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The following e-mail is an example of how top 10...20 business schools treat their minority faculty and students.  This particluar school holds an annual spectacle called Cabaret. A bunch of students put on a bunch of skits about life at their school, but if this is any indication of what their school is like, then the event should be called Cabaracist!


Path: news.anderson.ucla.edu!flintstone.anderson.ucla.edu!mail-to-news
From: Tony Shen <ashen@anderson.ucla.edu>
Newsgroups: anderson.mba-2000
Subject: RACIAL INSENSITIVITY AT CABARET
Date: 7 Jun 1999 02:14:26 -0700
Organization: The Anderson School at UCLA
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My fellow students:

I was utterly dismayed by one of the skits in the Cabaret Thursday 
night.  A number of white students performed a skit in which one of 
them portrayed Professor Shi Zhang, who is Chinese, hoping to get 
laughs from using a heavy "Asian" accent.  The other students, also 
portraying professors, called him by a number of mangled variations 
of his name, presumably because they thought it was funny that 
Chinese names are spelled and pronounced differently than others.  At 
one point, someone threatened to call the U.S. Immigration and 
Naturalization Service to deport Zhang.  The Zhang caricature 
re-surfaced periodically throughout the long, long night to introduce 
other skits.  The skit was supposed to be funny.  Well, it didn't 
work. In fact, it was repulsive.

A white man with a black wig and a chop-socky, Hong Kong Phooey 
accent.  It's a tired stunt with a long and ignominious tradition.  
The Charlie Chan movies.  The Kung Fu TV series.  Mickey Rooney in 
Breakfast at Tiffany's.  That may have been how white America saw 
Asians in past decades, but on the eve of the 21st century, with 
increasing interaction and interdependence of Western and Asian 
cultures and economies...we should know better.

You may ask, how is lampooning Zhang any different from making fun of 
Professors Cockrum, Sussman, Klein, and especially Aboody, who like 
Zhang is a foreign national and speaks English with an accent?  The 
other caricatures were made out of respect, and maybe even a little 
love, using any accents to emphasize the quirks that make those 
professors special.  In Zhang's case, though, the accent was the 
punch line--and not a very funny one.  Also, purposely and repeatedly 
mispronouncing his name takes away his dignity by dehumanizing him.  
And the reference to the INS deportation is a slap at the Asian and 
Latino immigrant communities whose quest for economic and political 
freedom in the U.S. is jeopardized by policies made with racial 
undertones at the highest levels of government.

Meanwhile, the skit exploited none of the shortcomings that those of 
us who experienced Zhang know he has as a teacher.  As far as we 
could tell, he never worked for a real marketing company--so why 
should we listen to him?  His assumptions in case analyses were often 
dubious at best.  His byzantine logic had us scratching our heads.  
His writing was illegible.  His comments on my work made me wonder 
whether he'd actually read it.  We gave him 1's and 2's on his 
performance evaluations.  And when given suggestions on how to 
improve the class, he ignored them.  Personally, I think that's more 
sad than humorous, but I could imagine a viciously funny lampoon with 
such rich material.  But no--the skit went for the cheap accent and 
name-pronunciation gags.

The Anderson School prides itself on the open exchange of ideas and 
aspires to be recognized for its international breadth.  Neither will 
happen if we fail to eliminate this kind of insensitivity from our 
community.  How do you think that ten-minute skit will affect our 
fellow students from Japan, Greater China, and elsewhere, whose class 
participation is already close to nil?  They will be even less 
inclined to speak, for fear their comments might be heard as 
"tickling chicken sphincters" (yes, that's a quote from the skit).  
And the rest of us suffer too--academics from other parts of the 
world won't come here to teach if they can expect treatment like 
Professor Zhang's.

My intention here is not to call for the censure of the actors or to 
propose "new and improved" sensitivity training during O-Week.  We 
should all know by now how that skit was wrong.  Unfortunately, this 
won't be the last time we deal with racial insensitivity, so in the 
future, when we come across prejudice of any kind, we need to speak 
up in order to push back the frontiers of ignorance.  The value of 
living in a diverse community is in tapping its resources--the 
people--so that insensitive actions and attitudes can be identified 
and corrected.  The skit actors and Cabaret organizers failed to do 
this, and that's the main lesson I hope we learn from this sad 
episode.

Sincerely,

Tony Shen
MBA 1999




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