A day that licenses costume and accent is not respect

The argument

A second argument concerns what the occasion licenses rather than what it sells. Opponents argue that the day as widely kept supplies an annual permission to wear a culture as a costume: to put on the hat, adopt the accent, perform the stereotype and treat the whole of it as festivity. The objection is not that participants intend harm, which most do not, but that the effect does not depend on intention. A performance of a people, repeated publicly once a year, teaches the watching audience that the people are a type. Opponents argue that the mechanism is cumulative. Each individual instance looks harmless and is defended as fun, while the aggregate produces a settled public image of a community as a set of props. Members of that community then meet the image rather than being met themselves, and have the choice of either laughing along or being told they cannot take a joke. On this account the occasion does not merely fail to produce respect; it actively manufactures the caricature that stands in the way of respect. The conclusion opponents draw is specific to the form the day has taken. They accept that heritage recognition is valuable and argue that an observance which has become an occasion for impersonation cannot deliver it, because impersonation is what most participants have learned the day to be. Reforming it would require changing what the public already understands the occasion to license, which opponents argue is a much harder undertaking than it appears, and until it is done the day should not be celebrated.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents argue that this indicts a behaviour rather than a holiday. Costume and caricature attach to many public celebrations and are addressed by naming them as unacceptable, not by cancelling the occasion, and the standard for what counts as acceptable participation has in fact shifted as communities have made the objection. They add that abolition would remove the respectful forms along with the disrespectful ones, leaving the public with no sanctioned occasion for encountering the culture at all, which is the condition in which caricature grows rather than recedes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Costume and stereotype attach to the day through the behaviour of some participants rather than through the occasion itself, which other participants keep without either. [Rejecting P2] Public standards for acceptable participation have demonstrably shifted in response to objection, so the teaching effect is not fixed. [Rejecting P3] The difficulty of objecting is a feature of how the objection is received rather than of the occasion, and it has not prevented the standard from changing. [Rejecting C] The premises support regulating how the day is kept rather than ending it.