Recently, Melissa Fan '08 e-mailed out to campus, apologizing for her role in approving the now infamous "Hip Hop in the Hood" dance party-exhibit ("Students oppose hip hop party," Apr. 17). Fan was one of the two senior interns responsible for organizing the event. The following sentence from the last paragraph of Fan's letter captured my attention: "I am exhausted and am trying my best to live my life with integrity." It struck me because it contains the entire truth about the incident. The people responsible for "Hip Hop in the Hood" are not racist. In fact, they have decent intentions and are probably not tools of a patriarchal hegemony or of their own repressed racial prejudices. They made a mistake and that is all. There doesn't need to be another reason.
In Bryan Joseph Lee '07's column last week, "Not all Good in the Hood" (Apr. 21), he attacked the College, writing "'Hip-Hop in the Hood' is just the latest in a series of events that reminds us how negligent, unthinking and insensitive a place like Dartmouth can be."
I think that, in order to be insensitive, you have to be aware of someone else's sensitivities in the first place. Clearly, those administrators responsible for "Hip Hop in the Hood" were not aware of these sensitivities. Therefore, they could not have been insensitive to them but merely uninformed about them. Or in the case of Fan -- as she made clear in her letter -- she actually was aware of the stereotypical ideas hip-hop associates with black women but sought to ironically juxtapose them with the exhibit's content. After all, The Hood was sponsoring a very progressively minded exhibit on black womanhood in the first place, and to actively seek to undermine the mission of its own exhibit with rap music would clearly run contrary to the Hood's interests and to common sense.
Lee goes on to write, "It seems as if Dartmouth doesn't understand its diverse communities on the most basic level, and when it tries to learn, it is unable to see past its own hegemonic gaze." It is difficult to know what is going to touch a nerve in any given circumstance. While cultural sensitivity is important, it is impossible for us to know what will offend anyone in any circumstance. This makes it necessary for us to cut one another a break rather than immediately apportion blame. How else are we going to have any peace or rest from this clumsy cultural warfare?
And quite contrary to Lee's assertions, "Hip Hop in the Hood" does not make the College seem like the great white oppressor of yore but merely like a naive institution desperate to please identity groups while appearing hip and socially conscious, yet unwittingly foiled in its attempts to do so. Lee speaks of the College's "hegemonic gaze" and the need to see beyond it. Aside from "hegemonic gaze" being a near meaningless term, I believe that it is impossible to see beyond your gaze, just as it is equally unlikely that you will be able to gaze beyond your sight.
The people who are upset over "Hip Hop in the Hood" need to put aside whatever discomfort the exhibit may have caused them and realize that no one at the Hood was aware that such a vaguely construed connection between hip-hop (mostly socially conscious hip-hop at that) and the oppression of black women would cause a minor furor. In light of Fan's letter, Plato's dictum, "Be kind: for everyone is fighting a hard battle," ought to be applied to everyone involved.
I humbly suggest that the energies wasted in the outcry over this mild misunderstanding would be better vested elsewhere. Darfur, with its daily reports of rape and murder, is far more of an outrage against black womanhood than "Hip Hop in the Hood." But, to quote Umberto Eco, "When your real enemies are too strong, you need to find weaker enemies."
Maybe we should just play jazz next time.
