What costumes are appropriate and for whom?
If I am what society labels as white but actually have mixed heritage (as we almost all do) that includes Cherokee, can I dress up as a Native American princess or is that cultural appropriation? Does it count for anything if I grew up attending pow-wows in Oklahoma with my grandparents?
Can upper middle class black people dress up as gangsters if they want to?
Who is allowed to dress up as a cowboy?
What if a Muslim student gets offended that a woman doesn’t have her head covered?
Slippery slope.
“As a former preschool teacher, for example, it is hard for me to give credence to a claim that there is something objectionably “appropriative” about a blonde-haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it. I suppose we could agree that there is a difference between fantasizing about an individual character vs. appropriating a culture, wholesale, the latter of which could be seen as (tacky)(offensive)(jejeune)(hurtful), take your pick. But, then, I wonder what is the statute of limitations on dreaming of dressing as Tiana the Frog Princess if you aren’t a black girl from New Orleans? Is it okay if you are eight, but not 18? I don’t know the answer to these questions; they seem unanswerable. Or at the least, they put us on slippery terrain that I, for one, prefer not to cross.”
I think this is very nicely stated. Contains a lot of nice discussions of nuance, which appears to be absent these days.
Slippery slope doesn’t mean that Yale should allow any conduct, no matter how offensive. Some things should be off limits. Some things already are off limits. For example, Yale decided that prancing around yelling “No means yes, yes means ____” was prohibited.
This all goes back to our original topic - where do you draw the line? You can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Not all speech is protected speech, I don’t think anyone is arguing that. What Yale needs is to do what U Chicago did: http://provost.uchicago.edu/FOECommitteeReport.pdf
The Yale Daily News article is slanted. The video of the event shows that Christakis maintained himself with composure, while composure is a word that cannot be used to describe the various Yale students that surrounded him. Various videos are here and you can judge for yourself.
Video 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoxJKmuoBmE
Video 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRl2_ibd_WA
Video 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFD_JVYd0
Video 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKOEla2-wz8
This article by Edward Schlosser perfectly captures mood on campuses these days.
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid
The readers comments to the YDN blog posted in $96 are interesting. I agree, if they are asking for students to behave in a certain fashion, that should include the behavior of the protesters.
Cardinal Fang - No doubt civility is one of the values at the core of both official disapproval proposals. But - to me - there is a key distinction here between two cases:
1: Abusive protests directly suppress the expression of ideas … that’s essentially how I define “abusive”.
2: Wearing Halloween costumes - even somewhat offensives ones - do not directly suppress the expression of ideas.
However, I admit that blackface might fall in the category of expression that so severely degrades the environment that it also suppresses academic discourse. This is a very slippery slope and one that I am reluctant to go down, but in the case of blackface the deliberate racism and the history is so clear that I can see myself deciding that it essentially excommunicates people from the academy without any redeeming gain in an academic sense. Similarly for the burning of crosses and so forth.
That’s why - at least in my vision of the academy - Category 1 offenses are definitely are out of bounds while Category 2 offenses are only out of bounds in extreme cases. They aren’t completely symmetrical to me, and the underlying notion of “civility” isn’t sufficiently nuanced for me.
But I completely understand how you can view them as both required by “civility”; I just think that - in a university environment - academic free expression has to be one of the dearest and most central values.
The other issue is - what exactly does “official disapproval” mean? Does it just mean a reminder that a behavior is wrong or are there penalties involved?
The issue, raised by Christakis, of how we define cultural appropriation is complicated. For instance, as I was looking at a friend’s daughter’s FB page I found a picture of a large Stiles College (one of the residential colleges at Yale) group, including a couple of suit-and-tie senior admin types all dressed as Vikings for Medieval (K)night. They had plastic helmets with horns, shields and maces or swords. Should my kids, half of whose extended family still speaks Swedish, be offended? What are we to make of the misrepresentation of Nordic peoples (who did not really wear horns) and the implication that all Norsemen and women have historically been bellicose?
