Cut your bulls—, Mardi Gras racism. 
As parade season comes into full swing, #MardiGrasRacism is also picking up steam. You can have fun at the parades without using someone else’s culture as a costume, and you can go to a parade without blackface,                   redface or yellowface. 
You can have “actual fun” in purple, green and gold without being a racist ass. 
Costumes aren’t the only        racist things I see on social         media. Many parades consist of mostly white, wealthy dudes who pass off racism and sexism as comedy. 
According to NOLA.com | The Times Picayune, the Krewe of Druids had a float last year suggesting the EBT card, used to purchase food stamps, was “the preferred card of all female Mardi Gras krewes.”
Druids also featured another float, “Lincoln Beach or Pontchartrain Beach,”                                 referencing Lincoln Beach, a                                  separate facility for African-Americans through the 1960s on the lakefront, and Pontchartrain Beach, an all-white beach that wasn’t desegregated until 1964. 
Black people didn’t have a choice between Lincoln or Pontchartrain Beach. Segregation limited them to one beach. 
Martin Luther King, Jr. had to explain this injustice to his daughter. In King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he describes his daughter’s tears in her eyes when he had to explain an  amusement park, Funtown, didn’t welcome black children. 
King described his daughter’s reaction to racism. He saw “the ominous clouds of inferiority     begin to form in her little mental sky.” 
Mardi Gras’ racism is nothing new. According to                                  NOLA.com | The Times                                               Picayune, flambeauxs, those carrying torches to light parades at night, were originally slaves or free men of color. Now, the mostly-black flambeaux carriers reach to pick up pennies, which the Uptown parade watchers throw to them as tips. 
Many Mardi Gras krewes formed from exclusion. The         formation of the all-black Krewe of Zulu formed in the early 1900s out of a social benevolence              organization where blacks “had to provide certain basic                                                           economic and social                                                  services themselves,” according to political science professor Wayne Parent in his book “Inside the Carnival: Unmasking                   Louisiana Politics.”
According to NOLA                                    Defender, the first gay Mardi Gras krewe, Krewe of Yuga or “KY,” formed in 1958 before the Stonewall riots, at a time when police raided gay bars and shut down many gay establishments. 
In 1991, the New Orleans City Council sought to rectify this  history  by voting to no longer grant permits to Mardi Gras krewes who                                                                             discriminated on “race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, age, physical condition or disability,”                                                            according to The New York Times. 
The history of racism and sexism in New Orleans is ugly, and still manifests itself in these parades. You can punch up, making fun of those who seek to enforce and continue these oppressive systems today.                                       However, I doubt the people who have enough money to ride in these satirical krewes would  recognize the harm they are           doing. 
Mardi Gras has a long history of exclusion. Don’t continue this tradition by “dressing up” like a Mardi Gras Indian, a flambeaux or anything that requires you to easily water-down another           person’s culture into a costume. 
Dance in the street, mind your backpack, get drunk, catch beads, be merry, enjoy the break. Leave your racism somewhere else. 
Michael Beyer is a 22-year-old political science senior who will be thirsting for your beads in New Orleans, Louisiana.