For her 2015 Halloween costume, Kylie Jenner wore a white crop top with a fur-trimmed hood, a matching miniskirt, and a pair of furry boots. On Instagram, she revealed that the outfit was her attempt at dressing like an “Eskimo,” a word that is considered a slur by many people living in the Arctic. NPR has published an in-depth explainer on why the word is problematic, and the gist of the issue is that it was commonly used by racist colonizers who viewed the native inhabitants of Arctic areas as dangerous heathens.
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According to HuffPost, Jenner changed the caption of one Instagram post to describe her costume as a “Snow Princess” instead, so she evidently noticed that she was getting called out over her ill-thought-out Halloween look. However, she did not remove the word “Eskimo” from a video showing off her glittery eye makeup, and she used the offensive exonym again in a 2016 Facebook post, revealing that the Halloween costume had been added to the “Kendall and Kylie” mobile game. In the comments, one of her followers replied, “I’m Inuit, ‘Eskimo’ is a derogatory term to us (not all), but we do not dress like that unless we want to be found dead in a snow bank. Please don’t dress like us as a f***ing Halloween costume.” Another person wrote, “This is cultural appropriation of the worse kind because not only is it offensive, it also sexualizes women of this culture.”
