A Safe and Respectful Halloween

Halloween is officially tomorrow! How do you plan on celebrating it? Hopefully your answer doesn't include an insensitive costume or predatory behavior.

From rape culture to cultural appropriation and even Blackface, dressing up in costume often gives people a false sense of permission to do outrageous things. The anonymity of wearing a costume on October 31st gives you the ability to completely change your day-to-day identity, and makes it easy to feel like you have an alter ego... but that doesn't make it okay. In fact, blatantly racist costumes that dehumanize people are never okay. Violating someone's consent just because they're wearing a "revealing" costume is never okay.

People in face paint darker than their natural skin tone, women wearing war bonnets and moccasins, men saying that "she asked for it" just because her skirt is short: none of it is okay. This Halloween, recognize that celebrating a holiday doesn't give you permission to be problematic.