Would You Call This "JFK Assassination Day" Family Halloween Parade Insensitive or "Just Patriotic"?

Personally, I would call recreating JFK’s assassination day as a family Halloween costume offensive and deeply insensitive. 

The inconsideration alone, especially since the Kennedy's just lost another young family member--the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, KYLE FRANCIS KENNEDY, should have made them at least care enough to postpone it until next year, if nothing else sensible stood out with them.

Dressing as the Kennedys generally is one thing. Deliberately evoking the day a man was murdered beside his wife -whose pink dress that once held her husband's blood and brain shards on it is now on display in a museum- turns an actual family’s trauma into made-for-public entertainment.

There are still people alive who remember that day explicitly and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s pink suit has a particular historical weight because of it. Using it to make an assassination scene recognizable is what makes this more troubling than simply dressing as any president and first lady.

The photograph alone doesn’t establish every detail of their intention, like adding in the open air limosine and signs that say GRASSY KNOLL and "THIS WAY TO PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL", but the assassination is obviously the intended reference point, which makes it even more despicable and unpalatable.

Halloween doesn’t make a real killing—and the grief of the wife and children left behind—harmless costume material.

Do you think anyone would have found it obscene or objected to it a BLACK FAMILY had done the same?

Yes. I believe so.

—and I think a Black family would very likely have faced a harsher, more racialized backlash, including social media doxxing and death threats. 

Beyond calling the costumes tasteless, some people would likely have questioned their patriotism, accused them of celebrating a white president’s murder, and extended the condemnation to Black people generally. But is relatively sensible that only a Trump supporter would enjoy it and think it harmless. He was, after all, a "dumocrat," in Republicanspeak.

We can’t know exactly how that hypothetical would unfold, but the double standard would be clear if a Black family had done it: who gets treated as an individual exercising poor judgment, and who gets made to represent an entire race and be blacklisted by the Ku Klux Klan and all of their Klannites of all denominations and delimiters?

The white family is already receiving criticism and objections, but whether a Black family would have received the same latitude in how their intentions were interpreted?

I think we all know the answer to that.

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