side note: your style is great….don’t change

This type of thing can only make the situation worse, not better.

If you’d have overheard a couple of white male colleagues remark on a black guy wearing a full-out FUBU ensemble as the dude in the “ghetto outfit” would you have advised your black colleague to just laugh it off?

and

That comment was exactly as proper as if you had said, “There goes Prof X in one of his ‘black boy teaching outfits.’” Neither more nor less. Crude racial remarks are not acceptable no matter what race the speaker.

I think that both of those would be true if we lived in a society where there was racial tension, but not racial inequality. Unfortunately, because we have profound racial (as well as other forms of) inequality, we have a series of profoundly asymetrical relationships: man/woman, white/black, queer/straight, etc.

In asymetrical relationships, things like insults, complaints, stereotypes, humor, etc. are affected by which side of the relationship they originate from.

In the example of an asymetrical parent/child relationship, there’s a big difference between “I Hate You!” coming from my 7 year-old to me, as opposed to that same statement coming from me to him. Because of the power imbalance, the first is rude and annoying. The second is threatening and potentially quite damaging.

That’s not a perfect analogy, so maybe this is better: if it had been one of Hugo’s students making that remark, it would have been rude and inappropriately personal. If, however, Hugo had said that to a student, it would have been seen as rude, inappropriately personal, and a threat. Hugo has tremendous power over his students. They have relatively very little over him. His (hypothetical) insults to them would not only cause distress, but could very well be a sign of impending punishment. A struggling student might even change the way he/she dresses in class if they thought that Hugo’s disapproval might affect his attitude towards them and thus their grade.

This is the same reason that a “Black Faculty Caucus” would be received very differently from a “White Faculty Caucus.” Shutting White people out of a “Black Faculty Caucus” allows a bunch of subalterns to talk without worrying what the hegemon will think. Shutting Black people out of a “White Faculty Caucus” (or golf club or Chamber of Commerce) means keeping them out of places where influential connections are made, where power is gained, and where decisions are made.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the insult is not exactly the same coming from different sides of the asymetric relationship. For White people, insults about their clothing coming from Black people put them in fear of, at worst, fashion snobbery and exclusion from certain social groups with which they may have little contact. For Black people, insults about their clothing coming from White people put them in fear of job descrimination, not being taken seriously by people with significant power over them, and even legal intimidation (i.e., have Hugo and his colleague in the FUBU outfit both go shopping at a jewelry store. See which one gets followed around by the security guard).

And that’s all, of course, contingent on a lot of things. Things would be different if Hugo were teaching at a historically Black college, and his senior colleagues, department head, and dean (all Black) were deriding his “white boy teaching outfits.” Though, still, the situation would not be a mirror image. Hugo would still enjoy vast privilege in society at large that even his Dean would not. The asymetrical relationship remains asymetrical. This is why Reagan’s “color-blind society” was such a sham: if gross imbalances based on color exist, we can’t just make them go away by pretending race doesn’t exist as a social construct. Saying that words, actions, and clothing all mean the same no matter the color of the person is ignoring the power differential, virtually always to the detriment of the people on the short end of the differential.

Whew. I do go on. Two more points, though: 1) Depending on Hugo’s relationship with his collegues the remark could be seen as anything from friendly teasing to a pointed barb. It seems like it felt like more of the latter, suggesting they either misjudged their relationship with Hugo or were deliberately trying to offend. 2)It does sound like a “white boy teaching outfit” (or in less loaded terminology, “a fashion statement that signifies a particular type of Whiteness, including qualities perceived as both advantageous and disadvantageous by those who construct their identity as non-White”).

If we take Bannana Republic as a GAP-equivalent, I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine and her new boyfriend, each of whom thought the other considered themselves a racial minority, discover that they both think of themselves as White:

Darryl: So, what are you?
Elaine: I’m white.
Darryl: So, we’re just a couple of white people?
Elaine: I guess.
Darryl: Oh.
Elaine: Yeah. So do you want to go to the Gap?
Darryl: Sure.

Cheers, my fellow Golden Bear!