Opinion: Misplaced outrage about white guys in headdresses

Monday, January 14, 2013  

"In case you haven't heard, in Philadelphia the "politically correct" crowd is on the warpath over a New Year's Day Mummers skit by Northwest Philadelphia's Venetian New Year's Association. The three-minute strut included a crude reference to "Indi-sourcing," in which members dressed in traditional Indian costumes managed a "New Delhi Call Center." In a parallel skit, other brigade members did a hybrid Native American war dance while wearing small feather war bonnets.

Sometimes it's fun to worry about inconsequential minutiae, but the fact is Native headdresses have been part of the Mummers for decades. Since the Mummers are about feathers, it should come as no surprise that some brigades would opt to use a Native headdress as part of its ensemble.

An important thing to remember when viewing the comic brigades is Jonathan Swift's famous line: "Nothing is above satire." This may be hard to swallow in our super hypersensitive age when good comedy sometimes takes a back seat to (yawn) sanitized political correctness. Unfortunately, we live in an era when people become "outraged" at the drop of a hat and at all the wrong things. Consider this: where was the outrage when President Obama signed the NDAA into law, which gives the government the right to arrest any American citizen and deprive them of legal representation after that arrest? Isn't this what they do in Red China, and what used to happen in Soviet Russia? Instead, people are "outraged" because a few drunken white men danced in a circle wearing makeshift American Indian headdresses. "

Get the Story:
Thom Nickels: Thou Shalt Not Wear a Native American Headdress (The Huffington 1/14)