The Bowdoin Orient

I’m on the sailing team, and I didn’t go to the "gangster" party. I wish I could say that was because I knew it was wrong, that I was immediately shocked and offended by the theme, that as a Hispanic person, I was hurt by the reference to criminalized and impoverished non-white culture. But it was just a coincidence that I wasn’t there. That doesn’t make me less sorry for what happened, because I still knew about it. I got the email invitation, I read it and knew about it for days preceding the party on Thursday and I am just as implicated as anyone else.

So here's the big question: how was a sizable group of students ignorant of the social implications of dressing up as a gangster when others were immediately aware? And I’ve been asking myself all week: How did I—a Sociology major currently taking a class in which we discussed cultural appropriation at length; a half-Mexican person from Los Angeles, where gangs and ghettos are real—let this blatantly problematic act go over my head?

I can’t totally answer those questions, but I want to try. Let me start with the personal part: Yes, half my family is from the part of Mexico City where gun violence happens; yes, there were kids at my high school in LA who were in gangs and wore bandanas and baggy jeans; and yes, some of them got pulled out of school and arrested for drugs or violence. But I’ve never had to live that culture. Few people look at me and see that I’m Hispanic, and I’ve never felt discriminated against by a teacher or a cop. And when I saw those kids have to leave school, I didn’t wonder why all the white kids who did drugs weren’t getting pulled out of class too. I know that black people, especially those who dress that way, are arrested and looked down upon at wildly disproportionate rates, but obviously that wasn’t enough.

Understanding cultural appropriation, institutional racism and inequality from a sociological perspective wasn’t enough either, and that’s what really bothers me. How can I claim to be a social activist or even a conscientious person when I didn’t realize that my team’s party was contributing to and trivializing society’s view of poor black people as dangerous and uneducated? If I were in class and I were asked whether a "gangster" party was problematic, I would’ve said yes. When I was sitting in the Union and I got an email about a party, I just wasn’t thinking about it. If I was from downtown LA and my best friend’s older brother was in a gang, would I have been offended? Probably.

But I hate that our conversations about appropriation always revolve around whether something is justifiably “offensive,” and I think that we need another way to talk about this. As legitimate as I think it is for people to feel offended by the "gangster" party, there will always be others who say they're unjustified. But I really just want all those people defending us on Yik Yak to stop, because this isn’t an isolated incident and it has serious implications. It doesn’t matter that we weren’t thinking about racism when we had the party— that’s the point and the problem! In Sociology 101 we learned that racism is an institutional problem, and so it has an institutional solution; it’s not about us saying we’re sorry for offending people (even though that’s important and we are saying that).  

It’s about this being one of a huge number of incidents that contribute to U.S. society—all of us, not just ignorant white people—associating poor black people with violence, crime and bad behavior. I don’t think “offense” is something that we will ever be able to agree on, but statistically proven institutional bias is! I’m sorry that my team’s actions offended my friends and classmates, but I’m more sorry that we added one more thing to the list of news reports, TV shows and fads that focus on the part of black culture that institutional poverty has forced into gangs and criminality.

I didn’t realize the theme was offensive at first, despite my passion for sociology and my background, because I wasn’t offended. Even when we try, I think it’s incredibly hard to put ourselves in the shoes of another person and accurately gauge how they feel or should feel. So I think we should start talking more about why cultural appropriation is bad on a national scale and how there’s concrete evidence to prove it. I am not at all excusing my team’s actions or my own failure to recognize them as harmful. But if the Bowdoin community and people on Yik Yak want answers to all of these questions about where to draw the line, I think we should try to break the bubble and make it easier to connect our problems to the ones we learn about in class, by focusing on objective measures of discrimination and inequality. Besides the value of being factual, speaking in terms of these objective measures might make it easier for people who are worried about saying the wrong thing to enter the conversation.