America's culture wars produced two almost too perfect specimens this week: a lesbian bar where relaxing a KN-95 mandate provoked accusations of eugenics and a wealthy white Philadelphia teacher who acknowledged spending years falsely presenting herself as Palestinian. The stories are different but their respective absurdity rhymes. At Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue in Greenfield, Massachusetts, customers had been required to wear a KN-95 mask "or better." When the financially struggling bar announced that Saturdays would become mask-optional, commenters accused it of ableism, racism and complicity in a "mass disabling event." One commenter went so far as to wish that the venue would be firebombed, which gives some sense of how quickly a fairly ordinary change in bar policy was transformed, from the safety of social-media comment sections, into a struggle over life, death and moral complicity.
The ensuing community meeting lasted three and a half hours and included mediators, Zoom participants and arguments over whether the presence of a licensed therapist was itself unsafe. In Philadelphia, teacher and pro-Palestinian activist Hannah Gann admitted that she has no Palestinian or Tunisian ancestry, after fellow activists investigated claims she had made about her background. She had been publicly described as Palestinian American and, according to reports, had also presented herself at times as Black.
Hence the inevitable nickname: the "Palestinian Rachel Dolezal." For anyone who has forgotten the 2015 original, Dolezal was the white president of the Spokane NAACP who publicly identified as Black until her white parents revealed her ancestry. Gann could have demonstrated her solidarity with Palestinians by advocating for them. Apparently that was not enough, though, so she adopted the identity of the people whose cause she championed, complete with a fake family history to match.
There are defensible reasons to wear a mask, as we have all come to learn following the world-altering arrival of COVID-19. But Last Ditch had transformed the mask into something more than protective equipment. In a venue whose politics placed emphasis on protecting disabled, immunocompromised and other medically vulnerable people, the KN-95 had become a visible badge of allegiance to those causes—part public health measure, part moral uniform.
But then the bar tried to loosen its rule for one night a week because it was losing money. Its owner was working four jobs, had lived in a truck for six months and remained responsible for a $50,000 loan while the business struggled to pay its bills. Yet allowing customers to expose their faces on Saturdays was treated by some critics as an ethical capitulation.
Even the apology became another offense: the bar initially posted it without alt-text, prompting a fresh accusation of ableism. This is where earnestness crosses into theater: the accessory acquires moral content and wearing it demonstrates that one understands the suffering of others. It follows, then, that declining to wear amounts to evidence that one does not.
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