Like most alumni, I have become aware of the controversy that is occurring due to an RA event called “#StopWhitePeople2K16.”
Once the story hit the national media and oozed into every social media crevice, it sparked a campus-wide discussion on issues like race, political correctness and free speech. However, the issue that compels me to write this article is about the necessity of a college campus being a place where you can experiment without fear of being shut down.
I co-founded Bing Stand Up, a stand-up comedy group, not a charity that helps overweight Binghamtonians get out of chairs, six years ago. I was part of the group for four years, two of which I spent as president. My time involved with the club was the most formative experience of my life. Before transferring to Binghamton University, I was a disheveled 18-year-old with no passion for anything and a suicide attempt on my resume.
Then I got to BU, and the University and its students helped me discover a love of comedy that persists to this day. However, that discovery would not have been possible if my friends and I were not given the chance to experiment and learn.
When we first started out, we were doing terrible and often racist, sexist or offensive jokes. I remember I once tried to do a joke about how black people talk loudly during movies. A joke so offensive, hacky and uninspired that it caused me physical discomfort to type it just now. Despite how bad we were starting out, no one ever called for us to be banned or expelled. The University and its students gave us the space to grow as we learned our craft and got better at articulating our ideas. The end result became an organization that gives people the opportunity to nurture their love of comedy and use that love to entertain students at shows all over campus.
It might be hard to see the through line, but getting the chance to see someone like Lyla Cerulli tell brilliant and emotional jokes about her personal experience with self-harm and rape only happened because we were allowed to experiment with those taboo topics early on without fear of our club being shut down.
That doesn’t mean that the students on campus accepted our initial awfulness without complaint. We had hecklers. We had people email us about material they found offensive — which was great! I wanted people to share their thoughts on the material that we did. That is how I learned people were really inspired by my jokes about mental illness and caused me to deeply examine that part of my life. It was a messy process that was necessary for us to evolve as young people figuring out our point of view.
While comedians are known for pushing boundaries, they should not be the only ones who do so. College should be a place where everyone explores cultural taboos in the pursuit of learning and improving themselves, whether that is through telling jokes about mental illness or exploring the complicated issue of race in the United States via a community dialogue. I believe that the people who created and attended the event #StopWhitePeople2K16 are going through that aforementioned process that my club and I went through. They are students who are inspired to work toward social justice and want to create a dialogue about it on campus.
They are experimenting and refining their voices in a very difficult arena. If you feel offended by their initial attempts at that, go ahead and let them know. However, as a campus we cannot let criticism give way to bans and expulsions. Otherwise, we risk losing out on the truly original and beautiful ideas that could potentially come out.
Unless you do a capella, in which case none of this applies to you #StopACapella2K16.
Mike Amory, Binghamton University Class of 2014, is a co-founder of the student comedy group Bing Stand Up.