Good summary from Gawker. There are videos, too.
http://gawker.com/yale-is-imploding-over-a-halloween-email-1741191530
I don’t understand the response from Christakis, who works in child development and seems to be talking about children. (Yes, I fully recognize that adolescence can stem well into your 20s but her work seems to be around early childhood.)
The Dean asked the ADULTS who associate with Yale to be decent human beings. I don’t see anywhere where he said that individuals would be punished for their actions if they chose to ignore the note. IMO, Christakis’ response was way over the top.
But it’s whatever. People will read into this situation exactly what they want to. If they think the cultural sensitivity around Halloween has been blown completely out of proportion, they’ll side with Christakis; if they think it’s high time that people stood up and said “no, my culture isn’t going to be a joke on Halloween,” they’ll side with the Dean and the students who backed him.
Here’s the full letter from Erika Christakis. It’s more nuanced than the snippet would lead us to believe. The central point of her letter is that college students don’t need older adults to tell them what to do from on high, that they can control themselves through use of their own judgement and peer pressure. I’m not sure I agree, but her position is not the “anyone should dress any way they want” message it’s being portrayed as.
The part just after the section of the letter quoted by Gawker is…
To me it seems LESS nuanced. Is she really telling that freshman from Iowa, go ahead and dress in blackface, your African American classmates can demonstrate to you by their reactions what a jerk you are, no need for guidance about how not to be a jerk? Seems to me that other classmates have something better to do on Halloween than to have to police jerkiness.
Regardless of how dumb Christakis’s email may or may not have been, the way the behavior of the young woman (and surrounding crowd) in the video is a complete disaster.
I think Christakis’ email was ill advised and I disagree with parts of it, but since when is polite and reasoned disagreement cause for firing?
According to her letter she was responding to the concerns of “a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween-wear.”
One thing I don’t understand about these supposed advocates of free speech is why they seem to want to ban people talking about what they find offensive.
@warbrain
Unfortunately, many of our children are hypersensitivite and irrational and they will suffer as a result in later life.
I’m going to list 3 things. You tell me which one doesn’t belong.
- Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis
- Persecution and genocide of the Yazidi people in Iraq by ISIS.
- People crying over Halloween costumes.
I would say obviously not. Not even faintly so. I think that both of the Masters believe that Yale students, an intelligent bunch, have not reached adulthood without learning that blackface is not acceptable in polite society, and they shouldn’t need an administrator to tell them.
She is saying that students should be able to police their own behavior, and not have to have a real grown up tell them how to dress themselves. In other words, act like the adults you want to be considered to be.
I also think that they expect, in the unlikely event that someone really thinks it is amusingly saucy to don blackface, that ALL of their friends, of whatever race, would point out to them that it was going to be truly offensive to a lot of people.
Sorry… I grew up in a family where all of my immediate family members still think it would be perfectly fine and very funny to don blackface. There are many people in the US who still think it is fine, especially in certain geographic areas, and some of those people likely do end up at Yale. There are probably students at all colleges that draw a national student body who think it is fine. The Masters are mistaken if they think all their students know and follow “polite society rules”.
Isn’t it amusing that a group of kids who are so over-privileged they can swear at renowned researchers without any repercussions are crying about how marginalized they are?
I don’t need some professor telling me that I can wear black face out in public to know that I shouldn’t. I think free speech is fundamental to our society, but so is common sense and decency. Anyone who got into Yale should know that and be respectful of their classmates.
Polite society rules are not laws. Social ideas have to be defended by people on an individual basis.
I understand your point and agree. I am in no way saying that individuals should not stand up for social ideas. But if someone were to show up at a Halloween party in black face I would instantly lose all respect for that person. I would expect a similar reaction from my friends. Is having an offensive costume really worth it? Maybe I’m just naive and still believe in treating other people how I would like to be treated.
Thank you for posting the full link. The letter is perfectly appropriate - this is college -there is no law against cultural costumes (Tacky or otherwise) so there should be no rule against it at a college of quasi-adults. They SHOULD use personal tact - and look stupid if they don’t. So, presidential costumes should be banned? No one can dress like Obama- like they have dressed for EVERY Halloween since the beginning of time? Or is it OK to dress like Obama if you wear a mask, but not if you put on makeup? Maybe we should ban the hideous Trump hair, that could be offensive. Its a slippery slope - which is what Christakis is saying.
And Yale students are going to have a tough time in life if they are losing sleep over a perfectly coherent letter, which invokes the writers Freedom of Speech. To think this group is likely to produce the next crop of future political leaders is scary.
YES! Thank you!
This would have been the correct response:
Guy shows up with blackface. Jeremyj and his/her friends instantly confront him and show him to be a racist moron. Everyone loses respect for the guy and he likely never wears blackface again.
Now, was that really so hard? Why did the students have to run to the administration and now try to get a person fired? It’s not the Yale administration’s place to get involved with such petty, low-stakes situations.
There was no rule about cultural costumes, nothing was banned. And if no one has noticed, the protesters are using their own freedom of speech, which has somehow upset the entire internet.
Censorship was implicit in the letter sent by the Yale students. And the protesters are not using speech…they are shouting, swearing, and acting like a mob.
Personally, I stop caring about someone’s message when it is delivered in that kind of way.
Instead of simply dismissing the students in the video as oversensitive, maybe consider where they coming from? The anger and swearing seen in the video isn’t an appropriate (or an effective) way to have a dialogue about these issues, but that doesn’t mean the reaction isn’t understandable. The “White Girls Only” party that allegedly occured would suggest there is already racism present on Yale’s campus (as there is on other campuses) and the privilege at Yale contrasted with the New Haven area probably does not help the climate. According to http://ctdatahaven.org/reports/communityindex2013.pdf in New Haven “a Black or Hispanic child is four times more likely than a White child to attend a public school where the school poverty rate (based on free lunch eligibility) is higher than 40%.” In Connecticut as a whole black people are least twice as like to be in poverty as white people: http://trendct.org/2015/09/21/poverty-in-connecticut/
When there is such a high disparity between races, there is often a lot of tension. This tension does encourage the hyper vigilance and awareness of microaggressions that was the final straw that triggered the events in the video. The anger seen at Yale isn’t just the results of one (in my opinion) poorly chosen letter, but the buildup of tension in a racially charged political and cultural climate.