This op-ed  http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/oct/31/zelinsky-the-taste-of-halloween/ appeared in the YDN today, criticizing the Yale Intercultural Affairs Council for putting up table tents discouraging “’demeaning costumes and parties’” during Halloween.  The writer, Zelinsky, argues that by using “the language of multiculturalism,” groups “quietly encourages members to conform to standards of decency” and asserts that “[a] Yale College in which students enforce their own conception of civility, rather than have it imposed from a higher authority, will be far more effective in creating the welcoming environment we know this place to be.”

What bothers me most is that Zelinsky assumes the most people know what is offensive and what isn’t, what is racist and what isn’t, and that people like the members of the IAC are drawing too much attention to a tasteless minority that doesn’t know what’s inappropriate—that people, especially Yale students, have the good taste to know that, as Zelinsky puts it “it’s generally bad to belittle others.”

Putting aside the Halloween costume issue, I can think of a couple of examples when the Asian American and Yale community at large didn’t seem to recognize when things were getting “distasteful.”

1. Amy Chua: The woman made sweeping generalizations about what it meant to be a “Chinese” parent and the children of Asian and Asian Americans in generals, and for the most part, we in the Yale community didn’t even stop to question whether or not she was reinforcing stereotypes about an extremely diverse group in the United States population and supported preconceptions that Asians and Asian Americans are an exotic other whose parenting methods and general way of being are completely foreign to the “Western.”  Instead, all we did was debate whether or not “Chinese” parenting created successful children or mindless drones with no social skills.
2. The Asian Playboy: His thesis was that Asian men are nerds with low self-esteem; therefore, it’s okay to pursue and objectify women, particularly white women because they’re the best, so that they can feel better about themselves.  You’d think bringing someone like that would have caused a bit more of an uproar on a campus like Yale that has a reputation for being extremely liberal—except it didn’t.  I know there were a lot of Asian guys who agreed that they had a hard time with girls but there seemed to be no questioning why this was so besides that Asian cultures make Asian American males nerds.

In these two situations, I think the Asian American community would have benefitted with someone voicing the opinion that perhaps not all our mothers are the stereotypical Tiger Moms and that not all our males are inherently undesirable.  Because as much as we like to pretend we live in a post-racial society, how many can tell me that on some level they don’t take the idea Tiger Moms and the notion that Asian American boys are innately unattractive at face value?

I think that all people are capable of making decisions that aren’t hurtful or offensive to others, but we need help and that’s the task of organizations like the Intercultural Affairs Council and Yale’s cultural groups.  A person’s sense of “taste,” after all, isn’t necessarily innate but needs to be cultivated.