Norithics said:
EternallyBored said:
While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, you've gotta remember there are still people who were alive when that crap was actually happening,
Yeeeah, but at the same time, it's never those people who get up in arms. It's never the people who remember that kind of thing and lived through it who see the kid cosplaying and get mad about it- it's always some douchebag 20-something slacktivist who read about somebody talking about it somewhere and decided to become the embodiment of "my people's suffering!"
Instead of ever doing anything to actually further the cause of equality, I might add.
Oh trust me I know about the Tumblr social justice warrior crowd, and they probably will be mostly the ones who get offended by any slight thing. Still, you need to be careful, blackface is a touchy subject even outside the online circle if your not careful you can still draw ire from people even if you didn't mean to offend.
In the end, everybody here has had good advice so far, you can get away with tanning or lightening the skin as long as you do it well, with respect to your costume choice, and have a thick skin, because someone will get offended and if you flip out or get overly defensive about it, it will just attract more attention, and not the good kind.
Blood Brain Barrier said:
EternallyBored said:
I find this whole "there's nothing wrong with it but you shouldn't do it because people might get offended" thing bizarre. Surely the best way to help these people overcome their taking offense is the opposite to hiding what they're offended by? If I were Leader of the World we would have a huge parade every year featuring blackface, Nazi soldiers, Stalinists, Inquisitors, KKK, Hutu militia and Khmer Rouge just so everyone can be reminded that these things happened in the past, they were bad, but that times change and we can be glad they aren't around anymore. Kind of like Halloween except it would actually serve a purpose.
Except many of those people are still around, the KKK usually ends up with a few murders to their name every year, neo-nazis regularly end up in prison for killing gays and minorities, and there are still genocidal tinpot dictators in the world. Are you honestly suggesting we tell people to not be offended by people who joke about atrocities that are still ongoing today, especially if they personally experienced them?
Even if we only talk about defunct groups, imagine your talking to a man who survived the holocaust, spending years in hiding every day terrified for his life, only to be found and taken to a concentration camp, subjected to some of the worst conditions in human history, slowly starving to death as he watches thousands of people dying around him, who buried his own father in a ditch with hundreds of other corpses after he died of infection, and after he is rescued, he finds out months later that his mother and baby sister were gassed as soon as they entered the camp, because they weren't worth wasting food on making them do hard labor. What are you going to tell this man who has had his entire life ruined, his family taken away, likely has multiple physical disabilities from infection and starvation that will make him disabled his entire life, and regularly has thoughts of suicide. What can you possibly expose him to that's going to overwhelm the kind of hatred, depression, and loathing experiences like that can build. Not everything can be solved by a joke and some wit, and really should someone whose been through similar experiences not be entitled to take a little offense at people making light of something that ruined his life and took everything from him.
I've met and worked with people like that, who've survived terrible situations at the hands of evil people, just telling them not to be offended or using some kind of warped exposure therapy to make them confront such things will never work. People respond to trauma differently, but you can't realistically expect people to just overcome what they take offense to. The human mind just doesn't work that way.
