It’s starting to look a lot like Halloween!
While I’ve never really enjoyed the obsession with spiced-pumpkin coffee or passing out candy to kids who would rather stick their sticky fingers in the bowl than wait for you to hand them a couple of pieces, costumes are the best part of the event.
It’s around this time that my friends from home usually start calling and asking me to stitch together pieces for costumes — especially the friends of mine who go to Comic Cons. Friends from college, who haven’t found my secret obsession yet, come into my room and find measuring tapes and patterns in open notebooks across the room, as well as an assortment of different jewels, buckles, and clips.
It’s also around this time of year that I have to explain why it’s not only OK to dress up as a character of a different race for Halloween, but to Comic Cons as well.
Sitting in my room, my friends shout out character names, debating on who they were going to be and why. Going to an HBCU, all of my friends are African-American, and while I explained to them what things I could easily make and other things I had yet to try, they stopped me when I got to Thor. For Comic Con, my friend and I had agreed to try our hand at making Battle Armor Cosplays, which usually consists of a lot of craft foam, paint, hot glue, and patience. I was proud of what I ended up with, having made a Gender Bender Thor costume (a female Thor cosplay). I immediately recieved questions like, “You picked someone white?” and “Why didn’t you pick a black character? There are definitely black superheroes.” I would say that they were wrong to make these comments if I hadn’t personally experienced the backlash of cosplaying as someone outside of my race; otherwise, I would have never realized where they would see the problem.
One year I went to the Wizard World Chicago Comic Con as Poison Ivy, a white supervillain with scarlet-red hair. Her costume usually is portrayed as a bodysuit made of green poison-ivy leaves. I opted for shorts and a corset with fake leaves stitched into them and could not afford a red wig. Everyone knew who I was, but still there were comments on pictures I posted about how it would have been better if I had the straight red hair instead of my brunette Afro and how my rendition was good for “a black cosplayer.”
African-American cosplayers are immediately put into a separate sphere of judgement when showing off their costumes, while white cosplayers can dress as Native Americans, Hispanics, or African American characters without a harsh word. Cosplaying is dominated by white cosplayers. It is not bad that more white people go to Comic Cons than black people — the bad comes from the fact that this is probably so because black people are scared out of cosplaying because of the “not true to the character” argument that most people of the majority race use as an excuse for ostracizing minorities.
Take the issue of Donald Glover starring in the "Spider-Man" movie Andrew Garfield landed. Everyone was split into two: half of "Spider-Man" lovers said they loved the idea of Donald Glover playing Spider-Man because he has publicly been a fan of the comics for years and would also do the character justice with his personality; the other half shut the idea down on the basis of Spider-Man being white in the comics and that a black Spider-Man would take away from the authenticity. Meanwhile, Ryan Reynolds starred as The Green Lantern, a traditionally black superhero, and no one had anything to say about it. True, The Green Lantern has white personas, but this brings up another issue of movie studios actively choosing not to take on black characters when it would be easy for them to do so.
This Halloween, I have no idea what I’ll be, but I’ll know that if I pick a white character, my differing race won’t offend everything the character stands for.
