Macalester College

Macalester blackface story belts around the world in hours on AP & UPI wires; Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben still on Aisle 6

HongPong — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:22:21 -0700

The Associated Press news from Macalester takes a spin around the world today...

Quick, watch the FOX9 video before they delete it!!

Heres the transcript:

MyFox Twin Cities | Racist Costumes at Macalester Party

Last Edited: Thursday, 08 Feb 2007, 11:00 PM CST

Created: Thursday, 08 Feb 2007, 11:00 PM CST

MyFOX9.com ST. PAUL -- Macalester College is investigating a recent costume party on campus in which the politically incorrect them may have been taken too far.

One student arrived dressed as Adolf Hitler and another as an aborted fetus, but it was a racially-sensitive pair of costumes that is causing the stir.

“That’s not politically incorrect, that’s history that happened,” student Amanda Nelson said. “I think that’s offensive.”

School officials say the party was held at a cottage on campus, ironically on the day after the Martin Luther King holiday.

One student came dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, holding a noose attached to the neck of a student wearing face paint to appear dark-skinned. Once news of the costumes reached administrators, the president sent an email to students condemning the party, and telling student Macalester would not tolerate this type of activity.

“It is deeply disappointing that Macalester students would be so insensitive and demonstrate such a lack of understanding of the college’s value and mission,” President Brian Rosenberg said.

While the college believes the students didn’t intend to find themselves in the situation they did, the party seems to be part of a disturbing trend. Several students at Clemson University recently attended an MLK Day party wearing black face paint, while a female student padded her pants to make her butt look bigger. A Texas university is also investigating a party where one student dressed as Aunt Jemima and another wore a t-shirt reading “I love chicken” on the front.

The students at the Macalester party could face disciplinary action.

The following AP story and UPI story are getting posted on websites around the world this afternoon. As evening falls it reaches India:

Seattle: Racially charged costumes rile campus

Kansas City: AP Wire | 02/10/2007 | Racially charged costumes rile campus

Racially Charged Costumes Rile Campus, Minn. College Probes 'Politically Incorrect' Party; Students Wore Blackface, KKK Costumes - CBS News

Blackface, KKK Costumes Criticized - Forbes.com

Meanwhile in Britain: Racially Charged Costumes Rile Campus | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

Racially Charged Costumes Rile Campus - Newsday.com

It might get picked up as paragraphs in these global papers as they're published. For now it's just an entry on the wire...

The UPI version is more condensed on DailyIndia.com:

Non-PC college lampoon party irks some

MINNEAPOLIS, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- A Minnesota college with a liberal reputation is the latest U.S. school to come under fire for student parties with purposefully politically incorrect themes.

Macalester College officials were looking into reports that a recent costume bash included guests in blackface or dressed in Klan costumes, and will hold a campus discussion next week on stereotyping.

"We hope to take the teachable moment and engage our campus community a little bit more deeply," said Jim Hoppe, Macalester's associate dean of students, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The newspaper said Macalester was the latest school to find itself dealing with student antics that could be called racially sensitive.

Some students called the parties a satiric jab at established official public values. Others, however, said race remains a sensitive issue and such parties are based on inaccurate ideas about history.

Copyright 2007 by United Press International

Lessons time: One modest party can have a global impact far beyond your typical college "awareness" moments. Let that be a lesson about how certain symbolic arrangements explode – in this case, the misperception that a white student dressed as a Klan member.

Let's say I was close to this scene, as it happened. I wasn't at the party. it is very weird to think that this really has legs... As you might expect, that night I ran into some of the symbols that our local FOX9 is dutifully pursuing in its investigation of the party "nightmare". Ironically FOX and other Murdoch media push racist stereotypes more than anyone.

If you don't think FOX is racist, listen to the synthetic Orientalizing music - tom tom drums often - they play when Evil Iraq / Evil Persia themes come in. "24" is more of a fundamentally racist cultural object than whatever this party signifies, I think it's hard to deny.

I suspect it will blow over in a couple days. But it might not, and it might be seen as part of a Dangerous Moral Trend in America, rather than cabin-fevered students drinking in costumes in the dark dead middle of January. Interesting how you can't tell which.

There is certainly grounds for someone to feel offended about the situation from afar, as a certain kind of ugly scene to behold. I am wondering which particular symbols are the unacceptable ones, and if we can get some kind of list or structured matrix to evaluate symbol unacceptability with scholarly metrics.

