Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
—Voltaire
“Maybe Don’t Dress Your Kid Up As Moana This Halloween?” That leading question was a Cosmopolitan editorial headline the week before Halloween in 2017. The subhead avoided a direct answer: “It’s on you to teach your kid not to be racially insensitive.” So I’ll say it in plain English: “If your little girl is White, and you let her dress up as Disney’s Moana, you’re being racist,” according to Cosmo.
Obviously, that could upset some little girls and their mothers, so Cosmopolitan has thoughtfully provided instructions for how mothers can console their disappointed daughters.
“Encourage them to take a step back and realize that they’re awash in privileges that the real Moanas and Tianas of the world will likely never see because the world is full of racist assholes.”
I’m sure that will make “the real Moanas and Tianas,” as well as your kid, feel much better.
Identity politics has escaped the campus, infiltrated the Democratic Party, and as “cultural appropriation,” now shows up on a regular basis in women’s magazines—Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Teen Vogue, Redbook, People, Glamour, Allure. The first time I looked it up, Google handed me a piece in Teen Vogue explaining that White girls should not wear cornrow braids.
Although never labeled as such, “cultural appropriation” is just another type of microaggression. And being micro, its unintended hidden message is that racial and ethnic oppression has diminished to such a microscopic level that a White girl rocking cornrows is now near the top of the list of racial concerns, so we can rest easy. That unintended message is itself racist (I said the “message,” not those sending it).
Fortunately, there are still sane voices being heard, for instance, Whoopi Goldberg’s: “If you’re going to talk about appropriating, we’re all in deep doo-doo, because we’re doing it to each other constantly.” When Stevie Wonder was asked about singer Bruno Mars being accused of cultural appropriation for covering Black songs, he commented, “God created music for everyone to enjoy. So we cannot limit ourselves by people’s fears and insecurities. He [Mars] has great talent. So the other stuff is just bullshit.”
Auliʻi Cravalho is the Hawaiian/Polynesian actress who spoke and sang for Moana, the Polynesian Princess, in Disney’s 3D animated musical, and Disney was widely praised for its cultural sensitivity when choosing Cravalho. In spite of being Polynesian herself, she had a different take than the White corporate magazine editors when it came to anyone dressing up as Moana.
I think it’s absolutely appropriate. It’s done in the spirit of love and for the little ones who just want to dress up as their favorite heroine. I’m all for it. Go for it! Parents can dress up as Moana, too.
So what was the “logic” of the Cosmo/Redbook editors?
“To pretend to be Moana when you’re not makes light of [Polynesian] history—and reinforces a deeply problematic power dynamic, wherein White people use, then discard, pieces of cultures they’ve subjugated for centuries just because they can.”
In other words, if your little girl wants to dress up as Moana for Halloween, she is actually trying to subjugate other cultures just because she can. Stevie Wonder was right—that’s just bullshit. No one with the power to subjugate cultures has ever dressed up as Moana. That’s not how power operates. And they certainly are not little girls, White or otherwise.
The obvious point that usually gets lost is an old piece of folk wisdom: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When a little girl dresses as Moana, she’s saying she loves Moana. And that helps her remember a bit about Polynesian culture. When Bruno Mars covers a Black song, he’s saying he loves that song, and he’s complimenting the culture it came from. No one ever ate pizza in order to deprive Italy of its culture. We just love pizza. That makes us like Italians more, not less.
It Came from the Ivory Towers
So where did this nonsense come from? Academics, of course. Who else can twist their thinking into such intellectual pretzels?
Two years before the Moana hoopla, administrators from 13 multicultural centers and offices at Yale University sent the student body a two-page memo advising them on how to choose their Halloween costumes. They hoped that people would avoid any circumstance that “disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.” Fair enough.
But, in addition, students were warned that even if they were “not intending to offend,” they could fall so far short of the mark that no apology could undo the damage. To sort this out, students should ask themselves five fairly ambiguous questions, the last of which was, “Could someone take offense with your costume and why?” As we know, the answer to that is always: Yes, someone could! If the self-appointed culture police choose to take offense, that by itself makes you guilty.
A number of students approached the master and associate master, Nicholas Christakis and Erika Christakis, respectively, at Silliman College, one of Yale’s 12 residential colleges, and expressed their concern and frustration with these instructions.