I’m clearly being a bit tongue in cheek, but my question is serious. How and where do we draw the line? This same issue came up in the Oberlin microaggression thread. Are there things someone in the “in” group can do and say that those on the outside can’t and who makes the rules?
I had an interesting interaction with a trick or treater this Halloween. At the end of the night we traditionally get high schoolers and some of them make minimal effort at costuming themselves, wearing silly glasses, a fuzzy tie or a wig but otherwise their street clothes. One group came to the door without even a nod to dressing up. I was a little annoyed, so as they were getting candy I asked one of the guys, who happened to be AA, what his costume was. As he jumped down the stairs, he called over his shoulders, “A brownie!” and ran off laughing.
I laughed with him but something about his joke really bothered me. Upon reflection part of what I found disturbing was the fact that if I’d made the same joke I could rightfully be accused of racism, or at the very least, being inappropriate. The other thing that bugged me was the vague feeling that the joke was made at my expense, that it was a way of trying to make a jab at the middle aged white lady.
I don’t really have answers to the questions I posed above, but I wonder if we can grapple our way toward some common ground if we can’t have open, honest conversations. Demanding Erika Christakis’s resignation or shouting down her husband are not productive ways of engaging others in struggle.
Last spring I heard a “This American Life” episode on NPR about canvassers trying to prevent Prop 8 and the new tactic they were trying-simply talking to people and letting them hear the experiences of individuals who would be affected by the law. It had also been tried around abortion rights issues.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/555/transcript
IOW, what mattered most was human interaction, letting people see that “those people” are really “us.”
@Sue22 - I do not mean to criticize the substance of your post - which I think is a very interesting one - but unfortunately the research that forms the basis for the NPR piece that you link to seems to be fraudulent.
David LaCour, the grad student who did a lot of the research, appears to have completely fabricated his data about the “persuasion effect”. I believe the article has been retracted and LaCour’s academic appointment has been rescinded. A lot of people in his field were “taken in” (through no fault of their own) by the fraud, and at least one researcher appears to have been unable to replicate the findings.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-a-huge-fraud.html
I’d want to bend over backwards to protect academic free speech, but I’m not clear on how wearing blackface or a sexy Pocahontas costume is academic speech.
I dunno. The initial email that provoked the fracas didn’t mention any penalties, did it? Sometimes a reminder that that behavior is wrong is enough. What should the penalties be for students who disrupt academic lectures?
His name is Michael LaCour. He fabricated some of his vita, as well.
(This is a reply to #110.)
Thanks @al2simon. Your information makes me sad. I liked the idea of the persuasion effect, but if it’s not true it’s not true. Sigh. 
Thank you for the correction, and my profound apologies to any David LaCour’s out there. My memory isn’t as good as it once was, SwisscheeseWI 
How would these protestors view blacks in white face. Eddie Murphy did that quite often mocking whites. He was comedic genius? Wanda Sykes routinely mocks white people.
All the shouts of “hang them”, OK at least shouts of “fire them” at any perceived misstep by employees in the public eye show the real meaning and value of tenure for academics. Maybe university administrators need tenure protection too.
Comedians mock everyone. I happened to see Wanda Sykes just 2 days ago. The show was funny. The audience was a fascinating blend of blacks, whites, gays, you name it. She drew a large audience. BTW, she is married to a white woman and has 2 caucasian kids (twins). Sometimes people need to lighten up a bit.
@jym626 Many comedians including Chris Rock won’t play colleges anymore due to the PC nonsense.
Sorry, white and Hispanic comics don’t mock black people and black stereotypes, but there is open season on whites by black comics, particularly Jews and Christians. Muslims of course are protected by the PC police.
That’s one of the reasons I like Key and Peele. As biracial men they seem to be able to get away with mocking everyone!
We must not attend the same stand up comedy shows, TurnerT. Dont recall the specifics, but I seem to recall some pretty edgy stuff all the way around at some I’ve attended. Most comedians seem to make fun of themselves, though.