8 Miles from a Fine Line

Depending on your sense of humor, realizing you’re doing something socially inappropriate can be hilarious. In fact, comedians get paid to make these realizations, and, for their wit, we raise them up as cultural icons.

But what happens when no one laughs—when either the context of the situation or the level of appropriateness falls outside of the realm of the humorous and into that of the offensive? What happens when a bunch of preppy, white college students dress up like thugs to go see a movie about a modern gangster-rapper?

That question probably should have occurred to me before we got there, but upon walking into the clothing store in Central Square last Friday, the gravity of the situation hit me: we were not welcome customers, in a serious way. I was wearing a corduroy jacket over a Henley tee, boat shoes, and Gap jeans with one leg rolled up to avoid getting it caught in my touring bicycle’s gears. I was there to purchase an extra-long t-shirt and jeans with legs so big I could have ridden my bicycle through just one of them. Even though we kept our actual motivations for purchasing said clothing to ourselves, we obviously weren’t out to buy clothes for everyday use, and everyone in the store knew it.

The idea was to “Get Drunk or Die Tryin’” in celebration of the release of 50 Cent’s new, similarly titled biography, playing in theatres now. To do this, we planned to go all out (these friends are notorious for their excellence in effectively planning theme parties): pre-game with Tanqueray and forties while dressed for the part, go see the movie in Fresh Pond, take the T back and appreciate the finer aspects of college life on a Saturday night. Then someone said they were getting changed before and after the movie; after all, Fresh Pond isn’t known to be the most tolerant place towards preppy kids like us. We certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing khakis and pink polos, but what about the exact opposite?

At one point I had to ask: were we being racist? At the end of the weekend I have to admit that I still don’t know. As with all issues concerning race or religion, the line that divides the acceptably humorous from the inappropriately taboo becomes fuzzier as you try to look at it more closely. The fact that we were worried about our safety tells us what we were doing was offensive to some degree, but I can’t put my finger on anything fundamentally wrong with getting a laugh out of cultural differences. The problem seems to arise out of the fact that cultural differences are so closely tied to racial differences. Perhaps the saving grace of our activities is the fact that they had the best intentions—after all, how much nicer would our world be if we laughed at our differences rather than beating each other up over them?



Brendan D. B. Hodge ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Cabot House.