't have to actually come up with an independent costume for each person participating. On the contrary, if we come up with a good half-dozen, everyone in each community can dress up with their friends in those costumes and spread the message.

If people actually put in the effort on this, we can then take pictures and I'll put them up on the internet. It would also be helpful to pass out literature that explains what we are doing on the day of halloween.

To give one example, how about:

1. A & F white supremacist (pretty self-explanatory although obviously we have to think about what images to represent so that we don't get our asses kicked or upset other people of color).