Here we go again. It seems like every Halloween season, we’re having conversations about costumes rooted in racist stereotypes. This year, it’s Target that finds itself at the center of that conversation. The retailer recently came under fire over a children’s Halloween costume that evoked racist blackface and minstrel imagery. The costume, marketed as a “Kids’ Glows Under Blacklight Circus Clown Halloween Costume,” included black gloves and a mask with an exaggerated grin and teeth. The product’s promotional image featured a Black child model in a pose that many argue mimicked historical minstrel poses.
Target has acknowledged that the costume was offensive, saying it “should never have been part of our assortment” and that they are examining how it happened and what needs to change. Unfortunately, this is not new. Every year, Halloween brings another example, whether it’s someone wearing blackface or a costume that echoes a racial or cultural stereotype, and leaves us scratching our heads and wondering how it made it through an approval process in the first place (presumably several layers of approval).
At some point, we have to wonder: Do people really not know, or do they know and just not care? Or, as we discuss in Black Fatigue, is this a case of sublime ignorance? Neither answer is particularly comforting.
The Historical Context
To understand the outrage, we have to understand the history. Blackface minstrelsy emerged as a popular form of entertainment in the United States during the Jim Crow Era. White performers darkened their faces and mimicked Black people through exaggerated appearance, speech, movement, and behavior, portraying them as ignorant, foolish, lazy, irresponsible, and less than fully human. This caricaturizing of Black people helped shape and reinforce how Black people were viewed and treated in American society, normalizing ideas about Black inferiority. This imagery extended beyond the minstrel stage and appeared in advertising, toys, household products, film, television, and other forms of entertainment for generations.
For Black people, incidents like this contribute to Black fatigue—the exhaustion that comes from the repeated, cumulative impact of navigating racist systems and environments. In their apology, Target acknowledged the disproportionate impact, noting that the costume was “especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members and partners.” For generations, Black people have been expected to explain why these types of incidents are harmful, watch people debate whether something is really racist, hear an apology, and eventually watch another version of the same thing happen again.
We are living in a time when conversations about race, racism, inequity, and history are increasingly characterized as divisive, unnecessary, or even discriminatory. Efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in organizations and institutions have coincided with broader attempts to erase or minimize racial history and limit how systemic inequity is taught and discussed. This erasure of history can leave us unprepared to recognize when old stereotypes, ideas, and harms reappear in new forms.
This Is Why DEI (Done Right) Is Necessary
Target’s controversy comes with an additional layer. An organization once viewed as an example of DEI done right announced in 2025 that it would scale back several of its DEI commitments, including ending its three-year DEI goals and components of its racial equity work, sparking widespread backlash and calls for a nationwide boycott. Given this context, it’s tempting to draw a connection between Target’s DEI pullback and the sale of this costume in its stores. We cannot definitively know whether the two are related. However, it does make one wonder: Would this costume have made it this far if DEI were still a priority and embedded across all aspects of the organization?
When done right, DEI becomes part of how an organization operates. It helps build the cultural competence needed to recognize that something may have historical and cultural implications beyond what may be immediately evident. It creates an expectation that different perspectives will be taken into account when decisions are made. It encourages people to ask questions about whose experiences may be missing and how a product or advertisement may land differently across communities. It places responsibility for inclusive decision-making across the organization, rather than allowing it to fall on one person or department.
The current backlash and retreat from DEI would have some believe that organizations can simply stop paying attention to race, difference, inequity, identity, and history, and that everything will be fine. You can eliminate the acronym, rename or dismantle the department, but you cannot eliminate the diversity that exists within organizations and communities, or the need to understand and account for that diversity. Those differences still shape how employees and consumers experience organizations, what they need, and whether they feel seen, heard, valued, and like they belong.
This Target incident is a prime example of why the need for inclusive decision-making does not disappear simply because an organization stops calling the work DEI. Organizations need people who know enough to recognize the potential harm of certain decisions, cultures where people care enough to speak up about it, and systems that make it harder for harmful decisions to move forward unchecked.
About the Author
Mareisha N. Winters Reese is President and Chief Operating Officer of The Winters Group, Inc. In a previous life Mareisha was an engineer, she now runs the overall day to day operations that keeps The Winters Group running like a well oiled machine. She is a Black woman, Christian, wife, daughter, sister, friend, dog Mom, Gen X, introvert, analytical thinker, Native New Yorker, and current Southerner.
This piece made me think about my father, who passed away in 2024, and the vast collection of African American memorabilia he left behind. I have been contemplating what to do with it because, for him, it was never simply a collection. He used it first to teach his own children about history and, later in life, to teach anyone who was curious enough to ask.
After he had a stroke, a group of young white millennial physical therapists came to his home to help outfit it for his needs. They noticed the collection and began asking questions. They were scheduled to be there for an hour, but they came back later and stayed for three. One of them had a spouse who taught elementary school and eventually asked my father to speak to her fifth-grade students.
What has stayed with me is that this was happening at the same time we were increasingly hearing the argument that teaching history from an African American perspective somehow makes white children feel guilty or bad about themselves. That was not my father’s experience at all. When he shared the history reflected in those objects; the deep racism embedded in everything from advertising and product marketing to popular culture, but also the resistance, creativity and resilience of Black Americans, people became curious. They wanted to know more. Eventually, he was being invited to have these conversations beyond Black History Month.
And that is part of what I think we lose when we reduce conversations about DEI to an acronym or a political argument. So much of American culture, from everyday idioms to advertising imagery, carries history that many of us were simply never taught. Without that context, it becomes much easier for something like this Target costume to move through an organization without anyone recognizing what it evokes.
Learning history this way, at my dad’s knee, did not make me less interested in people who were different from me. It did the opposite. It made me curious about other cultures and histories and taught me to ask how something might look or feel from someone else’s perspective.
At its heart, that is what I always believed DEI was trying to do: broaden our understanding of one another, give us enough historical and cultural literacy to recognize what we might otherwise miss, and encourage us to see the world from perspectives beyond our own.
Thank you Yolanda for your thoughtful reply. Indeed, DEI has always been meant to educate so that we do not repeat our painful history and to broaden our perspectives. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Peace and Blessings.