“It could pass as the modern day dress worn at races in the UK.”
Well, not the national steeplechase, my wife showed me pictures from the Daily Mail, it looked more like the pictures from Boxing Day, the pictures from the race showed young women wearing things you might think from a nightclub or New Years eve, low cut dresses with short skirts, killed heels, with the young women in, shall we say, revealing positions and such lol. Ascot it wasn’t, that was for sure!
They were claiming it was elitist and created a have / have not divide.
In other words, it was a racist, offensive party to which they really were hurt they weren’t invited to.
My point is that the students of Dartmouth saw fit to examine exactly what the fellow students found distasteful about a sorority in New Hampshire romanticizing the Kentucky Derby and its accoutrements. Learning that something you thought was universally harmless, is offensive to some, is just enlightenment. What you do with what you learn is up to you. The Dartmouth students chose to change the theme of their party. No one else needs to get their nose of joint.
The media characterized the issue as a protest and capitulation. Entirely possible students spoke up and it started a dialogue. If we don’t talk to each other we can’t understand each other. After the students talked to each other they could have decided to carry on in spite of any objections. They weren’t forbidden to do anything.
Personally, I wouldn’t care enough to protest a party but we can walk and chew gum - protest ignorance of symbols and work for social change. The symbols matter or else these southern states wouldn’t adopt them as state symbols.
"amine exactly what the fellow students found distasteful about a sorority in New Hampshire romanticizing the Kentucky Derby and its accoutrements. "
The accoutrements of the Kentucky Derby - which started AFTER the Civil War - are dressy hats, horses/horse racing and mint juleps. Not slaves. You’d have a point if the theme was the Antebellum South complete with Confederate Flags. But it wasn’t.
What are these people going to do when they hit the real world where no one is obliged to run their party themes, clothing, etc by them?
Sigh…how to unpack this? The “protesters” have free speech rights which they say fit to exercise and they earn your wrath because the thing they wanted to talk about wasn’t going to change the most serious of socio economic problems facing their [ethnic] community. Just W O W.
I just don’t have words for the leap to accents being “offensive” because they are reminiscent of “someone who enslaved your ancestors.” I guess you told me - I’ll see about that tendency I have to be "offended. "
Free speech has nothing to do with this. at no point was the govt involved in any of the actions here.
Should I be offended by (and prevent somewhat from having) an Oktoberfest or Bavarian theme party because Germans weren’t exactly cool to my Jewish ancestors?
How about a 60s British Invasion themed party, when the Brits weren’t exactly cool to my Northern Ireland ancestors?
This is a serious question. At what point do you stop claiming victimhood and demanding that society be cleansed of all things that offend you because of tangential relationships to bad things done to your ancestors? Why is “it offends me” equivalent to “you must stop”?
I don’t think you realize this -
When there are these “protests” over minor things where people are clearly looking to be offended, and people capitulate and don’t hold the events -
What you THINK you are getting is a victory - that these people have been shamed into “seeing the light” of their white privilege and yada yada.
What you are REALLY getting is a “oh god, these people are so tiresome, they will complain about anything and you just have to give in to them or they will make your life miserable.”
Is that really the victory you seek?
I appreciate Jamcafe’s posts here and took the time to research the song, which seems to have a very complicated history. It helped me a lot in thinking about this protest, which I was having difficulty understanding. Jamcafe: Thank you.
Nothing from the south will ever be “acceptable” to celebrate if that’s the criteria. Doesn’t quite seem right.
I don’t agree with this as a general principle. I think there are a lot of things that genuinely offend people, and where the offending party initially does not realize the behavior is offensive. But when the offending party is informed that what they are doing is offensive, he or she is genuinely mortified and is genuinely willing to change the behavior so as not to offend.
Just to make up a hypothetical example, let’s say someone repurposed a Thai Buddha statue as a footrest, not knowing that would be offensive. That would be very offensive to a Buddhist (as I understand it). Upon being informed of that, most people would change their decor out of a genuine desire not to offend.
It is all contextual. But most of the time when people change, I genuinely believe it is because they sincerely don’t want to offend anyone.
While I found the matter to be protesting to be silly, those who did so exercised the ultimate expression of what free speech is supposed to be about (not talking the law here, the concept, since the law doesn’t apply here), that when something comes up there is supposed to be dialog and more speech. If something I said offends you, then it is your right to tell me you think it is offensive and why, and I then have the responsibility to talk about how I see it. If I choose to change my speech because what they said made an impression, so be it. Do I think some people are overtly sensitive? Of course, the person who told me the term “black ice” was racist was guilty of that, the term has no connotation other than the obvious one, it is ice so clear you can’t see it, the pavement is as black as dry pavement, and I would tell them that, and if they wanted to keep construing that as being racist, so be it.
