As I get older, I spend more time thinking about the childish fun I used to have growing up.  Halloween was my favorite holiday; it was so fun pretending to be someone else—even if it was just for one day.  Even better than trick-or-treating, was walking in the Halloween parade at school.  Most of us were superheroes: there were dozens of Black children who woke up early that morning so one of their parents could paint their faces with White shoe polish and help them into their costumes so that they could transform into miniature Wonder Women and Supermen for the day.

Luckily, the fun of dressing up didn’t end in my childhood.  When I went to college, some of the fraternities and sororities would throw parties such as “White-Girl Wasted Wednesdays” or “Trust-Fund Timmy Tuesdays” where we’d all dress-up as White college kids.  People went to great lengths for their costumes: putting Crisco on their hair to make It appear stringy, buying pants too large so it appeared that they didn’t have a butt, drawing their lipstick line in the middle of their lips so their lips would look pencil thin, stuffing their bras with various products to imitate fake breasts, using a rubber-band around their faces to imitate the face-lift-stretched-out look.  We’d buy kegs and drink to excess (doing “keg stands” and playing beer pong), play pop and rock music, and laugh at each other as we jumped around and danced purposely with no rhythm.

Of course, none of this is true.

Quite to the contrary, in America, only White people, for the most part, reduce a person’s race or culture to the point of a cartoon or caricature.  Parties are thrown where elementary, high school and college kids wear black face, fake afros, gold chains, and saggy pants.  A number of sports teams have mascots portraying caricatures of Native Americans: Braves, Redskins, Indians (with “Chief Wahoo”), Seminoles and Chiefs.  Schools across the country think they are being culturally relevant by having “Mexican Heritage Day” where kids dress up in large sombreros, taped on mustaches, and eat tacos for lunch.

White people get to be complex and varied; while everyone else is whittled down to a cartoon character, caricature or a costume that represents the basest of stereotypes.  Unquestionably, imitating someone, their race or their culture is bullying and racist.  It can not be classified as a mere joke when one party is injured or insulted for the pleasure of another. It can not be dismissed as child-like antics because it is not a behavior that children of all races naturally do; it is something White children do–that they feel entitled to do. One can’t feign ignorance about the offensive nature of such acts; as wearing Blackface was specifically designed to degrade Black people since it began during the mid-nineteenth century. The practice and the hateful intent behind it isn’t new.

That White people are not stereotyped, minimized to a caricature, bullied, and mimicked (there are no sports teams named the Pink-Necks, or White-face party controversies) is power.  They have it; and some abuse it. The willful lack of awareness of their offensive behaviors, and ensuing ability to dismiss concerns and complaints about them, are the very definition of White privilege. And that is not a fable.