This ridiculous “illegal alien” Halloween costume was being sold at a bunch of major retail stores recently until the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights took issue last Friday. Since then, companies including Target, Walgreens and eBay have removed the costume from their inventory. According to the Associated Press:
Target has said it sold the costume online only and that it was posted by accident though it did not meet the company’s standards. eBay said it asked sellers to remove the costume because it “does not allow items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance, or promote organizations with such views.”
This actually seems like a pretty remarkable step for immigration advocates, who have fought to erase the hateful and inhuman term “illegal alien” from our nation’s vocabulary for quite some time and to mostly little success, thanks to xenophobic mainstream talking heads like Lou Dobbs. Unfortunately many local stores are still selling the costume, which also paradoxically comes with a green card. If that doesn’t reveal this country’s hateful ignorance toward immigrants, I don’t know what does.
Some people have argued that the activists can’t take a joke and that if anything this costume is making fun of the antiquated terminology we use for undocumented immigrants. But only someone who has no idea what the undocumented face in this country—such as indefinite imprisonment—would take issue with the outcry over this costume.
It’s not just some effort to make Halloween costumes more PC. If that were the case then activists would be attacking the many other costumes that play on Hispanic stereotypes. And to be honest, they’d probably have a case with something like this donkey riding Mexican.
I’ve always found the ‘it proves you have no sense of humour’ argument to be especially weak.
If something is not funny then people don’t laugh .. it’s nothing at all to do with having a sense of humour or not! We can all walk away from an unfunny joke. But when something is also offensive (which by defnition means people are offended by it) then walking away is often not enough.
Thanks for this!
PS I actually found the costume both slightly amusing and very offensive – I guess the best response to that is to laugh in an embarrassed way and then complain about it and get it removed.