The other night I started thinking about my Halloween costume .for this year --it’s never too early to start working on your Halloween costume! and came up with this idea:
A Witch Doctor costume! A figure out of four hundred cornball jungle-adventure epics, done with elements of both low humor and actual chaotic scaryness.
The only problem is, I suppose it could be misconstrued as a racist costume if one wanted to misconstrue. What do you think?
The basis of the outfit would be one of those Lycra Spandex body suits – the one with a white skeleton on a black background. There’s no way to identify what race or ethnicity the wearer might be.
A grass skirt, souped up with rubber snakes and maybe a bunch of papier mache shrunken heads. It would hide a “utility belt” kinda thing with pouches for flash paper and smoke bombs and glitter and those things that explode when you throw them at the sidewalk
A wig that’s long and ratty and just really wild-looking, perhaps with some kind of witch-doctor headdress or some horns or something.
And a skull rattle sort of like a jester’s wand, but with a skull. It’d be papier mache too, with some beans in it to give it a loud raucous rattling noise.
Four or five necklaces made out of fake fangs and claws and such will complete the ensemble.
So what d’ya think? Is it edgy or unconscionable?I’m not at all attached to doing this costume; it is just one of several possibilities
I think you still have to be careful, but it does not jump out as racist to me. What part of it is racist to you? If a major feature of the costume involved painting your skin another color and inviting people to ‘get it’ that you are a black witch doctor or something like that, yah, maybe then. But, to me, that doesn’t seem to be what you are doing at all.
I mention caution because you could inadvertently wade into somebody’s culture with this and piss 'em off- some people are just so sensitive anymore! :rolleyes: But it doesn’t seem like you are out to pick on anybody with this either.
Oh, and maybe check out Thunder Snaps- unlike traditional snaps, the ones wrapped in white paper with the rather paltry bang, these look like fuseless firecrackers and are A Lot louder. It might be fun to have both at your disposal.
Yah, somebody’s gonna take offense… But a lot of people wouldn’t. Just so long as you don’t go the burnt-cork route…
Hell, we’re in a milieu where people get offended over Indian Chief costumes or Mandarin costumes or even Medieval Priest costumes. Nothing’s safe any more.
‘Witch doctor’ isn’t some imaginary concept conjured out of thin air. There’s a cultural basis with religious significance that’s been distilled down to ‘scary other,’ for those jungle adventures.
You could probably pull it off for a forgiving audience if you’re very careful. Just seems like a lot of bother, though.
Jeez, why even have Halloween anymore if dressing up as anything is bound to offend some oversensitive creature. The point of the costume - which sounds fabulous by the way- is to be scary and fun. Witch doctors have always been scary (though perhaps not to the practitioners of that particular religion)and as far as I know, are usually black,no? You didn’t say you were going to blacken your face but so what if you did? The whole point of dressing up is to temporarily become something / someone else. Why does that have to be considered offensive?
Of course, if OP really wants to just dress as a practitioner of sympathetic magic for warding off diseases and ailments, they could just go as a chiropractor…
No. I mean, the getup the OP’s describing sounds more like the usual generic caricature, and native spiritual practitioners from the Amazon to New Guinea all get called witch doctors. Shrunken heads, for instance, are exclusively a South American thing, and when I hear “Grass skirt” I think Pacific Islands, not Africa.
Yeah, if it’s “racist” then I’m not sure exactly who against. Everyone from central Africa to Polynesia to Peru? At least you’re efficient with your racism, I guess.
Have a friend dress as a shaman with Central European, Siberian and North American influences and you guys can insult both hemispheres at once with only two costumes.
