The Anti Defamation League is pissed off because Urban Outfitters is selling a t-shirt that says “New Mexico, Cleaner than Regular Mexico.”
Here is an article: Group Decries Urban Outfitters T-Shirt
Ok, you know what? They are right. Mexico, when viewed from the US border, is a dirty, third world country well-populated with shanty towns, abject poverty, raw sewage, and corrupt and menacing pseudo-governmental officials with guns. On the other side of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, there are 100 million people, most of whom love their country and their kids, are literate, are employed, and enjoy a standard of living not unlike the lower-end of European countries like Estonia, Turkey, or Poland. The only thing keeping them from being warm-weather Canada, is American racism and that they have a real problem with drug cartels who are enriched and empowered by supplying America’s unfettered demand for cocaine, heroine, and meth.
New Mexico is a lower tier state well populated with ghost towns, Indian Reservations, American poverty, dried up rivers, and lackadaisical government officials. If you had to chose between living in New Mexico or living in Coahuila, Chihuahua, or Sonora, you’d pick New Mexico every time because you’d earn in an hour there what you’d earn in a day South of the border for the same amount of work and you probably won’t die in a hail of cartel bullets. You can’t get pissed off over the truth.
If you think that selling American kids a t-shirt that makes fun of Mexico is bad, maybe you should go hang out in Nogales or Juarez and take a big, deep breath. Then you can turn around, walk through the big steel wall guarded by men with guns and attack dogs, get into your air-conditioned, gas guzzling car, and drive back to someplace where you don’t feel the compulsive need to check the door locks.
Selling a t-shirt that says something bad but true of Mexico is orders of magnitude less offensive than treating Mexicans like second-class human beings, exploiting their low standard of living for cheap labor, and propping up the organized criminals keeping their standard of living low with your endless demand for nose candy and smack and crank.
Sure, someone could say that saying anything not nice about anyone is “bad”. I respond by saying that being too afraid to speak the truth when faced with the opportunity to speak around the truth is the source of many of the problems of today.
This is the statement from the ADL’s press release that is on their website:
‘In a letter to Urban Outfitters CEO Richard Hayne, Barry Morrison, Philadelphia ADL Regional Director, expressed his concern that the message is offensive. “It is an inappropriate and unnecessary disparagement of that country, and people identified with the country should not be subjected to this type of ridicule and debasing reference.”
Morrison asked that Urban Outfitters discontinue this item and remove any existing stock. He also wrote that the company seems to have continuing problems regarding racial, religious and ethnic sensibilities, suggesting that Urban Outfitters “seriously consider undertaking diversity training of your personnel.”
Susan Seligman, ADL New Mexico Director noted, “Insensitivity is never in style. It is unfortunate that Urban Outfitter’s design and marketing teams think being offensive is a fashion statement.”’
The press release emphasized three points:
- Calling Mexico ‘dirty’ is disparaging to the Mexican people – in effect it is calling the Mexican people ‘dirty’
- The accusation that Urban Outfitters is, as a corporation, filled with those who do not conform to the ADL’s “racial, religious and ethnic sensibilities” and the accompanying assumption that the sensibilities of the ADL are also those of the Mexican people.
- The assertion of an equivalence between insensitive and offensive.
Well, to begin with, as I’ve said, all anyone has to do is go to Mexico and they will know that Mexico is dirty. Dirty is an adjective that means ‘covered or marked with an unclean substance’ and that pretty much applies to more of the parts of Mexico adjacent to the United States than not. It doesn’t, however say anything about Mexicans. If it did, it would have to be used either as an adjective modifying a personification of a person or people to indicate the dirtiness of said person or people:
“New Mexicans, cleaner than Regular Mexicans.”
It could also be used as a predicate to indicate the act of defilement:
“New Mexico, not dirtied like Regular Mexico.”
To argue that to the contrary is simply ungrammatical. To argue that it somehow implies a connection between the political entity and the people that isn’t found in the text depends on an assumption of ignorance on the part of the reader, which to me seems no less disrespectful than the implication itself.
The assertion that the members of Urban Outfitters lack the sensibilities to religion, ethnicity, or race that the ADL believes is appropriate is similarly challenged by language. The term ‘sensibilities’ refers to the receptiveness to impression not the predictive capacity of the consequence of an act to sympathies. Furthermore, it usually has the meaning of being easily offended, not being uncaring or offensive. It is a reactive, not proactive characteristic, and as such no amount of diversity training will change the perceived shortcomings of sensibility that lead to the decisions to launch products bearing slogans that the ADL finds offensive.
Overlooking the grammar and assuming (pretty safely, based on past behavior) that the sentiment was intended to be one that revealed the uncaring attitude of a producer of slogans that are insulting to the subject or object of the saying, and assume that the slogans are, in general, factual, consistent with the moral sentiments of the populous, and uttered unironically, it seems that the suppression of the utterance is no less insulting than the utterance itself.
It also seems that the ADL presumes some great unity in mind and experience between themselves and the Mexican people. To me, this seems quite presumptuous, as nothing on the ADL website leads me to believe that the ADL is active in the cities, towns, villages of Mexico, or in the shanties along the border at Juarez or Nogales, or in the slums of Neza.
Finally, the assertion of a synonymity between ‘insensitivity’ and ‘offensive’ is absurd. One is not being offensive simply by being insensitive. To be offensive requires the presence of intention, whereas insensitive requires only the absence of feeling. It is not the case, no matter the perception, that if one claims to be offended by another, that the other is necessarily being offensive, they may simply be insensitive without the intention of ‘causing someone to feel deeply hurt, upset, or angry’ as a dictionary definition of offensive might read. Being offended has no correlation to being offensive. That means that to make claims that anything that results in feelings of resentment, displeasure, annoyance, or contrary to principle originates with a desire to be offensive is simply not correct.
The notion that orthodoxy cannot be challenged because to challenge offends is backwards thinking. Change requires a willingness to speak truth and an insensitivity to deception, even to the point of being offensive.
I have respect for the ADL and groups like them. But I do think that things like this are a waste of their time and of their energy. And I think they should be more careful with their language.