Racism starts with feathers and construction paper.
That’s according to Kelly Alderfer, a student at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, who wrote in The Keystone about the evils of dressing like an American Indian for Halloween:
Unfortunately, what a lot of people don’t realize is that by dressing as a Native American for Halloween, they are reinforcing stereotypes of an entire culture that is so much more than buckskin and headdresses.
She quotes a professor of “multiethnic rhetorics” at Kutztown who says, incredibly, that wearing costumes of any particular group will “disrespect the real, living people” who are “very much alive and well” in modern America. (Like the Kardashians?)
And this harmful pattern can be stopped during playtime, Alderfer says:
One of the problems here is that most of us grew up being taught that this is okay. Around Thanksgiving when I was in preschool, my class made headdresses out of construction paper and wrote on each feather something we were thankful for. It’s an innocent activity, but it’s the first step of many that can cause some of us to have that stereotypical view of Native Americans that we may have today.
That’s right – time to threaten your kid’s preschool teacher for teaching them racism! (Would Alderfer prefer that people dress up as successful gambling executives?)
She has strong feelings about other aspects of Thanksgiving, having worked in a toy store around Black Friday.
Alderfer isn’t especially helpful in recommending how to devise an inoffensive costume, simply exhorting Kutztown readers: “Be imaginative!”
According to her profile for Writing Wrongs, a journalism project in which students spend the weekend at a homeless shelter and write an entire newspaper about it, Alderfer is majoring in “professional writing” and enjoys craft beer.
Her personal quote, ironically, is: “With the media covering so much useless information, it’s so easy to forget about what really matters.”
RELATED: Greek life could sue UCLA for First Amendment violation by punishing ‘Kanye Western’ party
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
IMAGE: Artesia Wells/Shutterstock
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.