Taking Offense

After what was essentially a six-week hiatus, I thought I'd hit the ground running with something substantial:

If you met this fellow on the street, would you be offended? If he told you he didn't know what the symbol in his arm meant, he just thought it looked cool, would that make it OK?

Unless he's an actor in a movie or some sort of reenactment, I think we would all generally agree that wearing a swastika armband necessarily associates you with something decent folk don't want to be associated with.  In this sense, what you wear communicates something, whether the wearer intends to communicate it or not.

What about this?

Nobody really thinks that wearing a bomber jacket tells others that you have a pilot's license, or that you have destroyed enemy bunkers using military incendiary devices.  It's entirely plausible for someone to be a complete pacifist but still wear a jacket like this just because you think it looks cool.

So there seems to be a spectrum of association and message when it comes to things like clothing. Somewhere in the vast space between swastikas and bomber jackets, there is a line that, if crossed, moves you from wearing something "because you like it" to wearing something to "send a message." And it's really not a matter of intent: the swastika sends a particular message, period.

I bring this up because I have been thinking about the issue of offending others with something you see as harmless.  This article, in particular, got me wondering.  As an example, I know a lot of people who find this...

...to be a simple expression of support for their home state, states rights, or simply a rejection of an overly intrusive central government. On the other hand, basically every African-American I know looks at that shirt and sees this:

These white hooded figures are Boogey Man, a fear passed from parent to child over generations until it becomes ingrained in the society as the thing we must fear, not unlike the Nazis to Jewish communities. (As an aside, I have a friend of Jewish ethnic heritage who was once called a Nazi by a political science teacher. Bad form, political science teacher; very bad form indeed.)  When you fly your confederate flag, you are linking yourself to the KKK in the minds of most onlooking African-Americans as surely as if you were burning a cross in your front yard. It doesn't matter whether you intend it that way, just as it wouldn't matter if you wore a swastika armband to a bar mitzvah. You are doing something with a distinct meaning to another people group, and that meaning doesn't go away just because you don't see it.

Should the offense done to this people group be reason enough for you to eschew the confederate t-shirt? My instinct is to say yes; there are ways to express your group identity with other Southerners without hurting African-Americans, so the loving thing, the Christlike thing, to do is probably to avoid giving unnecessary offense.

But of course there must be a limit to the application of this logic, since every attire and activity risks offending someone.  Is the offense to animal rights activists sufficient reason to avoid something like this?

Aesthetic arguments are a separate matter.

I'm not sure, but again my intuition is to say the offense is not enough.  We aren't required to avoid all offense at all cost, and I'm not sure it is even possible to do so.  So if someone wants to wear a Victorian explorer outfit to a convention, are you aligning yourself with European imperialism?  If someone informs you that, as descendants of a subjugated people, they find your outfit offensive, do you owe an apology?

Is this man just having fun, or basking in retro-futuristic irony?

How should the second greatest commandment guide our willingness to invoke terrifying images or hurtful history upon those around us?  Where is the line beyond which our aesthetic choices begin to speak without our consent?  Or is this an instance where the mechanic is simply asking the wrong sort of question, where the mystic's way of thinking yields greater light?

I wish I had the answer to these questions.  I tend to think academics in the humanities over-play the idea of "the other," but on balance how we relate to "the other" is something most people should probably be more intentional about.