In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I offer a transatlantic perspective on the racial-sensitivity imbroglio at Yale. Here’s an excerpt.
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Erika Christakis, a lecturer at Yale’s Child Study Center who doubles as associate master of the university’s Silliman College, called forth the demons last month when she replied to a mass e-mail from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council urging students not to wear “culturally unaware or insensitive” costumes on Halloween. If you keep up with the safe-spaces-and-trigger-warnings movement, you know that the only acceptable response to such a memo is in the abject affirmative. Instead, Ms. Christakis asked this seemingly reasonable question: “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious…a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” This set off an explosion of student outrage, followed by a groveling apology from Yale’s president….
Around the same time that Yale caved in to the grievance merchants, the British Broadcasting Corporation announced that it will make 10,000 hours of TV programming from the ‘70s available for online downloading by residents of the United Kingdom—including a number of once-popular comedies that network executives long ago banned from the airwaves as racially insensitive. One of them, believe it or not, is an episode of John Cleese’s “Fawlty Towers,” the funniest sitcom ever made, that the BBC will no longer broadcast in unexpurgated form because it puts “insensitive” racial epithets in the mouth of…yes…a pompous old bigot.
I tremble to think what the BBC would do with “All in the Family” videos. Torch them, probably. Nevertheless, the network has now decided to allow similar shows of its own to be purchased online, accompanied by warning labels proclaiming each one to be “an un-PC product of its time but remains a cherished piece of vintage comedy.” Note, by the way, that political correctness is a good thing in the BBC’s Orwellian lexicon. Even so, it is still deigning to let individual viewers choose (for now) what they want to watch in the privacy of their own homes.
The significance of this approach ought to be more obvious than it is nowadays: It acknowledges that what’s offensive to some may well be innocuous to others. To suppress a work merely because certain viewers find it “insensitive” is the first step down a Teflon-coated slope that can lead straight to full-blown censorship—so why not leave to the individual the choice of whether to consume it?…
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Read the whole thing here.