African American Cultural Appropriation

Most think that cultural appropriation only happens to African Americans, Asians, or anyone that isn’t white. But that’s highly untrue. In fact, the LGBTQA community is often misrepresented in the media. Maybe not as often, but, they are. For example, this article on the Huffington Post, Jules Horowitz, a transgender himself, explains that transpeople need to be involved in telling trans-stories.
Hollywood has only really put one famous Transperson in the centre of the media when it comes to acting and depicting actual hardships they face; Laverne Cox, who plays Sophia in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, is one of the first to show the challenges of being a transwoman. But, instead of allowing more transpeople to play transcharacters, Hollywood insists on using big-name actors, such as Jared Leto.
But, it isn’t just the
Candy sales go through the roof, decorations are sold by the crate, but most importantly, costumes are sold like crazy—even though they’re sometimes incredibly racist and demeaning to various cultures, races and societies. And while one could branch this topic of cultural appropriation through clothing and costume to the fashion industries, I’ll keep it small, considering this paper is already longer than it should be.
The website I went to initially was Spirit Halloween, a very popular Halloween site apparently. My goal was to go look for costumes that were depicting a culture or race, such as Native American or Romani. I went under “Classic” costumes for women, and within two pages I had over 10 tabs opens—and that is out of 6 pages. I’ll list the names of some of the most racist that I thought I could find within those first two pages. (Afterwards, I realised I excluded the ‘Beerfest Girls’ costumes, which, I think, are as equally culturally