Halloween is a treat for anti-PC crowd
I’m going to let you in on a trade secret. Many of us who get paid to “weigh in” on the news for a living run out of ideas on the regular.
I call this “opinion fatigue” and when I suffer a particularly hairy bout of O.F. (roughly three times a week), I make like a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: I phone a friend.
And I plead: “I’m out of opinions. Do you have any? I’ll take anything: Euthanasia, bad breath, bad dry cleaners, the economy . . . anything.” In fact, at least a third of my opinions aren’t really mine at all. They belong to my friend Travis. (Thanks, Trav.)
But what is a brain-drained columnist to do when she runs out of friends and family to pester for fresh content?
Luckily there exists another equally effective method to mask a shortfall of original opinions — one employed by columnists far and wide: the “Blame-Political-CorrectnessStrategy.” Here’s how BPCS works. Step 1: Google “political correctness run amok.”
Step 2: From the 80,000-plus Google entries that immediately appear, select the most current incident of hypersensitivity on a liberal arts campus you can find (“Yoga banned on account of cultural appropriation!” “Woman triggered by salami sandwich!”)
Step 3: Immediately proceed to write a column proclaiming, with righteous indignation, that as a direct result of one or two such incidents, freedom of expression, as we know it, is in peril.
Why am I revealing the BPCS secret to you now? Well it just so happens that BPCS is especially popular among pundits and column writers at this juncture.
Why? Because Halloween is upon us, and with Halloween comes all manner of offensive costumes, from the blatantly racist (blackface) to the blatantly tasteless (Caitlyn Jenner) to the truly horrifying (Bill Cosby). And where there are offensive costumes, there are also offended university students who want to ban them. Enter BPCS.
To illustrate, very recently the student union at Brock University in St. Catharines announced a prohibition on offensive Halloween getups at its student union events; and already the anti-political-correctness punditry machine has begun spitting up outrage. News of Brock’s costume ban made its way into nearly every major paper in the nation this month, and Breitbart, the conservative news giant in the U.S., wrote a scathing critique of Brock’s “twisted” PC “illogic.”
The Brock University Students’ Union justifies its position this way: “People’s identities are not costumes.” More specifically, costumes that mock rape, suicide, gender identity and costumes that appropriate other cultures — a la “traditional or religious headdresses”— are off-limits. To his credit, Chris Green, general manager of the school’s students’ union, acknowledges that policing the policy is “not an exact science.”
You can say that again. When I asked Green how the inexact part of the policy surfaces, he said that just last year (when the same policy was in place) a guy showed up to a students’ union Halloween event in what looked like “Rastafarian” garb.
The students’ union, wondering if the costume was appropriative, asked the man about his outfit. And what do you know: The guy revealed that it was in fact, a costume derived from his own personal heritage.”
So, it turned out, in an awkward bit of irony, that the would-be protectors of marginalized identities were, for a moment, the ones doing the marginalizing.
I hate to say anything nice about Breitbart, but they aren’t entirely wrong to call such a costume policy illogical.
However, where Breitbart and other media outlets are wrong is in their rabid, if implicit, assertion that such a policy is newsworthy at all.
Yes, Brock’s costume policy is overreaching, but it and so many campus policies like it are extremely small potatoes. According to Green, the costume prohibition at Brock applies to just two weeknight Halloween parties run by the students’ union, at a bar on campus. One of those parties, he says, “is a dry event” (in other words, probably not the first choice of someone who likes to push the boundaries of taste, anyway).
The students’ union then is not walking dorm to dorm and house to house policing student costumes. If someone wishes to dress up as Caitlyn Jenner or Bill Cosby, house parties and other bars abound where he is free to be his most distasteful self.
That’s the thing about the antipolitical-correctness argument as it pertains to university campuses. Nine times out of 10 the PC demand at hand is much ado about nothing. Because for every sliver of so-called “safe space” on a university campus, there are about a hundred others where anything goes — spaces where you can go about your day oblivious to the sensibilities and jargon of the far, far left and nobody will bat an eyelash. Spaces where no one checks his privilege or his offensive costume at the door.
So the next time you read an outraged column warning that freedom of expression is in decline, and that 10 years from now you will be living under a politically correct caliphate — remember this column, and read between the lines: Nothing is in decline besides a writer’s ability to conjure up fresh ideas on a slow news day. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.