Celebrity Kim Kardashian, wife of Kanye West, has an Armenian lineage. So does UCLA student Caterina Kachadoorian.
She wrote an op-ed in the Daily Bruin published Monday, giving her two cents on the controversial “Kanye Western” theme party by a frat and sorority, now both suspended for racial insensitivity:
Let me start off with the “plumped lips and padded bottoms” imitating Kim Kardashian. As someone who is Armenian, I am not offended by this in any way. This is not a representation of my entire Armenian culture. It is merely a representation of Kim’s pop culture status that include her iconic “assets.”
Imitating West’s ostentatious look is similarly “not targeting the entire African American population,” and no one appeared to be wearing literal blackface as initially claimed, Kachadoorian said.
She faulted the Afrikan Student Union, which raised a stink about the party with the administration, for focusing on a “mildly inappropriate frat party” rather than doing “community outreach” to help reduce high levels of black-on-black violence and improve education for black children.
For this, she has received “an immense amount of hate, claiming that I am anti-black, a white supremacist, a racist, dumb” and so on, Kachadoorian told The College Fix and other journalists in an email Monday night.
She claims that one of the Afrikan Student Union protesters spit on her – “the last straw” that convinced her to write an op-ed taking the group to task.
Now she’s a pariah and “slightly afraid to go to school” Tuesday morning, for fear that “someone will recognize me and start instigating something.” (Yes, probably.)
Kachadoorian claims she was “publicly attacked” on the UCLA Class of 2019 Facebook group, though the page moderator has removed those posts “because it got really out of hand.”
There’s already a spirited debate in the Daily‘s comments over whether the paper should be punished for publishing Kachadoorian’s “hate speech,” or whether demanding punishment of the paper is even more idiotic than Kachadoorian’s opinion.
Most of the comments appear to be personal attacks on Kachadoorian, though some attempt to argue intelligently with her points. One commenter, chillingly, favors a “more limited interpretation of the right of free speech” to protect “marginalized peoples’ rights to pursuit of a non-toxic public environment.”
Meanwhile, the Daily might consider pleading its case to the administration – and perhaps putting UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh on retainer – before its editorial independence (and print run) becomes the target of a Wesleyan-ish movement.
RELATED: Greek life could sue UCLA for First Amendment violation by punishing ‘Kanye Western’ party
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