This year’s Halloween festivities saw a lot of creative juices flowing down State Street in the form of outlandish costumes. Among them: Antoine Dodson, Four Lokos and, in a punny homage to everyone’s favorite bar, a trio dressed as a scoreboard.

As per usual, girls generally took the opportunity to bare as much skin as possible, guys took the opportunity to cross-dress and still be socially accepted and people stopped at nothing to take their costumes over the top.

But in trying to push boundaries, there were some costumes that proved to be a little too ethically uncouth for my taste.

Specifically, I passed by a prison chain gang. A run-of-the-mill costume, until you consider the fact that these were white men, dressed in blackface.

Minstrelsy is a dated, intensely derogatory act. It was used as a way to perpetuate stereotypes about blacks and originated in the mid-19th century.

So when I passed by these men dressed as prisoners, with their naturally white faces painted a dark brown, I had to do a double take.

This wasn’t the only instance of blackface I saw this weekend. The other one of note was a white student dressed as Tiger Woods with his face, of course, painted black.

We like to believe we live in a post-racist society, but how can we uphold that notion when students are still painting themselves in blackface?

Halloween gives students the chance to throw most ethical rules by the wayside. But something strange must have been going on in these students’ heads when they decided to paint themselves in blackface just to accentuate their prisoner costume.

They couldn’t have been white prisoners? And in the Tiger Woods case, I happened to see one or two others dressed as the infamous golfer. They were, in fact, light-skinned. And stayed that way.

It’s hard for me to see these simply as isolated incidents. The act of going ‘blackface’ for a Halloween costume speaks to a greater issue of racial apathy among our generation.

Perhaps these students aren’t bigots, at least in the way that you and I would envision a bigot. They might not even be outwardly racist. But they have perpetuated racism, regardless of whether they meant to do so.

We live in a politically-correct world, where the words that leave your mouth can be your biggest enemy. With such tight restrictions on speech, racism is much less overt in nature; its subtlety is represented in something like the aforementioned prison inmate costume.

I’m in no place to play racial ombudsman. I grew up in a predominantly white community. And all things considered, though there is significant diversity at Binghamton University, it still seems to be a segregated campus.

But I’m still allowed to be alarmed when I consider that several white students felt the necessity to complete their prison inmate costume by painting their faces black, as if to imply that a prison inmate was best characterized as a black individual.

We try to pride ourselves in having so much distance from the bigotry of days long gone by, but these displays convince me otherwise.

It’s hard to police all that might be interpreted as offensive, but it’s important to show some judgment. These costumes were simply in poor taste and had no place being worn.