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Comment by GJim | Hacker News Reader

I fail to understand why a story about a child innocently dressing up as someone from another culture is perceived by some Americans as racist.

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It’s never really resonated with me either. But I think this thread has a good example in it: a patent not wanting their child to read a book in which people consider “you” to be an acceptable costume (making you feel strange or uncomfortable, since kids often don’t like being singled out or noted as different — especially not in a way meant to exaggerate and lean in to stereotypes). This is doubly true when the kids may already feel self conscious about their race due to any existing racism they personally encounter in the society.

Counterpoint: St. Paddy's day - where a lot of people dress up and claim to be Irish.

Or when someone dresses up as a 1920 gangster, just always happen to Italian...

It's really the same rule of thumb of stand-up comedy: punching up vs punching down. Western European and North American pan-national stereotypes are typically comfortably 'up' (though targeting specific ethnicities can become 'down').

Well, this kind of adds up because the "punching up vs punching down" rule never made sense to me either.

What a ridiculous statement!

Perhaps you would like to give us all a 'hierarchy of the races' so we can all judge who punches up or down? You can call it the Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes.

ah come on. It's halloween. Brothers dress up as their sisters, sisters dress up as their brothers, kids dress up as their neighbours.

You are an acceptable costume. Face it. But context matters. The reading kid is not singled out, nobody is making this negative. It could also be perceived as a celebration 'hey I want to be like my adopted asian sister, she is cool'.

Live and let live, and give context if the kid is asking questions. But don't censor because you feel like a special snowflake

Kids dress up as their siblings?

I haven't seen that, but at work we all once dressed as our boss once, and several times I've had friends have dressed up as me.

It’s about thinking of people stereotypically, there might be a way to do it not so bad but it never is

See these examples

https://www.culturalsurvival.org/sites/default/files/nmai-sp...

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/browbeat/2013/1...

https://risetowin.org/assets/img/what-we-do/educate/resource...

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