At E-Carnavalskleding.nl, a company that specializes in “party and carnival costumes,” you can shop for your ethnic, non-normative look of choice. You can dress up as an “African” woman or man, an “Argentinean” mariachi. To my knowledge, mariachi is typically Mexican. However, at E-Carnavalskleding.nl, it seems, South America is just one big grab bag of one-size-fits-all artefacts.
If cultural appropriation isn’t your cup of isms and you feel feisty, you can even slip into the ensemble of a drag queen. Anything goes under the guise of carnival!
Now, if an entire costume is too much of a hassle, you can also opt for one of their multipurpose wigs: they have a wig that serves both as an Afro and as a Zwarte Piet hairdo. Yet there are still people in the Netherlands who claim, with a straight face, that Zwarte Piet does not represent a Black man. Go figure.
Or if you don’t want to wear blackface because of some skin condition, you can wear a mask. Again anything goes under the guise of carnival!
The act of dressing up as a racial or ethnic Other not only preserves, but it also reinforces the racial hierarchy that privileges White Autochtoon Dutch culture. Racialized Others become mere costumes that you can slip into and out of. What’s more the outfits that are being presented as “African,” “Argentinean,” or “Arabic” are creations of a Western imagination. I doubt that the peoples of Argentina would claim mariachis as Argentinean. Of course, at E-Carnavalskleding.nl White Autochtoon Dutch folks are stereotyped, too. However, there is a marked difference between White Autochtoon Dutch people who stereotype themselves, and White Autochtoon Dutch people who stereotype the Other.
The pertinent question then is who produces, controls, and disseminates these images and dress styles. Cultural appropriation is one of the many processes through which imperialist power is mediated: one party is the dominant one.
This power differential enables the dominant culture to appropriate and define, through sartorial play, cultures that are produced by racialized bodies while minimizing the contributions of racialized bodies to the dominant culture. Moreover, the dominant culture asserts its normative power by actively legislating against racialized bodies. So racialized bodies are not only symbolically displaced (through the erasure of cultural meaning), they are also quite literally displaced, and confined in stereotypes.
In the politics of integration having a cultural identity other than White Autochtoon Dutch is considered undesirable. Cultural appropriation takes an interesting position in this discursive space. It’s through this process that appropriated objects become integrated as vital commodities and accessories in the manufacture of White Autochtoon Dutch symbolic spaces.
At any rate, for analyses of why it is wrong to dress up as other “cultures,” you can read “Don’t Mess Up When You Dress Up: Cultural Appropriation and Costumes” published on Bitchmedia’s blog and “Unintentionally Eating the Other” published on Threadbared.