Duke University (my alma mater) is back in the news this week for yet another “reputational setback.” A fraternity there decided to throw an Asian-themed “racist rager” Friday.The Duke Chronicle reports that student groups originally objected toan email invitation to the “Kappa Sigma Asia Prime” party that “included misspellings to convey accented English—’Herro Nice Duke Peopre’” — and ended with a “Chank you” instead of a “Thank you.” The frat responded to the complaints not by canceling the party but by changing its theme to “International Relations.”
I hope none of the frat brothers are marketing majors; the weak attempt at rebranding was completely ineffective. Party-goers still showed up dressed like Asian stereotypes — which attendees of course captured in photos that they later shared on Facebook. Because what’s the point of college but to create digital content that will haunt you for the rest of your life?
Make the punishment appropriate: they mocked Asians? Forty years in a laogai (Chinese Gulag camp) doing some sort of nasty labor (melting down scrap circuit boards for their rare metals?) while the guards (all from Hong Kong) make jokes in British English about "fat Yanks and their crap colleges."
ReplyDeleteChinese Gulags are seriously called laogai? I know the word from the Lake Laogai episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender
DeleteThose aired in 2006, so in a couple of years there will be college students who learned that word, in correct context, as children.
It's an abbreviation of the Chinese term "Laodong Gaizao"* or "reform through labor"....they stopped using the term in 1990, but have never stopped the penal labor element in prisons, which is done for profit (money goes to the central bank to be reinvested in other industries; everything stamped "Made in China" is directly or indirectly involved with the laogai system.)
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* I can't do the diacritical marks but it looks like this: Láodòng Gǎizào (勞動改造/劳动改造) [stolen from Wikipedia.]
At least the Gulag system of the USSR was a drag on the economy....the Belomorkanal (White Sea Canal) was too shallow for heavy traffic because it was built by zek hands and not by machine. The Great Helmsman's children have turned out to be inhuman monsters undeserving the name "communist party."
While I'm always surprised at the poor judgment by our students, I do remember being awfully stupid when I was in college. I'm glad that Facebook and Twitter didn't exist in the dark ages, or I'd be trying to delete my own history.
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DeletePhotography has existed since the 19th century. When I was an undergraduate I at least had the sense to avoid being photographed whenever doing anything other than what I was supposed to be doing. Of course it helped that I knew what I was supposed to be doing: I'm not sure that many of today's undergraduates do.
DeleteIs Duke, like, totally full of douchebags? I don't know, it's just that whole lacrosse kid stereotype I can't shake. I went to a college that had a big lacrosse culture, and they were the worst humans I ever met.
ReplyDeleteSorry for any offense. I get so tired of kids who act like this.
I spent a while at Duke researching their writing program when I was building one at another school. I met a ton of great students, but, yes, the whole LAX culture seems to accept and embolden the worst qualities of some people. And Duke is one of the epicenters of that world.
DeleteNot Duke, just frats are filled with douche bags. Sad and lonely douchebags that need to pair up with other douches to form a super douche unity group of douchiness.
Delete"Sad and lonely douchebags that need to pair up with other douches to form a super douche unity group of douchiness."
DeleteThey'll be too scared to be sad working with the North Koreans* in the special *secret* logging camps in Siberia, getting that perfect birch whiteness the IKEA people use to make the ferkakte furshlugginer tables with all the spare parts that confound the hipsters who buy/assemble them.
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* The comrades from the DPRK are paid labor; it's considered a good gig by the men, who were barely surviving as collective farmers in the cold hard 1990s.