Democracy Now owes Yale’s Christakis an apology

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! owes Erika Christakis an apology and, at the very least, should give her (and/or her husband) a chance to refute the false narrative they aired during their broadcast this morning.

While Democracy Now! is known for being unabashedly leftist, usually they have some scruples about intellectual honesty and free speech issues. Not today. First off, this is not a left vs. right issue. It’s clear from the interview below and the text they published that Amy Goodman is more interested in creating an overarching narrative about racism on college campuses some how connected with the Black Lives Matter movement. Facts and peoples lives be damned. Here’s how she did it.

AMY GOODMAN: We move on right now to Yale University. The protests at the University of Missouri come as a similar dynamic is playing out at one of the nation’s top Ivy League schools. On Monday, about a thousand students at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, held a march over racial insensitivity on campus. The “March of Resilience” comes after several incidents where students of color said they faced discrimination. One woman of color was reportedly [This is disputed and based on a Facebook post.] denied entry to a fraternity party because she’s not white, and a faculty member drew criticism after rejecting calls for students to avoid racially insensitive costumes on Halloween. [Read the email and decide if she really ‘rejected’ anything.] Monday’s crowd of a thousand chanted slogans including, “We are unstoppable, another Yale is possible.”

Notice how all of these disparate events are all connected in one grand rhetorical swoop by Amy Goodman. It gets worse.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Thursday, Lex——when hundreds of students confronted Nicholas Christakis, the master of one of the college’s residential dorms, over the email that his wife sent in which she condoned offensive Halloween costumes. [Not true, she did not condone anything.]

If you go read the actual email being misrepresented here, it’s hard to imagine a more thoughtful way of asking questions and offering alternative points of view to top-down implied control over Halloween costumes. It’s all very liberal and open-minded. Here’s how The Atlantic reported it:

Traditionally, she began, Halloween is both a day of subversion for young people and a time when adults exert their control over their behavior: from bygone, overblown fears about candy spiked with poison or razorblades to a more recent aversion to the sugar in candy.

“This year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween,” she wrote. “I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.”

Here’s an extended quote from the rest of the email:

I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.

As a former preschool teacher… 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 Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it.

I suppose we could agree that there is a difference between fantasizing about an individual character vs. appropriating a culture, wholesale, the latter of which could be seen as (tacky)(offensive)(jejeune)(hurtful), take your pick. But, then, I wonder what is the statute of limitations on dreaming of dressing as Tiana the Frog Princess if you aren’t a black girl from New Orleans? Is it okay if you are eight, but not 18? I don’t know the answer to these questions; they seem unanswerable. Or at the least, they put us on slippery terrain that I, for one, prefer not to cross.

Which is my point.

I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can’t defend them anymore than you could defend yours.

Pretty thoughtful, right? We return to the interview with the activist on Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: Students confronting Nicholas Christakis (he dared to defend his wife who wrote the email), a master of one of the college’s residential dorms at Yale. Lex, if you could explain what the letter was that his wife sent out about Halloween costumes?

LEX BARLOWE: Yeah, absolutely. So, the Intercultural Affairs Council, which is a body of various administrators at Yale, sent out an email a couple of days before saying, you know, “Please do not be culturally appropriative for Halloween. Respect other people’s traditions. Do not wear anything that is not your own culture.” Pretty simple and pretty polite, to be honest. And a couple of days after that, the Associate Master of Silliman College Nicholas Christakis’s wife Erika Christakis sent out an email to the residents of her residential college basically saying, “None of that matters. Do whatever you want. The university is trying to control you. They’re trying to tell you what to do. If you want to be culturally appropriative, it’s OK if you really like it. You can do whatever.” [Is that a rational interpretation of the email you read above?]

And so, you know, students were outraged. It was basically an outright—you know, completely ignoring the students in her college and also in the university who find these issues to be not just, you know, discomforting and upsetting, but really deeply harmful and actually creating space for violence to happen on campus. And in particular, the advice that she gave was to either look away or to engage in dialogue with someone who might be wearing something culturally appropriative. And when students actually did try to engage with people, they were harassed, they were mocked, they were, you know, physically intimidated. And so, it really did create a completely unsafe atmosphere on campus.

A hallmark of this kind of irrational ‘safe space’ talk these days is the term “catastrophizing.” Did you notice how the feelings of distress are blown way out of proportion with phrases like, “completely unsafe?” You might think you were reading about an entire village destroyed by a flash flood if you read the responses out of context. Take a moment to read more on this at The Atlantic:

According to The Washington Post, “several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore.” These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film-editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms. But they can’t bear this setting that millions of people would risk their lives to inhabit because one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings?

Democracy Now!/Amy Goodman should apologize for misrepresenting Nicholas and Erika Christakis’ statements and offer them a chance to refute these smears on air.