February: 28 Days of Black Cosplay
Since 2015 Black History Month has, within the cosplay community, been known as #28DaysofBlackCosplay. The tag floods most of today’s relevant social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and TikTok) with black cosplayers who cosplay from a variety of mediums. The central theme is consistently sharing and “hyping” up black content creators, especially since the cosplay community has a problem with racism. It isn’t just the cosplay community itself, but geek culture as a whole. What much of the community has, over the years, placed on a pedestal as the ideal cosplayer is a white/white-passing cosplayer (usually slender and/or having androgynous features). As for cosplayers who aren’t that ideal, they deal with unnecessary hate comments as well as attacks on social media.
Which, ultimately, is what led to the creation of the tag in the first place in 2015. Funimation spoke to the creator of the month-long event (cosplayer Chaka Cumberbatch-Tinsley, also known as @princessology) and delved into the origins of the social media tag. It started as a way to lift up black cosplayers and content creators, fighting back against the anti-blackness and racism that can be found within the cosplay community. The threats and comments that black cosplayers receive doesn’t stop, even during Black History Month and #28DaysofBlackCosplay. A minority of the geek and cosplay community often adds fuel to the fire by posting racist remarks and complaining about the social media tag. Black cosplayers don’t have as much visibility on social media as white and white-passing cosplayers, so the act of sharing them consistently throughout February brings them across the feeds of racists in the community who wouldn’t have found their content otherwise.
It is a double-edged blade, in that these content cosplayers are exposed to more racism, but they deserve to be lifted up and shared. Not just during the month of February, but throughout the other months of the year as well. As the cosplay community as a whole stands beside them to push out and censure the racist members of the community, things will be able to change, and hate crimes within the community will lessen.
When it comes to hate crimes, the overwhelming majority of these incidents are about race and ethnicity. The FBI compiles incident reports that have been submitted to their offices and publishes annual reports on the statistics of these hate crimes.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual report showed a decrease in the number of hate groups nationwide, but it isn’t that these groups are disbanding. They’re moving online and developing a social media presence where, often, it’s easier to attack people from behind false profiles. An article from CBS News goes further in-depth on this subject, examining how hate groups have merged and become even more of a threat in recent years, the least of which not being the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
