The Occidental Weekly

Tef's opinion piece of last week, "Racism Strikes Party Scene Wearing Brown" has to be the most overblown, inflammatory piece of yellow journalism I've read in a long time. The idea of a "Cowboys & Indians" party is a parody of a caricature of a stereotype of a misinterpretation of American Indian culture. It isn't based on anything--it's turtles all the way down, and there's nothing factual at the bottom. His reaction to what basically amounts to innocent fun on the part of the party-goers is to accuse the entire Oxy campus of being racist crypto-colonialists. He sounds as though he legitimately believes the student body is out to get him. I didn't hear any of our Italian- or Greek-American students getting this upset after the Toga dance last semester, and yet that is roughly what this article is akin to.

Jake Solomon makes a fantastic point in his letter to the editor of the same issue that it is very easy to substantiate racism to gain sympathy - even where none exists. This kind of overzealous, wolf-crying reaction to what is essentially a farce has no value, journalistic or otherwise and I sincerely hope that the editorial board of the Weekly will take a lesson from this in learning to better evaluate the journalistic merit of its articles in the future.

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