Let's mark stereotype costumes in 3D space. You could locate the KKK guy at (21X,15Y,99Z), which is across the plane of impropriety, whereas Italian Gangster is at (11X,89Y,12Z), somewhat inside. That should settle this problem so people can know what kinds of political imagery are too much.

But also you can visualize them just standing around in a pretty low key way.

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben still on Aisle 6:

Strib A1 today: Party at Macalester raises ire with Klan costume, blackface

The Star Tribune had it on the front page A1, and still top on the website tonight:

At least Obama is running for Prez. Should be a lot more fun than this weird sort of stuff. I wonder if FOX's media attention has something to do with primary season.

Random bits for a fresh week; Oreo rockets; NSA dude says this "one of the darkest eras in American history"

HongPong — Mon, 22 May 2006 04:10:28 -0600

As for me, well this week is pretty much make-or-break in the career department. Quite a few links have piled up that might be interesting:

An Oreo filling-powered rocket and silly Japanese inventions from XFM.net. Cracked.com presents Five Steps to a Horrible Comedy (as well as the less funny acing job interviews). It is kind of funny that Cracked itself is still alive. A.Norman sends along a nice cartoon. Check out the ten highest-radiation cell phones. My Sanyo falls right in the midrange, at about 1.13 watts/kilogram. I swear this shit is going to give me cancer. I have a wireless router next to the head of my bed and I wonder how my brain cells like all those damn packets.

Winning the Macalester Lottery and seeking Global One World Government approval: I shake Kofi's hand; plus antiwar protest notes

HongPong — Mon, 01 May 2006 20:41:00 -0600

This is a belated note from the Springfest/Kofi/CheebaDANZA weekend. Springfest kicked ass, the weather held out, the organizers put on an excellent event. I couldn't say any more without risking a federal indictment. And the next day, my roommate offered me a ticket to go see Kofi Annan. I was pretty scrubby, which was exactly how it ought to be.

I still have some backdoor access around Macalester, so when I got rejected (ticket in hand) from the Kofi speech, after marveling at the bitching donors who believed their millions could get them into the Fieldhouse, I managed to sneak into the lunch, and get a seat way up near the front. This, in turn, has caused me to appear in Macalester Propaganda:

As the least well-dressed lunch guest, with the filthy jeans I grabbed running out the door at 8:20 that morning, all was right. The venerable and well-dressed Alex Flores (looking up at far right in the photo above) took three good photos.

As he went down these stairs, surrounded by shrewd members of the State Department security detail, I went to Kagin's side elevator, down to the ground floor. A Mac guard ushered me out of the building with some other folks, but I lingered near the entrance. In no time, Kofi popped around the corner, I asked if I could shake his hand, and I wished him luck.

Along with Springfest and a variety of shadow activities, I pretty much hit the Macalester triple bank shot that weekend... Finally mastered the damn place, about two years too late.

CHEEBA 420 fest at Macalester abruptly canceled by administration? Kofi is coming soon too; a P.R. disaster looms?

HongPong — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 06:18:34 -0600

For 4/20, the Cheeba organization at Macalester College is throwing a CHEEBAdanza for Social Justice at 4:20 PM. However, the student organizers, who tried to coordinate over weeks with the school administration, late in the evening of the 19th, suddenly found themselves apparently without festival approval after a surprise meeting with administration personnel. However, as of this late hour in the A.M., the event is still listed on the online events calendar:

It seems that the administration is trying to pull the plug after a rather boisterous article in the Pioneer Press Wednesday (also picked up in KR's Duluth paper). There is a lot on the line at Mac today, as the disappointed and angry students who have worked for weeks to pull together an elaborate festival that was (is?) set to include several bands, a comedy routine, the African Music Ensemble, a 100-pound roasted pig, juggling, a bouncy castle, and fire throwers.

Nick Werth breaking out to the Southern Cone

HongPong — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:55:00 -0700

Werth (at left) is rounding out his time at Macalester with a huge tour of South America, and fortunately he'll be blogging it for us — in Spanish. Southern Cone 2006 at Blogger is Nick's tool to let us know what is going.

Nick is leaving on February 12. He is hitting Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; Asuncion, Paraguay; and Porto Alegre in northern Brazil. Sounds frickin' awesome.

