Last Friday a group of University of Wisconsin students forewent a night of binge-drinking and protested the allegedly racist dress codes of Brothers and Johnny O’s.

Since these are private establishments, they have the right to create and enforce rules, including regulating their clientele’s attire.

Perhaps it is because the university we attend is a public institution and many students may not have been subject to the growing trend of school uniforms or dress codes in their pre-undergraduate years, but dress codes and uniforms are the norm in an overwhelming number of businesses and schools.

I was 18 years old and wearing a pleated skirt and knee highs, my high school’s dress requirements, attempting to teach multiplication to students in an after-school group. The reactions of the students and, even more so, their parents, was that of shock. It took a minute to understand the absurdity of my clothing since I had just come from a place with hundreds of girls who were dressed exactly as I was. Taken out of context, any dress code can be made to look ridiculous.

Many schools, both private and public, require students to wear uniforms to school. In an attempt to eliminate competition and distracting clothing among students in a learning environment, students must abide by the dress code which often includes a lovely array of plaid skirts and khaki pants.

Brothers is not asking anyone to wear a plaid skirt.

Furthermore, the dress code prohibits items of clothing that everyone in Madison may be subject to wear from time to time. The management is simply asking patrons to respect the guidelines they enforce for every person entering the bar.

The dress codes of Brothers and Johnny O’s were implemented for different reasons, but they clearly were not meant to keep an entire race or culture from entering either of the establishments.

Brothers began enforcing their dress code, which prohibits skull caps, sweat suits, sleeveless shirts for men and sports jerseys, to end a yearlong streak of dangerous behavior that involved countless calls to the police (which is bad news for a bar when it comes time to renew a liquor license with the Alcohol License Review Committee) and the use of weapons. After attempting numerous methods to discourage reckless behavior, the management enforced a dress code and their problems disappeared.

The establishments in question are not trying to ban a certain culture or race from entering the bar, just as schools are not trying to hinder self-expression. These bars are simply trying to creatively solve a problem that was negatively affecting business, just as schools have tried to solve a problem that was negatively affecting learning.

The protesters’ suggestion that the dress code is racist only accelerates stereotypes that all black people wear a certain type of clothing.

And while the concern of these protesters is admirable, they are not utilizing their proactiveness in the correct arena.

If these students were truly concerned with diversity in Madison, an effective and meaningful protest would have been to join other students last week who questioned the university’s dismantling of the vice chancellor for student affairs, a position that conducted several initiatives regarding diversity on campus.

Crying to the bouncers at Brothers is not solving a fraction of the problems these students claim to be protesting. The fact that these students are more concerned that they cannot wear jerseys while getting drunk than they are concerned with the lack of conversing with a diverse population of undergraduates while they learn exemplifies the priorities and concerns of the protesters perfectly.

Since there are already too many protests in Madison to begin with, only a few are effective and memorable.

A protest of dress codes at two of the 500 bars in Madison is surely one to forget.

Joanna Salmen ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism and Spanish.