I just returned from a De Anza College film club event featuring Emmy Award winning director/producer Marc Buckland. After his wonderful presentation, I was dismayed that the club had invited a representative of Psycho Donuts to speak.
He got the students' attention by encouraging them to submit short films with donuts in them to be run as loops on monitors in the shop. He also said that the shop could help with fundraising by providing the club with donuts at wholesale prices that they could then sell. He'd even send some "crazy nurses and doctors" over to help.
I said it isn't funny to name donuts after psychiatric diagnosis, and asked if they knew anyone with a mental illness or had ever been locked up in a psych ward. The officer said she'd been in a mental hospital three times and that I was taking this too seriously. When I repeated that it isn't funny, I was told to "take it outside."
Words are powerful. Will it also be funny to name a donut covered with black licorice "nigger"?
In the past, college students have been on the forefront of campaigning against injustice. I am disappointed that the members of the De Anza College AIF club in their eagerness to have their films publicly shown and to make money would do so at the expense of some of the most vulnerable members of our society.
That they lack the sensitivity to see how this shop maligns the mentally ill is disturbing.
Kim Hing, film
is a member of the 
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