Among the various fright masks, he came across something he called "very
disturbing" — a mask depicting a black man with grotesquely bulging lips — and a
short distance away on the Ossining store's shelves, another mask featuring an
Asian man with absurdly large glasses and buck teeth.
"I was disheartened," said Barkan, a Croton-on-Hudson resident who is black
and works as a dean and basketball coach at a Queens middle school. "It's so
negative, especially for children."
Barkan was incensed enough by Halloween masks, depicting what he termed crude
racial stereotypes, to complain. He asked the store's management to stop selling
the masks, and after receiving what he called an unsatisyfing response, plans to
follow up with a series of letters.
"The main thing is awareness. Too often people look past this kind of thing,"
he said, "But this is wrong. These images, these ideas have caused people to
suffer a lot of pain. Why perpetuate it?"
A manager at the Parties Plus Warehouse on Rockledge Avenue, who did not
identify herself, said she had no comment yesterday. There were none of the
exaggerated racial or ethnic masks on the shelves yesterday.
The local distributor of the masks in question, Bronx businessman Frank Bee,
said he would discontinue them. He said the masks are manufactured in Asia and
sold all over the country.
"Everyone sells them. I'll take it off the rack. It doesn't mean anything to
me. I'll pull them. I don't want to offend anyone," said Bee. He said the black
mask appeared to sell to African-Americans, as a kind of racial inside joke.
There is a long history behind the images on display at the party store this
weekend, notes an authority on African-American stereotypes, John Thorp.
"The racist imagery of the past is being brought into the future," said
Thorp, director of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia in Big Rapids,
Mich. "At Halloween, some people say it's fun and games, it's nothing important.
But there's some very long history in our society of the blackface tradition,
egregious, dehumanizing images. We have a long way to go to escape the racist
past."
THE
JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: November 1,
2005)
OSSINING — Josh Barkan came across
something that made his blood run cold when he was shopping for Halloween
costumes with his kids over the weekend.