Beyond Sombreros, Tequila, and ‘Gangster’ Parties

A couple of months after Ryan Wilson arrived at Yale University, a friend asked if she could borrow his clothes for a theme party. The theme? “Gangsters.”

Mr. Wilson, who is black, hadn’t yet found his voice as a campus activist, and that moment sticks with him clearly, even years later.

“She took my own clothes. That blew my mind,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview. “When they dress up as gangsters, they dress up as black youth. It just went to show when they thought of gangsters, that was the image that was in their head.”

It may have been the first time, but it was far from the last, that Mr. Wilson would encounter cultural appropriation firsthand on the campus.

Of course, Yale and Mr. Wilson aren’t unique. Campuses across the country frequently wrestle with instances of cultural appropriation, or the act of adopting elements of another culture. Meanwhile, social media can instantly send a local controversy viral, bringing the looming threat of a national backlash over political correctness run amok.

Recent examples abound, such as the so-called tequila party at Bowdoin College that gained attention in a Washington Post opinion piece or last year’s cafeteria protests at Oberlin College, which are still cited by national outlets. When students there claimed the Americanized version of Asian cuisine was cultural appropriation, online observers used it as yet another piece of evidence that today’s students are coddled or oversensitive.

Kids at Oberlin freaking out b/c the cafeteria isn’t serving traditional General Tso’s Chicken, WHICH DOESN’T EXIST pic.twitter.com/Wxife1DNnM

— Roberto Ferdman (@robferdman) December 19, 2015

Dear Oberlin sushi activists, Don’t take this the wrong way, but you deserve enthusiastic marginalization for this. https://t.co/lsSOUX2SJS

— Eli Lake (@EliLake) December 19, 2015

Colleges, which want to promote a welcoming environment while also avoiding disciplinary overreach, are in a bind. Can they really turn those incidents and all the accompanying hype into learning opportunities?

A Controversial Email

Two years after the initial incident at Yale, Mr. Wilson, now a leader of student activism on the Ivy League campus, was presented with a chance to stand up to cultural appropriation.

Last October the university’s intercultural-affairs committee sent an email urging students to think about cultural appropriation as they chose costumes for Halloween. The email was a nice and necessary gesture as far as Mr. Wilson was concerned, but shortly after, a Yale lecturer, Erika Christakis, sent an email of her own to the students in the residence hall where she was associate master. She criticized the university for trying to tell the students what to wear and for attempting to squash their right to express themselves.

Mr. Wilson was shocked and angry, and he wasn’t going to stand by idly as he had done a couple of years before. He drafted an open letter to Ms. Christakis that called the contents of her email “jarring and disheartening.” His letter garnered several hundred signatures from students, alumni, and staff members.

“I just didn’t see anything to object to in the initial email,” he said. “I didn’t really think being asked to be a little more sensitive and actually engage with these problems was a ridiculous thing to ask college students.”

Mr. Wilson, a junior who is studying ethnicity, race, and migration, was encouraged by the reaction to his letter. But, he said, much work remains.

“I definitely have had a lot of instances where I have been made to feel like an outsider here at Yale,” he said. “There are a lot of moments where I have loved being at Yale, but there have also been a lot of moments where it doesn’t feel like Yale is completely dedicated to having someone like me on campus.”

In the wake of the backlash against her, Ms. Christakis decided not to teach this spring. Last month she told The New York Times that the criticism she had received “was a painful experience.”

In November the university’s president, Peter Salovey, responded broadly to campus activism. In a campuswide email, Mr. Salovey said he would make changes to “build a more inclusive Yale.” Those changes included expanding the budget for the university’s four cultural centers and putting members of the administration through “training on recognizing and combating racism.”

‘The Next Mizzou or Yale’

In the spring of 2013, back-to-back instances of cultural appropriation at California State University at San Marcos sparked a conversation. The campus ramped up training and conversations about cultural appropriation, but the constant turnover of students makes it hard to keep up, Margaret Chantung, a spokeswoman for the university, said.

When campuses fail to confront cultural appropriation, students then are forced to do it for them. Bridget Blanshan, associate vice president for student affairs on the San Marcos campus, said students should not have to educate their peers, unless that is a role they embrace.

While some instances of cultural appropriation happen out of ignorance, she said, others do not.

“I doubt that some things were unintentional,” Ms. Blanshan said, adding that “students who don’t understand the full impact often are students who are not from that culture or they experience their heritage in a very different way.”

A page on San Marcos’s website points out that incidents may not seem like a big deal at the time, but pictures on social media can have repercussions down the road.

“In today’s era of social media it is not difficult for future employers and graduate-school admissions officers to find online photos of these types of events,” the page reads. “With today’s employers looking for employees who can work effectively in a diverse and global environment, and because of the costs of defending against discrimination claims, participation in such events will not be looked upon favorably.”

Social media is often a hotbed for students discussing instances of appropriation, especially when they can do so anonymously. After a string of controversies at Middlebury College, including a Latino student who confronted another student in the dining hall for wearing a sombrero, conversation on the anonymous app Yik Yak took off, said Miguel Fernández, Middlebury’s chief diversity officer, just as happened during student protests last fall at the University of Missouri.

“Someone on Yik Yak said, ‘A year ago if I had worn a sombrero nobody would have said anything,’” Mr. Fernández recalled, adding that it was clear there was confusion surrounding what cultural appropriation is and what it meant.

Mr. Fernández said he sought immediate action because he feared that Middlebury could be “one case away from being the next Mizzou or Yale.”

He decided to lead a trio of town-hall meetings on the Vermont campus. The first two were so popular that people were turned away, and the third was held in a larger space, he said, noting the event’s dialogue was emotional but productive.

Yet Elizabeth Dunn, a sophomore who attended all three town halls, said the people who really needed to be there, weren’t.

Ms. Dunn wrote of her frustrations about cultural appropriation in an opinion piece for the campus newspaper, which included her concerns that the rapper Felly was slated to perform on the campus. She wrote that the white rapper “is the epitome of cultural appropriation and white privilege.”

While Ms. Dunn said she is pleased that leaders like Mr. Fernández are spearheading conversations, she need not look further than the cruel comments left on her article for a reminder of how little has actually changed.

One commenter said, “Just lost a little more faith in humanity after reading this,” while another wrote, “This is absolutely ridiculous. Wow.”

Ms. Dunn said the veil of anonymity the Internet readily supplies is what concerns her the most. While she, and most everyone else, knows cultural appropriation is never going to be eliminated from campuses, she thinks the best bet to reduce cases of it is for students to be willing to engage with and listen to one another.