Dov Hikind’s Costume Offense

On the day that one in four Italian voters gave their support to a protest movement lead by Beppe Grillo, a portly Genoese comedian with a mop of silver curls and more than a million followers on Facebook, New Yorkers discovered that one of their own elected officials had found an interesting way to express his sense of humor. The revelation that Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman from Brooklyn, had hosted a Purim party while wearing a costume intended to represent an African-American basketball player was first made by the New York Observer, which published a photograph of Hikind wearing an orange jersey, a nimbus of black wig, and sunglasses, with his face darkened with cosmetics. The image first appeared on the Facebook page of Hikind’s son, Yoni, a young man whose social-media sophistication is considerably inferior to Beppo Grillo’s.

Hikind seemed at first to be delighted by his hijinks: Purim celebrations, which often involve costumes, are “all just in good fun with respect always, whatever anyone does it’s done with tremendous amounts of dignity and with respect,” he told the Observer, announcing that although he was having trouble removing the makeup, he would “do it again in a minute.” Purim is a holiday dedicated to remembering how Queen Esther saved the Jews of Persia, but also to topsy-turvinesss—some religious authorities say that Jews are supposed to get drunk to the point of incoherence—and Hikind clearly thought his actions were in keeping with the spirit of the occasion. Critics ranging from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to Karim Camara, the leader of the Assembly’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Caucus, quickly contested Hikind’s notion of dignity and respect. But the Assemblyman was unrepentant, taking to his blog to call the outcry “political correctness to the absurd. There is not a prejudiced bone in my body.” To the Times he made the prickly statement, “Of course the intention was not to offend anyone,” before letting it be known that he would probably rethink the Indian costume he was planning for next year because “someone will be offended.”

It’s not clear how closely Hikind follows the sport of basketball—not particularly, to hazard a guess on the strength of his costume vérité—but his choice of outfit suggests that he might be advised to pay closer attention to sports coverage in general. If he’d done so he might have noticed that it didn’t go over too well last fall when Tyler Bozak, the hockey player, adopted blackface for his Michael Jackson-inspired Halloween costume; or when Raffi Torres, of the Phoenix Coyotes, wore blackface to impersonate Jay-Z the year before; or when, in 2009, Patrick Kane and Adam Burish, of the Chicago Blackhawks, wore blackface to complete their Halloween outfits emulating Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman.

Sportsmen and politicians aren’t the only public figures who have caused offense by the oblivious sporting of radically offensive outfits in the name of fun. Charlotte Casiraghi, who is fourth in line to the throne of Monaco, recently got into Twitter-based trouble after competing in the Paris Masters International Jumping Competition while wearing fringed buckskin pants and a feathered headdress, and having orange-colored stripes painted on her cheeks. Paris Hilton was censured for rocking a “sexy Indian” costume a few years ago, and so was Miley Cyrus. Heidi Klum, who hosts a Halloween party every year in an extravagant but racially circumspect outfit—cat, witch, Lady Godiva—made a ill-advised step in 2008 by dressing up as Kali, the Hindu goddess. The most memorably offensive costuming of recent years was when Prince Harry dressed as a soldier in Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and ended up on the front page of the Sun newspaper in his swastika armband. The Prince later issued the standard non-apologist’s conditional apology: “I’m very sorry if I have caused any offense.” Admittedly, it might have taxed Harry’s imagination to come up with any entirely inoffensive costume that still adhered to the party’s theme, which was “Colonials and Natives.” One wonders how Hikind would have dressed up for that event.

Two days after his now notorious party, Hikind offered a belated but still clueless apology on his blog. “Unintentional as they were, I recognize now that the connotations of my Purim costume were deeply offensive to many,” he wrote, adding, “I sincerely hope that this note will soothe any hurt feelings.” That Hikind, a thirty-year veteran of the Assembly, might not have been aware until this week of the ugly history of blackface is as good an argument as any for the necessity of term limits within that body. He’d be able to get out more from his insular home base, the Forty-eighth District of Brooklyn, a heavily Orthodox and conservative community, and perhaps visit some of his neighbors elsewhere in the borough who might have clued him into the latest news in race relations. (Mitt Romney won the Forty-eighth District district by more than three to one; in Brooklyn overall, Barack Obama won eighty per cent of the vote.) Incidentally, it’s twenty-five years since Hikind first made headlines in the Times by denouncing a teacher’s manual issued in New York City schools that addressed issues of unconscious racism among white Americans. The manual noted, “Even if an individual white American is free from all conscious racial prejudices, he/she remains a racist, for he/she receives benefits distributed by a white society through its institutions…. They do not have to consciously decide to oppress racial minorities in order to be racist.” Hikind had the manual withdrawn, and one can see why; but perhaps a staffer can dig up an old copy from a filing cabinet somewhere. It might just be worth a glance before next Purim.