I called up several experts on cultural appropriation and got their take. “Why do people use Halloween as a time to be offensive?” asks Jamia Wilson , the executive director of Women, Action and the Media It comes down to Halloween being a goofy, silly holiday where people are trying to be clever and funny with their costumes. “At Halloween, you participate in the carnivalesque ,” says Anna Akbari, PhD, a sociologist and founder of Sociology of Style . “Everyday life gets turned upside down and inside out, hierarchies dissolve, the sacred becomes profane. Hence why so many women dress in an overtly sexual manner, because they can reclaim it in a way that becomes acceptable on Halloween.”“Halloween as a holiday has a history of being focused on inversion of power,” says professor Susan Scafidi of Fordham University. She is the author of Who Owns Culture: Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law . “It’s about turning the daily world on its head.” People dress up as celebrities, cops, politicians, and other powerful figures, and it’s funny! But when you dress up as a culture that you are currently oppressing, or have subjugated in the past, you’re not inverting anything, you’re just kicking them when they are down — or, as Scafidi says, “reinforcing current power structures in an offensive way.”“We need to treat people with the dignity that they deserve, the way we want to be treated. If it’s something that [you] have the privilege to wear safely, where others would be persecuted if they wore it, do not wear it,” Wilson says.Put another way, minorities have to put up with so much real BS every day of their lives — discrimination, hostility, structural violence and exploitation — then they go out on Halloween and everywhere they turn are people making fun of them and their family and friends using erroneous stereotypes. “You can be whoever you want for a day, but with what ramifications?” says Dr. Akbari. “Who suffers at the hand of your public display of dress-up?” Can you imagine being Mexican, hearing Donald Trump call all Mexicans rapists, and then seeing guys partying in sombreros on Halloween? Or being a Muslim and unable to get on a plane without being pulled out of the security line, and seeing someone dressed up as a terrorist? And then, you can’t even say anything without being dismissed as overly sensitive.“The pushback is ‘People can’t take a joke’ or ‘You’re looking too hard for [offence],’” says Akil Houston, associate professor of cultural and media studies at Ohio University. Students there did a great campaign a couple years back called “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume.” But he’s also seen some egregious costumes, including a Klansman with a noose around a student’s neck, and white male students in blackface as Michael Jordan and Lil’ Wayne.“You should know when you go past the limit,” he says. “But there are people in society who don’t know that limit. If we really begin to examine the links between funny and the subconscious thoughts of others, there might be a lot more there than just a joke,” he points out.But Dr. Akbari cautions against being too strident. “Erring on the side of being PC always works in your favour,” she says. “But anyone who tells you that there is a clear line, they’re lying. It doesn’t exist. Halloween in many ways is about pushing the envelope. Every costume can offend in the right context. That doesn’t mean just go for it, because you’re going to offend everyone. I don’t think anyone should go in blackface; I don’t encourage a Caitlyn Jenner costume.”Okay, so don’t be scared to be creative, but be thoughtful. Got it. Here are some more specific guidelines I found: