A few years ago, my preschool daughter decided to dress up as a Native princess for Halloween.

As far as I know, my family has no Native ancestry. But she wanted to dress up in a “beautiful” costume, and a Native princess was the most beautiful thing she could imagine.

Her teacher sent her home with instructions to change her costume because it was “offensive.”

This left her baffled.

“I think it’s beautiful,” she said.

“I think it’s beautiful, too.” I told her, trying to explain the teacher’s thought process in terms a four-year-old might understand. “But some people might think it’s offensive because you’re not really a Native princess.”

“But why can’t I dress up as one?” she asked.

I didn’t have a good answer because, frankly, I disagreed with the teacher.

The message my daughter got was that she could not pretend — could not even imagine herself — to be a Native person. She got the message that a barrier existed between herself and the “Native princess’ she wanted to be — the barrier of race. And nothing could surmount that barrier. Not even a child’s imagination.

This is a horrible message to send to our children.

Now a French school board in Ontario, Conseil scolaire Viamonde, is proposing that children should not wear Halloween costumes that portray cultures outside of “their own.”

Essentially, the board is sending kids the message that a Jamaican boy can’t imagine himself a ninja. A Latino girl can’t dress up as a coureur des bois. And an Ojibwa child can’t pretend to be a gondolier.

The board is saying it is better to stifle imagination than to believe that we share enough common humanity that we might be able, just for a day, to imagine ourselves as someone else.

It might be tempting to shake this off as a tempest in a teapot. But it’s just the latest manifestation of a movement that is gaining a dangerous grip over Canadian intellectual, educational and artistic circles.

This movement holds that any person who seeks to portray a person of another race or culture is committing the unforgivable offence of “cultural appropriation.”

This movement attempts to force us to define ourselves by our racial heritage. It’s a highly dangerous movement, especially in a multicultural society like Canada.

In a multicultural society, it’s absolutely necessary that we find the common humanity in all people, not only in theory, but in our daily lives. We have to approach each person as an individual, not as a member of a “race,” “ethnicity,” or “culture” that is often different from our own.

When the United Nations proclaimed the International Day of Yoga in 2016, renowned spiritual leader Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev said that yoga is “India’s gift to the world.”

That’s a beautiful thought: to view the best aspects of our many human cultures as gifts to the world. Not as possessions of an exclusive bloodline.

Let’s fight back against the intellectual movement that seeks to confine each of us into a tiny ethnic box.

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Let’s fight for our right to define ourselves as human beings, rather than representatives of a particular race.

Let’s fight for the right of our children to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes.

Kate Jaimet is an Ottawa-based writer and journalist.

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