If ethnically pumped over-the-line satire could create awareness and understanding of the group used in the prank, we would be living in a different world. Those who have seen Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” or even heard of it would have qualms about attending last Friday’s Gypsy Jazz Coffeehouse.
A shift away from the word “Gypsy” is at the heart of the Roma people’s struggle for recognition and life worthy of a human being and a citizen. This word was a scarlet letter that sent thousands to the death chambers of Porajmos: the Nazi Roma extermination campaign. Even today the word stands for gross inequalities and human rights violations.
But the success of Friday’s Gypsy Jazz was by no means diminished by the controversial title. “That’s just a genre name,” to quote a fellow student; the evening turned out to be one of the better Coffeehouses of the year, or so I hear.
“Indians take over Bridges’ office” is a tasteless joke on Whitman’s diversity policy. It is also a vulgar satire of the Indian Rights Movement and especially the practice of retaking significant places in the American public imagination, like the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969-71.
Yet, it is funny. The notion of the Theater Sports team improvising the final hours of Lieutenant Custard is macabre and hilarious, as is the suggestion that “Dancing With Wolves” is too “gay” to be shown at Whitman. It’s the weekend after Dragfest, for pity’s sake!
What is hurtful, demeaning and sad is not that the Pio would run an article laden with dump jokes about an invented tribe asserting its rights over Whitman. The reality is.
Indian bones packed in plastic bags in a closet in Maxey Museum, disastrously low retention rate for native students and the fact that the visit to Whitman Mission was taken off the introductory week program but Tamástslikt Cultural Institute never made it: these truly hurt not only the aboriginal students but those of us who miss out on learning about these issues.
Native Americans don’t catch Whitman’s attention too often. Professor Schmitz’s lecture two years ago about what Whitman College does in connection with Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act had exactly seven attendees.
Just as “Borat” did no good for the Roma and has not seriously challenged popular attitudes in this country, I hope that the authors did not believe that publishing “Indians take over Bridges’ office” would ameliorate the attitudes that Whitman College perpetuates.
The article is vulgar in its handling of aboriginal history of the U.S. and oversteps the frontier of propriety. But the calls official sanctions toward the authors and the Pioneer are excessive. Vulgarity is a sin, not a crime. Leave it up to lightning bolts from blue sky to deal with the writers, not the college administration or ASWC.