The great ‘offense.’ In response to this concern, Erika Christakis sent an email to the students at her college, in which she said, “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 [Disney’s animated Chinese princess] Mulan for a day.” She also suggested that students might want to handle the costume question on their own rather than letting the university’s establishment “exercise implied control over college students.”
The ‘brave’ response of 150 Yale students was to publicly confront college master Nicholas. A video taken toward the end of the confrontation shows a female student yelling, “Be quiet! In your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman. You have not done that.” Silliman College, with its indoor basketball court, dance studio, gym, movie theater, film-editing lab, billiard tables, and art gallery, sounds far more comfortable than what 99% of college students experience, not to mention what urban Black kids experience.
Then the student demands, “By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?!” He replies calmly and quietly, “No, I don’t agree with that.” Standing a foot away, she explodes, screaming:
Then why the fuck did you accept the position?! Who the fuck hired you?! You should step down! If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that!
This too is a dark side of identity politics. This is about intimidating your intellectual opponent when you have no reasonable argument. It’s not about “creating a place of comfort and home,” as she claims. Otherwise, she would not be so eager to destroy that in order to enforce her ideology.
The student’s demand is an extension of the standard identity-politics demand for “safe spaces” on campus. These spaces, safe from those who might question the logic or ethics of identity politics, are now provided on most campuses. The student’s rant is a demand that the residence college itself should count as a safe space—safe from points of view that differ from her own.
Although the Christakises apologized for unintended racial insensitivity, they would not disown the views expressed in their email. The thought police were not pleased. Nearly 1,000 students and faculty signed a petition asking for Nicholas and Erika Christakis to be immediately removed from their campus jobs and campus home. Some students demanded advanced warning of Erika’s appearances in the dining hall so they wouldn’t be traumatized by the sight of her. This is the sort of thing that gets them labeled “snowflakes.”
None of the politics enforcers saw the least problem with screaming curses in Nicholas Christakis’ face. That could not be a microaggression because he is White.
Seven months later, at Silliman College’s graduation ceremony, some students refused to accept their diplomas from Nicholas. Two days later the two resigned from their posts at the residential college.
The View of a Black Marine. I have no data as to the majority view of Blacks regarding Halloween costumes, so-called cultural appropriation or open discussion on college campuses. But the view of one Black Marine who commented on the situation in a letter published in The Atlantic seems to me to put things in perspective better than anything else I’ve read.
My name is Chris Martin. I was in the U.S. Marine Corps Infantry from 2007 to 2011. After combat deployments to Ar Ramadi, Iraq, and Marjah, Afghanistan, … I attended Denison University, a liberal arts college in Ohio, where I was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in economics.
Violence, the prospect of violence and fear always seem to grab peoples’ attention more roughly than almost anything else. The world grieves for ISIS’ victims this past week, as they ought to.
During these recent tragedies, and the student protests sweeping campuses across the U.S., I find myself intrigued by the term “safe spaces.”
In the military, I firsthand witnessed occasional racism. At college, I again heard of racial tensions between student groups. I wholeheartedly acknowledge and support the causes that the students at Mizzou/Yale/Ithaca/CMC/Amherst and other colleges are fighting for. Their cause is just and needed.
It is difficult for me to reconcile the idea that campuses are not “safe spaces” for students. … A member of my unit, Kyle Carpenter, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for diving onto a hand grenade to save his friend. That kind of environment, to me, constitutes an “unsafe space.”
Again, I do agree that there is racism in academia.
My Millennial peers who are still on college campuses do their causes disservice by claiming conversations about inappropriate Halloween costumes cause them to fear for their safety. Talk to a student veteran about fearing for your safety before invoking such hyperbolic terms.
Conclusion
The standard “proof” of cultural appropriation’s harm is blackface. But if some frat brats put on blackface to ridicule Blacks, this is neither a microaggression nor a cultural appropriation. It’s simply a highly offensive insult. Blackface is not some important part of Black culture; it is purely an offensive artifact of White culture.
Most “cultural appropriations” fit the definition of microaggressions perfectly. The offense, if it exists, is generally small by objective standards—Whoopi Goldberg, Stevie Wonder, and Auliʻi Cravalho could detect no offense at all. In microaggression theory, it doesn’t matter if borrowing the culture is intended as a compliment. As I’ve pointed out before, if someone decides their feelings are hurt, almost any level of retaliation is justified.
When someone borrows from another culture because they respect it, admire it, enjoy it or simply think it’s cool, this is not an act of aggression, micro or otherwise.
Ripped Apart
