Event name is ‘cultural appropriation’
Making a jokey gang sign will get you digitally lynched at UCLA. Mentioning a rap song will get your event banned by American University.
Fortunately for Sigma Alpha Mu, its supporters thumbed their noses at the administration after it blocked the fraternity’s “Bad(minton) and Boujee” fundraiser for a veterans group whose founder got his master’s degree at AU.
The Eagle reports the fraternity raised $3,500 on GoFundMe, far more than the $500 they had hoped to raise at their badminton-themed event, which alludes to the popular rap song “Bad and Boujee” by the Georgia trio Migos, a celebration of flashy living.
Colin Gerker, assistant director of fraternity life, had ordered the group to rename its event because “boujee” might be seen as “cultural appropriation.” Sigma Alpha Mu wrote on Facebook that it told the administration they would not dress up in any culturally appropriating clothing – “boujee” was simply an allusion to the song:
Throughout our exchanges, the university took very long to get back to us, and our current email has been sitting for over a week without a response. As such, we have not had time to fundraise or organize the event with its verification in limbo and subsequently decided we had to cancel it.
MORE: Don’t say ‘Greek life,’ it’s cultural appropriation
Eventually the administration apologized for ordering the fraternity to ditch “boujee,” but said it would keep warning student organizations when their events might offend people:
The nature and titles of some events could have negative impact and unintended consequences on campus, and while the university doesn’t prohibit them from proceeding, our Office of Campus Life works with the sponsoring student group, educates them on the possible impact on their peers, talks through some options, and allows them to decide how they will proceed.
One arbiter of cultural appropriation is not letting the fraternity off the hook, though:
Sydney Young, a senior in the School of Public Affairs and secretary for American University NAACP, said that the word “boujee” is associated with a certain culture.
“There are definitely cultural implications behind the word boujee,” Young told The Eagle. “In the context of which the which the word “bad” is used, I don’t know that without that song coming out, that that fraternity would’ve used those terms or understood the origin or the context of those terms. That’s definitely something to be considered.”
American University has a red-light rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, meaning it has “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”
The specific red-light policy is American’s definition of “harassment” in the student conduct code.
Read The Eagle story, fraternity’s post and American’s quasi-apology.
MORE: Fraternity under investigation for wearing sombreros
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