Controversy!

A few days ago I received an email inviting me to go to a "Town Hall meeting" about the Law School Parody that my friends and I saw a few weekends ago. Apparently, the parody offended some people, including some students being mocked about their romantic relationship or their body type, and two black girls who were unfavorably portrayed as "ghetto."

I don't recall this at all from parody, but ABS told me that the black girls stuff was near the beginning (recall that I was about 15 minutes late). Also, since I was pretty much drunk almost all of the time there, my sensitivity-radar wasn't operating at normal levels.

My main gripe with the parody was that it was too long, and that it wasn't that funny. The problem mainly came from the fact that the parody parodied many students, and since I attend a fairly large law school, and no one here can be said to know the entire student body, most of the audience won't "get" at least 80% of the jokes. So for any given joke involving students, perhaps 5-10% of the audience will laugh. The other will not understand what's so funny. The whole thing just seemed kind of lame and unnecessary.

On top of it, people got offended by it, which made it even more not worth it. I can kind of relate. I was not parodied in the parody, but if they had done it, I'm not sure how I would feel about that. If they mocked me in an unfair way, or had presented something inaccurate about me (as some of these people apparently felt) perhaps I would be pissed off as well.

In any event, I thought this would be an interesting meeting to attend, so I went with ABS in the afternoon to the meeting. A LOT of people were there. I think someone must have sent out some rallying email. Almost the entire black student's association was there. The parody cast and crew were there. I think some conservative student groups were there as well. Then there were curious spectators like me. They filled up a very large lecture hall and people had to stand in the back because there were no more seats.

A very prominent black professor moderated the discussion. There was a palpable tension in the air, and there were some ugly moments of shouting at each other. On the whole though, the comments and the dialogue were civil. The parody producers and writers apologized profused, though their apologies were always followed by some super-defense "BUT... blah blah blah..." A few black students spoke very eloquently. One black guy totally got an Obama thing going on.

I made a comment too about how I feel like the parody has the potential of messing with people's reputation, especially since we are a large community and people don't necessarily know the students being parodies personally.

Others made the point that in certain other law schools mocking students in the parody is just not allowed. You can only poke fun at professors. I think I kind of agree with that. I think it smacks of meanness when you poke fun at students, who don't necessarily consent to being protrayed in this way. Some people also suggested an "opt-out" registry for students who don't want to be parodied, or for the writers to ask the students for their permission before writing a parody about them into the show.

Freedom of speech, predictably, came up as a defense. As well as the defense that the parody is just a big joke and a great tradition and people should just let it be, in the name of tradition and humor.

i disagree with that on so many levels, which I will not recount here.

A few people became very emotional during the discussion, and nearly cried. I guess this is a really emotional topic for everyone.

There was also quite a few predictably self-congratulatory "well, at least we are engaging in a soul-searching racial dialogue" "at least something good came out of this" talk. I am very non-plussed by this kind of thinking. I don't think discussions are good for their own sake, unless they solve something or at least lead somewhere. Just pointing out "oh jeez, there's a lot of racial discrimination around the school." is not really that helpful and is even a bit cliched at this point. Not to mention that a lot of the discussions are even less than that. The question is what do we plan to DO about it? How do we make the parody less hurtful and more constructive? How do we respond to the members of the student body who feel insulted? How do we write the parody in the future? How do we build the law school community in other ways that will make all members feel welcome? These are the really pressing issues that need answers. Feeling superiority about one's awarness of racial discrimination is really not that helpful. But unfortunately most people stop at that.

In any case, I thought this was a very interesting evening and two hours very well-spent. I hope we have similar events in the future where we can build on the dialogues of tonight and come to some real solutions.

:D Coffee, dinner, and a lot of catching up with SF, his girlfriend L, DPP, his wife LR on Saturday evening.
:( Ames brief almost due. Still a lot of work to be done on it.