Unfortunately, that sounds a lot like Trail of Tears, a series of forced death marches Native American tribes were sent on by the US Government between 1830-1850.

A New Zealand academic, Professor Joanna Kidman, discovered the dress online and posted "I guess it's cool to be ironic about genocide" on Twitter. Twitter produced headlines; Trelise Cooper swiftly apologised.

She shouldn't have.

True, not apologising seems un-Kiwi. Even if you haven't sought to upset someone in person, but find you have, the most polite thing you can do is say sorry, and move on.

That's how we resolve these things person-to-person.

But this is not a person-to-person situation, and it's about more than a fashion faux pas.

Trelise Cooper didn't know about the American Trail of Tears. "The mistake was made out of ignorance," she wrote in her apology. Use of "ignorance" suggests she should have known more about U.S. history.

Why?

The event occurred in another country.

In the US, they're still struggling to teach the topic properly to high school students. We've only just mandated our own curriculum about New Zealand history.

Ignorance implies an uncommon lack of awareness. Not knowing something is quite different.

Had Trelise Cooper released a "Parihaka party" dress, that would be outrageous.

New Zealanders should reasonably be expected to know our own history and racial insensitivity and injustice shouldn't go unchallenged. But everyone can't be expected to know everything.

Once, as a social experiment for television, I spent the day asking random people to name the Leader of the Opposition.

Most had no idea.

Also, intent matters. We know this from disciplining our kids. If Tommy meant to hit Sally, he goes to time out. If he didn't, we'd encourage him to be careful and show compassion, but he isn't reprimanded the same way.

So what was Trelise Cooper guilty of, actually?

She was "guilty" of using a sound-alike phrase that accurately described her own design. The person who found this and made the connection didn't contact the fashion label directly; instead posting derisively on social media, directing others to the perceived slight.

If all of this sounds familiar, Trelise Cooper has apologised in the past for putting Native American headdress on runway models. And a couple of months before this brouhaha, Professor Kidman was praising people on Twitter for generating signatures to a petition against what she called the racist sacking of Waikato professors.

One of the subjects of the petition later said that people need to tone it down on Twitter.

All of this is a somewhat mild example of a much bigger problem within the social media and news media eco-system.

We know the script too well: public accusation, amplification, pile-on, apology.

Sadly Cooper's apology doesn't address the fundamental problems with this kind of culture of public shaming I've described.

Yes, it does divert the online heat and headlines away from the target…but in the long term, the cyber rage continues to blaze. Perhaps it's even magnified.

Anger comes from a natural moral desire to end injustice—a righteous indignation. It is right to want to bring an end to racial injustice and for people to not want to perpetuate insensitivity.

But how righteous is it to incinerate someone publicly when you don't know whether they're erring deliberately?

Moral ends aren't justified by immoral means. And trying to embarrass, shame, and terrorise un-knowing people into submission may be the road to clickbait, but it isn't the road to cultural growth and mutual understanding.

Perhaps Professor Kidman could have contacted Trelise Cooper directly before the Twitter maelstrom.

They might have had a private conversation. If that approach doesn't work out, by all means, dial up the mob…

We need more authenticity in our discussions of these issues, not less. And we don't need performances of outrage, or apology.

We can do better.

Let's give the real thing a try.

• Tim Wilson
• First published by the Maxim Institute - republished with permission.

In the past four years he has converted to Catholicism, met and married singer/songwriter Rachel, and had two "sparkling" children — Roman, 17 months, and Felix, five months — whose existence lights him up from the inside like a sky lantern.

For those readers who might confuse fiction for biography, let it be known: Wilson, 50, is not at all like Tom Milde, the drunken protagonist of his just-published novel The Straight Banana, "a middle-aged loser, ex-failed poet, ex-print journalist, a nocturnal habitue who falls into TV in New York City".

But he kind of used to be.

For seven years, Wilson, known to many as "the quirky one" on Seven Sharp, was the American correspondent for TVNZ, establishing a New York "bureau" in his apartment. A Metro magazine staffer, he moved to New York with the aim of writing for the New Yorker, but like Milde found himself working in television almost accidentally, certainly with no ambition other than paying his rent.

He covered Hurricane Katrina, the Global Financial Crisis, the Virginia Tech massacre and many other big stories, contextualising them for Kiwi viewers, as well as celebrating red, white and blue oddballs.

"People think I was flown over there in a golden jumbo jet and installed in palatial splendour in Spanish Harlem, but I was a freelancer and I only got paid when I worked," he says. "My first job for TVNZ, I FTD'd [failed to deliver]. I was at the top of the news doing the second inauguration of George Bush. I did not know what I was doing. I hired friends to help me out, and it was a colossal mess.

"But I had support from Bill Ralston, who was the head of news and current affairs at the time. He was indulgent of me, and I was the only person they knew who had a New Zealand accent who was around. So it's an economy of scarcity." Continue reading

Source and Image

• Stuff article by Eleanor Black

Have I left anything out? Oh, yes, there is the little matter of his conversion to Catholicism.

He said: "Were you surprised when you heard I'd become a Catholic?"

Of course I was surprised! Wasn't everyone? But why was I? he wanted to know.

Because it's weird, I said, lamely but truthfully, and we'd been talking about God for a good long time by then and we had both had enough of talking about Him.

Or at least we had both agreed he wasn't going to be able to talk me into faith — "You were raised an atheist? You poor thing!" — and I wasn't going to be able to talk him out of it.

He said, hardly smugly at all, really: "You'll probably, on your death bed, be screaming for the mercy of the Blessed Virgin." I most certainly will not.

"I shouldn't provoke. I shouldn't provoke," he recited, failing miserably at piety.

He can't really believe in the virgin birth, I said, but of course he does. "Absolutely."

He said: 'Why are we talking about religion so much?" Serves him right.

He had said, about our God talk: "It was very Dawkins versus the Bishop of Canterbury ... but maybe scaled down a bit." Huh. Only on his side.

"On my side. More like a stammering convert up against a princess of atheism; a deacon of disbelief!" Continue reading.

Source: New Zealand Herald

Image: Greg Bowker/NZ Herald