Cultural Appropriation

We would like to encourage our fellow students at Harvard to join the movement this year: Choose respect over insensitive humor when assembling your costumes. Even more importantly, take this opportunity to educate yourself. Engage in dialogue about why certain costumes can be perceived as offensive and how humor and caricature have historically been used to perpetuate racial and cultural stereotypes. In other words, we would like our campus to discuss how Halloween costumes can serve as mechanisms for cultural appropriation.

According to the blog Unsettling America, cultural appropriation can be defined as “the adoption or theft of icons, rituals, aesthetic standards, and behavior from one culture or subculture by another [generally] when the subject culture is a minority culture. This ‘appropriation’ often occurs without any real understanding of why the original culture took part in these activities or the meanings behind these activities.”

The Harvard Crimson, 29 October 2013.

A reenactment of a Black Mass celebrating Satan is scheduled to take place at Harvard University on Monday evening.

CBS News, 8 May 2014.