Author: Henry Dickmeyer
Azealia Banks is not headlining SpringFest tomorrow. Booking Macklemore does not mean Programming Board hates minorities. And despite a few participants dressed in a questionable fashion, Occidental’s own rendition of the now-famous Harlem Shake internet meme does not signify the college’s condonation of intolerance.
Our most influential voices on the issues of race, ethnicity and diversity always tend to be the extremists. We tend to react, listen then admonish dissenting voices, all before recognizing the driving forces behind their arguments or behaviors. So for a liberal arts institution endowed with the task of changing the world by understanding its nuances and its intricacies, Occidental students porously brandish their ability to “tolerate” others.
Tolerance is the elephant in the room at Occidental. It’s the principle we preach and the paradox we practice: a belief that we must accept a myriad of cultures, yet we deride individuals who don’t practice that belief. We incessantly invoke extremes to confirm that there is good and evil in politics and social order – from sharing an article about the Utah smoothie shop owner who marked-up prices for liberals to quoting the latest Rush Limbaugh rant. College students continue to figure out how to collect and disseminate information efficiently, and have concluded that the proper way of doing so is by editorializing.
Injecting commentary, declaring a truth and discerning hatred from acceptance exemplify that progression. However, acting on said impulses requires berating dissenting voices, even if if one has an unsubstantiated inkling of those voices. Reductio ad absurdum, or “reduction to the absurd,” has become the most available form of vitriol for both sides. And that is the hypocritical temptation to which many Occidental students have fallen prey.
Take the Macklemore controversy. After receiving 750 Facebook likes, Programming Board revealed that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis would be the SpringFest headliners. Our adrenaline percolated, illegally downloading every possible Macklemore song we could get our hands on (or pulling up his Wikipedia blurb). We called our friends, called our neighbors, shouted, cried, tweeted and updated statuses.
Nonetheless, Programming Board drew flack on our democratic forums for their decision. “ISEEYOUOXY,” Twitter and Facebook began hosting arguments about the nature of the decision: who were the alternatives, how much did it cost, why choose a white male rapper and why not choose a female artist. The criticism backed Programming Board into a corner with no escape route other than to tell Facebook followers to “kick back, enjoy some music and stop demanding diversity out of an event that’s supposed to just make people smile and have a good time.” Apparently Macklemore’s music, which tackles issues such as same-sex marriage, white privilege and consumerism, wasn’t diverse enough for a good percentage of the student body.
Or consider the recent Harlem Shake video: a fun CatAList project turned sour when a couple of students decided to ignorantly, so to speak, wear headdresses from “other” cultures. Students harkened back to the Halloween discourse about how “culture is not a costume,” demanding that CatAList incur responsibility. Occidental’s Facebook page shared the video, and people subsequently began commenting to demand the school take responsibility.
Both the Macklemore and Harlem Shake debacles highlight something profound about our student body. Although the disputes have dissipated, they each forced the Occidental community to take a look in the mirror at its own understanding of what it means to tolerate others.
And it was a failed look.
Tolerance is after all an inherently contradictory attribute. To be tolerant without contradicting oneself is to literally tolerate any and all behaviors, which makes authentic toleration hardly attainable. So as a student body that walks the political correctness tightrope and strives to comprehend foreign cultures and practices, students tend to violate their own tenants.
We entrust school organizations and institutions to provide us with quality in a politically correct fashion, but bastardize violators like CatAList, now apparently endorsing intolerance with its Harlem Shake segment. We berate Programming Board for selecting a white male over potentially an African-American female artist but refrain from impugning when Snoop Dogg and Common headline the annual event. We understand how people are conditioned to think, yet scold them when they don’t fix themselves up after being told that “catfight” and “freshman” are derogatory nouns.
One can also cite Election 2012 as exacerbating the school’s politically divisive fervor. I’m a sophomore right now, having began my years at Occidental in the heat of the Republican primaries. My entire stay has been full of political criticism, support and commentary, all the while running into roughly one Republican for every 25 Democrats I meet. Conservative students don’t come out of the woodwork because they understand the potential for strife, second-looks or sardonic remarks. The liberal vanguard associates them with Christian bigots, hounds, homophobes and big-business patriots. It’s difficult to see the nuance in individuals without overcoming the fear of being surprised, of holding beliefs and having them shot down when the façade falls. Instead the “liberal before proven conservative” presupposition pervades the campus.
That form of conservative liberalism – the self-decreed open-mindedness that always seems to shut out the rocks in the sand – isn’t conducive to the liberal arts approach. If a person doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage and goes to Occidental, advocates will go nowhere by telling them they’re an immoral Bible hugger. Or if Programming Board books Macklemore, or the Harlem Shake is clout with a dash of unconsciousness, these events shouldn’t catch us off guard. The answer to fixing a blithely unconscious mentality doesn’t have to lie behind chastising the individual. It doesn’t have to be what recognizing equity or diversity means. And it doesn’t have to be what Occidental College stands for.
What students need to do is communicate with one another both openly and empathetically. If Occidental has the intention of being a top-tier liberal arts school, students must first and foremost remove their idealism from the picture. There’s a silver-lining somewhere, in which moderation rules supreme; where we don’t have to yell to get attention or bully to indoctrinate. Students have the potential to engage with one another by realizing that gross attitude shifts move at a gradual if not tenuous pace. One should keep in mind that Occidental makes it a priority to understand various cultures, much more so than other schools.
Divisiveness is sometimes viewed as the necessary result of direct and impassioned responses. And the case against moderation will be that pushing boundaries is part of the democratic process. In an age of social media in an already democratic world, the loudest voice tends to come out on top. The loudest voice is always the extremist. The question is: does Occidental have to be the extremist voice? Can we be a liberal arts school without staring down at a compass and hoping that walking North will get us to where we need to be?
Henry Dickmeyer is a sophomore economics major. He can be reached at dickmeyer@oxy.edu.
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