Jesse Mortenson's Green bid for 64A Macalester legislative district featured in Star Tribune

HongPong — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 18:46:27 -0700

I had heard that my former Macalester classmate Jesse Mortenson '05 was considering a run for the State House — and indeed, he is not the only recent Macalester grad to consider a run. Apparently, Jesse is the first Green Party candidate to shoot for a spot at the Capitol, which makes me wonder what the hell the rest of them are doing. (official Green Party press release on it)

Charges dropped!!!!

HongPong — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 17:57:07 -0700

I sent this email out to lots of people. If you're reading it, well that means you care about my dear website so you are invited too! (I sure as hell don't have the email addresses of everyone I wanted to invite...)

**********

Long story short: the mess is over and I win. Rambling details below. We are having a Victory Party this Friday evening - at whatever evening time - at the new apartment @ 32 Spruce Place, Apartment 200, in downtown Minneapolis, and everyone's invited. I mean everyone. Forward this email around if you like - 'they' are invited too. Here's the GoogleMap to the Apt. - you just drive up Hennepin towards downtown, turn right at Spruce Place (a block before South 13th street) and then go a block to Harmon Place. The building's on the corner, and I'm going to put my red stoplight in the window as a beacon!

My contact info is: 651 338 7661, AIM: hongpong2000, http://www.hongpong.com (as always)

Last night I was walking to the Hennepin Ave. Davannis with my roommate Colin Kennedy, and a random dude asked us for a cigarette, as they do so often. He talked with us as we walked, about how good friends have to give hard advice (as a friend did about the case that night)... I told the dude my dilemma - that I had to go to court tomorrow and decide if I should plea bargain. He said he'd had his troubles with the law and had been caught with 17 ounces of cocaine (someone else's, of course!) and he'd had the option of a plea for 15 years or going up for 40. He said that going to jail was good for him, it forced him to change his life, and he spent 3 years reading law books. The state wouldn't fight hard to force a plea because it costs lots of money to impanel a jury, he said. He told me that I should stick it out and tell the truth, and whatever higher power I might believe in would see that the truth would set things right, and it would be plain for all to see. Best legal advice I'd gotten in a while!

It took almost seven full months, but we stuck it out in court and rotated through three judges in all. However, today I didn't expect anything would happen, except setting a court date with yet another judge. This time around, the new one, Judge Kathleen Gearin, talked with Gary Wood, my lawyer, and the city prosecutor Jeffrey Martin, for quite awhile in the Chambers.

When Gary came back it was some good news. He wasn't sure how the judge was feeling about it but they'd offered a Disorderly Conduct with a $50 fine. I compared that with the thought of hundreds more dollars on legal fees that I can't afford and I decided to go for the plea. We went back in to wait to finish this thing.

I'm recollecting this from memory here... So when we went up to the judge in court, she asked if I wanted to take the plea and I said something like 'Yes, because I can't afford to go any further.' She looked over the police statements and said that there was something about the issue of spoilage of evidence and a memory card. She asked the prosecutor if this memory card ever showed up at the property room and he said it never had. However, he never offered a particular defense or explanation of this.

She asked me to explain in my own words what happened, and what if anything was contained on the memory card. I said that we, as a senior class, had been on a riverboat cruise that day, and I'd taken around a hundred pictures of everyone gathered together for one last time ... and she said, alright get to the point... so I said that we'd been in a cottage, the police came in, I took a picture of that and took more pictures outside. I said that I know it is legal to take photographs from a public space as long as you obey lawful orders from police, etc. I told her that I took a picture of someone (Andrew Kracziewicz) being arrested, and then the police hit the camera out of my hand and I got arrested. I said that at the jail, the police had showed me the camera and asked if it was mine, and I said that it was, then I got it back when I was released, without the memory card.

She asked if the photos indicated something illegal by the police, and I said something like that they were being forceful and overreacting. Well, she said, they had to be forceful, and that it seemed from the police reports that some people had been out of control. I didn't try to defend the actions of everyone there and stuck to the matter of the pictures. I said that the existence of the pictures proved that I hadn't been shoving Officer Moore -- I'd been taking pictures. The prosecutor didn't try to defend or challenge this, aside from claiming that the police report was the state's full statement on the matter.

The judge said (I wish I had the exact quote) that, with a reference to a precedent of McGill vs. someone, that failing to produce the evidence was prejudicial to the defendant - and that she was bothered by the fact that these pictures never showed up. Citing some statute, she said that the charge of obstruction of legal process of force was dismissed. She seemed quite ticked about how they never brought the pictures. I had never expected such sharp words about it, so it was really great to hear after all this.

