Northern Arizona University Homeless Costumes

Overview

Northern Arizona University Homeless Costumes refers to a set of college students' Halloween costumes in 2019. The group of students dressed up as homeless people with cardboard signs stating that they were either immigrants, veterans or alcoholics. The image of the students originally posted to Instagram was reposted to Twitter causing the University to speak out on the matter.

Background

The DailyDot^[1] obtained screenshots of comments posted to the original Instagram photos from Katy Stiff who discovered the images and reposted them to Twitter^[2] on October 29th, 2019 (shown below). The tweet gained over 11,200 retweets and 29,400 likes in five days.

Notable Developments

On October 31st, 2019, Northern Arizona University President Rita Cheng^[3] responded by tweeting, "The recent post by NAU students has been taken seriously. We involved the Dean of Students & Office of Inclusion. The students recognize the seriousness of their actions & apologized. @NAU values & supports free speech. Speech demeaning to others does not represent our values." (shown below, left). Twitter user @groovyk8^[4] or Katy Stiff replied to the tweet by saying, "According to information I just received, the girls and their families are under the impression that this statement was issued by NAU in order to condemn the BACKLASH the girl’s have received for their offensive costumes, INSTEAD of condemning the offensive costumes themselves" (shown below, right). The tweet accumulated over 4,300 likes and 129 retweets in four days. Twitter user continued to speak out against the student's costumes with their own experiences with homelessness.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References