If you’re among those who think that free speech nuts, like gun nuts, should be allowed to run loose because, well, their right to degrade or kill people is enshrined, respectively, in the First and Second Amendments of the Bill of Rights, then shopping at Walmart is for you.
Walmart is a well-known multinational retail corporation based in Arkansas, with over 11,000 stores in 28 countries, including Mexico, Japan, India and Argentina, and is the biggest private employer in the world, with 2.3 million employees. Walmart also happens to be in the Halloween business.
Halloween, of course, is that festive event that includes, for kids, trick-or-treating (going from house to house, dressed in costumes modeled after supernatural creatures, requesting candy treats) and, for adults, dressing in costumes parodying generic stereotypes. As for the latter, Walmart this year has in stock costumes that fulfill all your last-minute Islamophobic needs. Just check out their website or walk down their supermarket aisles.
Consider this one, pitched as a great bargain at $27, and sold amid a wave of attacks by Israeli occupation troops that has killed dozens of Palestinians: A boy, dressed as an Israeli soldier, holding a toy Uzi sub-machine gun. Parents are urged to remember that “as Halloween time rolls around, make this item part of your child’s complete ensemble.”
Consider yet another Halloween costume offered by America’s largest supermarket chain: An accessory called Sheikh Fagin’s Nose, described as a “prosthetic nose perfect for an Arab Sheikh” with an accompanying photo showing it worn with a fearsome beard and an Arab head-dress.
Fagin, of course, was no Arab. He is the evil antagonist in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, whom the author frequently referred to in the novel as simply “the Jew,” leader of a group of street urchins whom Fagin teaches to make a living by pick-pocketing and other criminal activities.
Last year, Walmart sold a costume labeled Pashtun Papa, worn by a ferocious looking Pakistani and pitched thus: “Represent the Middle East. Nothing is sacred this Halloween. Shock your friends with this Islamic costume.”
Never mind that these semi-literate oafs at Walmart are confusing South Asia with the Middle East. The year before that, the store sold Little Amigo, that included a sombrero and a fake mustache, clearly mocking Mexicans. And so it goes.
Is it all fun — albeit fun in bad taste — or is there a sinister agenda propelling it? I doubt that it’s the latter, but by being so blissfully ignorant of the fact that people resent having their identity paraded and mocked in such a fashion, Walmart is at best unwittingly playing on racial stereotypes and at worst aiding and abetting racism.
Yes, free speech is to be respected, but we also live in a time of political correctness. Free speech, for example, does not cover a thief who demands, “hand over your wallet” or a trouble-maker who hollers “fire!” in a crowded movie theater. Nor does free speech, I say, cover a bigot who incites racial hatred through stereotyping. And political correctness? Well, its purpose is to guard against the unintended consequences of what has been described as “the rich American tradition of a loud, raucous, messy, free-speech free-for-all.”
We are obligated, given our sympathy for people who are marginalized or discriminated against, to not merely fight bigotry but to push back against those who support it — or in the case of Walmart, unwittingly or not, promoting it.
That does not mean that people should be regulated in how thy go about having fun this Halloween, how they tell jokes, how they satirize cultural norms, and the rest of it. It means simply that our public debate — and to wear a Halloween costume is to make a statement, regardless of how nebulous it is -- should be shaped by innumerable taboos, including taboos that guard us against crossing red lines. For, keep in mind, no people come from a culture imbued with an immune system against hurtful comments.
America, perhaps more so than any other country in the world, has such an expansive view of free speech (in the US, even Nazis are free to disseminate their venomous ideology, whereas in Germany, say, you go to jail for denying the Holocaust).
America also, more than any other country in the world, has such an acute awareness of the fact that symbols constitute an assault on the dignity, the culture and the identity of Arab Americans.
In February 1999, David Howard, who happened to be white and who worked as an aide to the new mayor of Washington, a town with a majority black population, explained, at one hapless moment in a press conference, that he was determined to use his budget “in a niggardly manner.” The word "niggardly" is of course a perfectly legitimate term, with etymological roots in Swedish, that means stingy or frugal, and Howard had meant to say that he would disburse his funds in a studied fashion. Well, officials took offense. The term, it would appear, smacked too close to the N-word and Howard was fired. (He was rehired two months later.)
Was that a case of taking political correctness to a lunatic extreme? It probably was, but it all goes to show that we live in a time when the sensitivities of minorities have to be respected. The N-word is out, but so should the debasement of Muslim culture.
You’re angry at Walmart’s cheap antics this Halloween, well, express that anger where it hurts most — stop shopping there. And we’ll take it from there.