Would I wish that people would worry about serious issues, like the declining affordability of college, of real issues like police abuse of power, the concentration of wealth and income, people can speak about whatever they wish, no matter how trivial I might think it is. I am sure that there were more than a few when blacks started protesting and boycotting to protest Jim Crow and racism(in fact, I know), that more than a few people were saying “why are they making such a big deal out of this? We have the Russians ready to destroy us why aren’t they protesting that”? The opponents of same sex marriage in comments and on the news were constantly saying “why is this such a big issue, when we have a budget deficit, terrorism, if they think it is so bad here, why not move to Iran and see what bias is like”, and other things, they were trivializing an issue that was very important to others.
Maybe in switching to the Woodstock theme, the sorrority also made a point to invite people other than people they were familiar or comfortable with, maybe because it is Woodstock, a hippie era ‘gathering’, they felt it more apprapo to invite people who weren’t like themselves (and that is a hypothetical, I don’t know if the replacement party was invite only). I didn’t see what the changes they made were, if all the party was was Woodstock themed instead of Derby themed, then I would think that the protesters hadn’t really done anything, but if the invite list broadened, if instead of let’s say a bunch of upper class, privileged white kids only being invited, they made it a point to go outside their usual circles then maybe something real happened there, who knows?
And let me put it this way, no matter how trivial it may look, I would rather it be a war of words and thoughts, no one put a bomb through a window, no one was shot, and the people involved resolved it, and maybe people on both sides learned something, maybe the protestors learned the sorrority was not a bunch of elitist, racist types they thought, and maybe the sorrority learned that not everything they do is going to be liked by others,make them aware of broader things shrug. Compare that to something that just happened, an ex Saint defensive end was shot to death because some idiot in a humvee rear ended him, they were arguing, and the guy in the humvee shot the ex player dead and put two in his wife.
I erred in the reference to hoop skirts. I guess I envisioned the party incorrectly after reading the Washington Times article linked on the first page referencing the party as a link to the antebellum South. My bad.
In defense of sororities, my 28 year old D is wrapping up a weekend at the races in Lexington with 4 sorority sisters who live in various parts of the country. I’m thankful for the friends she made through her sorority experience. The Greek system has some cons, but there are some positives as well.
“I didn’t see what the changes they made were, if all the party was was Woodstock themed instead of Derby themed, then I would think that the protesters hadn’t really done anything, but if the invite list broadened, if instead of let’s say a bunch of upper class, privileged white kids only being invited, they made it a point to go outside their usual circles then maybe something real happened there, who knows?”
Well, all you know is that these girls were in a sorority. You don’t know that they were necessarily upper middle class and white. This is Dartmouth, not Alabama here.
I note with amusement the idea that the protesters are likely not inviting white, upper middle class privileged students with obvious trappings of wealth to THEIR parties.
@pizzagirl:
If you read my post that you quoted, you would note that I was talking in hypotheticals, it is why I wrote it the way I did. I don’t know who was invited to the original party or the replacement, I was simply talking about change that could have happened potentially, like for example if the parties generally were all members of their social circle and they went outside it with the new party, maybe that was progress shrug. Like I said, none of what I read said how the party changed, if it did at all. If they simply re-themed it, but invited the same crowd, then I wonder what impact the protesters really had. All of this is hypothetical, since the reporting on this was a mess, some were saying it was the derby theme itself (which is idiotic), others were protesting the exclusionary nature of the event…so I don’t know what the protesters were really protesting.
Yes, the exclusionary nature of the event. Gotta love people who think that others should always bear the burden of organizing, paying for and cleaning up after social events. Guess what? Plenty of parties I didn’t get invited to in college. Oh well!
I find the objection to “invitation only” really bizarre.
Right. Make up your mind - is it “it’s a bad idea and shouldn’t be allowed on campus” or is it “it sounds like a lot of fun but I’m upset I wasn’t invited.”
“Just to make up a hypothetical example, let’s say someone repurposed a Thai Buddha statue as a footrest, not knowing that would be offensive. That would be very offensive to a Buddhist (as I understand it). Upon being informed of that, most people would change their decor out of a genuine desire not to offend.”
I think you’re right on this Thai Buddha example. Most people of good faith would say - I don’t want to be disrespectful to an item that is sacred to you.
However, I don’t think this example quite fits with the Derby. This isn’t - you’re disrespecting an item that is sacred to a faith. This is - there’s an event that was started In a southern state, AFTER slavery was abolished, and that means nothing but big hats, horse racing and mint juleps - but it happened in the south and so therefore it reminds me of the bad things done to my ancestors and therefore you can’t have any part of it. It’s a loooong stretch, IMO. This isn’t waving a Confederate flag or a KKk white sheet here.
Right. I don’t disagree with you about this particular event; I was addressing the general principle that people may change their behavior in some instances because they genuinely want to avoid offending others, not just because they find the complainers to be PITAs.
I am still trying to understand exactly what all happened. News reports can be very misleading. If anyone involved is reading, I’d appreciate anything you would be willing to tell us.
PG: I don’t understand your reaction. Why does this agitate you so? or am I misreading your posts? It seems like you take it personally. I’m a white southerner. When anyone says something southern is racist, I get busy trying to understand their point of view. I do not want to shut them down.