The year of 2015 was marked by student protests. These protests centered around a variety of issues, including race, student debt, sexual assault and the freedom of speech and expression. The latter issue was at the focus of a viral video at Yale University. This video showcased a student harshly condemning her residential college’s master, Nicholas Christakis, for his and Erika Christakis’ suggestion that students tolerate cultural appropriation. This confrontation stemmed from an email sent by associate master Erika Christakis. Unsurprisingly, writers hounded on this video and its backstory as an opportunity to attack the so-called “liberal college campus,” calling its students “coddled.” However, they fail to grasp the situation from the standpoint of those against cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is not simply about banning someone from wearing a costume based on someone else’s culture. Rather, cultural appropriation is about desecrating the culturally sacred. A closer look at the sociology of religion provides us further insight behind the rationale of protests against cultural appropriation.
In his “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” French sociologist Emile Durkheim examines the development of religion. Durkheim explains that religious values are often a reflection a society’s own values. That is, rather than adopting preexisting values, humans create their religious values from their cultural values. In this process, people then solidify these religious values by imposing them on a totem — a figure that will represent their deeply cherished beliefs. In essence, their cultural values become sacred. Now, any attack on their totem will be seen as an attack on their culture and beliefs. Any threat to the totem will be interpreted as an attempt to transform it from sacred to the profane. These threats will, of course, be met with varying degrees of anger dependent on the severity of the threat. All that said, we can use this framework to understand the angered responses to cultural appropriation
In the case of Yale, the items being culturally appropriated were costumes representative of people’s cultures. Culture (of which religion is a part) is constituted by a set of values, beliefs, histories and practices. Among these practices is the adornment of particular attires. Over time, these attires become associated with its originators and, therefore, the values, beliefs, histories and practices of the originators. Culture is important to people. Yes, that must be obvious, but it is important to always keep this in mind when discussing cultural appropriation. Since it is a significant aspect of our lives, we should not be surprised when someone becomes offended because we make light of their culture. Though you may disagree that culturally appropriative costumes should be banned, the harsh reactions against culturally appropriative costumes are — to some degree — warranted by virtue of their symbolism to the offended group.
While privileged college students complaining about cultural appropriation may seem ridiculous to some, we must investigate why we find reactions as strong as the one we found at Yale. If we do, we will discover cultural appropriation is about much more than wearing a costume based on another person’s culture. It is about a serious moral transgression, where a person — intentionally or unintentionally — attacks another person’s deeply cherished culture, beliefs, values and history. In other words, people are offended by cultural appropriation because they interpret it as cultural blasphemy. You may disagree with banning culturally appropriative costumes, but you should not consider reactions against cultural appropriation to be absurd. Though I agree every culture should be subject to criticism and may disagree with the beliefs of the cultures being appropriated, the reactions against cultural appropriation should indeed be expected and perhaps critiqued, but they certainly do not merit that the protestors be dismissed as “coddled.”
Alexander Adames is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.adames@cavalierdaily.com.
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