I didn't pontificate about any grand concepts of freedom of the press or claim that Macalester students are all saints because that kind of thing would not really resolve the situation. It was easier to deal with all this with no friends or family at the courtroom watching me - it simplified the whole thing mentally, and well, I hadn't actually expected anything at all to happen today, so I never suggested that anyone go with me.

In the end, at the very least I proved to the police that they can't just destroy photos and expect to totally get away with it. Gary thought that they'd fought so hard in this case because of some of the top city attorneys decided to pressure us - they had earlier demanded written apologies with the other plea bargains, but they forgot to do this in writing, so it's not going to happen.

After the case I bragged to my dear old roommate Alison Norman, who is going crosseyed squinting at law books at William Mitchell 60 hours a week, that I'd won one case and now she better catch up!

When all of this was over I remembered what one friend always used to say to me... "Now Dan, drive carefully. I know what your country does and I don't want to go to Guantanamo!" The terrible truth of what happened in this incident was that Audun, an international student, was assaulted by the jail personnel, and his lack of a US passport probably contributed to that. The police also maced Zeynep in front of her cottage. The experience ruptured their sense of what this country's about -- and with the news these days that Cheney is darting around the Capitol begging Republicans to let them keep torturing vanished foreigners, along with news of a secret network of CIA detention camps in Eastern Europe (why would anyone think badly of secret camps around there, anyway?) -- it seems that this contempt for the rights of non-citizens trickles right down from those policies at the top. Inside jail it's not too difficult to see that you're only a few cells on the spreadsheet away from Guantanamo. It turned out that my ever-cynical friend was quite correct.

There's some possibility of a lawsuit down the line, in the hopes that we could discourage the police and sheriffs from abusing people like this, but I won't make any predictions or plans, and I sure as hell don't want to worry about it that much, after having experienced this weird and time-consuming trip through the System. The odometer's finally rolled over on this mess, and I'm happy about it. Tomorrow I'll wake up free of Conditional Release, having won a piece by standing my ground, but oddly winning after I'd given up.

Cheers to all of you and thanks for your steadfast support, far flung you may be. I want to come and visit people sometime in the dead of winter... +1 for the good guys!

--Dan

Updates a-coming; a bust in court on Halloween

HongPong — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 15:37:17 -0700

Hey all, I sent out this email to some people about the ongoing Senior Week legal case. I had to go down to court on Monday but nothing happened. Suffice it to say, this is a big pain in the arse:

From: Dan Feidt <dan.feidt@gmail.com>

Date: October 31, 2005 2:46:38 PM CST

To: everyone

Subject: Bounced to another judge

So I get down there and asked where Judge Ostby is hearing cases today. The woman at the desk said that Judge Ostby isn't hearing any cases today. What?! Apparently she has rotated from misdemeanors to felonies and she ditched this case like the rotten fish it is. So we got reassigned to November 8 with Judge Gearin.

Also, the city attorney is angry that the previous plea bargains for the other guys failed to include an apology, so they may try to 'undo' the plea bargains in order to try to secure an apology.

While they said that we had been sent notices that the court date had changed, neither I nor Gary Wood got one so it was totally a surprise. What an excellent bureaucracy. A little Kafkaesque.

Today I am working on Politics in MN stuff as well as Computer Zone things. There's obviously a lot to say about TraitorGate - I mean the Plame scandal. I promise there will be more. In the meantime go see Firedoglake.

Some kind of DeLay situation; dipping Uzbekistan; Machiavelli in the 21st century; Hey Arianna, we're #1 for "Bolton fake intell

HongPong — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:04:52 -0600

Yeah, I can't bring myself to write any more about the whole arrest incident. So I won't.

Start with Machiavelli for the Twenty-First Century from New Left Review. I liked this.

It is true that Bush sounds like LBJ in 1967 with staying the course. Tom DeLay got indicted, what fun. They are screaming partisanship but the Democratic Texas prosecutor has hit a lot of Democrats in the past.

A question of police photography

HongPong — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:53:15 -0600

It seems that my case will come down to the matter of whether or not I was taking pictures. Well, anyone can tell you that police officers make an excellent photographic element. So here are my some of my best photographs of police officers from the Republican National Convention. (click to enlarge)