College officials flunk in face of repeated racist incidents
Before the ill named and famed “Compton Cook Out” ignited a firestorm of student rage and protest at the University of California, San Diego and several other UC campuses, there was the “Halloween in the Hood” party, the lynching parties, and the Klan frolic at other universities. Then there’s the standard variety of hanging nooses, white hoods, racist graffiti, racial slurs and taunts that have been aimed at minority students. The colleges that have been called on the carpet for the racist acts read like a who’s who of American higher education. Clemson University, Auburn, Lehigh, Tarleton State, Texas A&M, University of Texas, Austin, University of Connecticut, Johns Hopkins, Whitman College to name a handful.
The pattern is always the same after a racist outburst. Teary eyed, enraged students confront campus officials. The officials, in turn, issue the obligatory indignant denunciation of the racial offense. A legislator or two may chime in with equal indignation. A fingered lily white fraternity will issue a quick statement disavowing any knowledge or responsibility for the racist act of a few of their members. If students squawk loud and long enough, campus officials will convene campus wide sensitivity sessions where students vent and rage at the administrators and at each other. If the students continue to squawk, campus officials will pledge to institute new diversity training, recruit more minority students, and hire more minority teachers and administrators, and maybe even an ombudsman.
UCSD officials used this template to the letter. Why not, it’s a time tested formula for stonewalling protest, and dissipating student anger. Campus administrators know that time is on their side. Students have to take exams and finals, write, term papers, hustle grades, and search for jobs.
But there’s a problem, really three problems, with this. Time, promises, and token efforts to change won’t magically make the hate and ignorance that spawned the racial offenses at their schools disappear. The propensity of some students to slander, slur, mock and insult black and Latino students mirrors the hate acts that occur virtually daily in society. The Southern Poverty Law Center which tracks hate groups notes that hate groups are on the rise, and the slurs, taunts, insults, vandalism, threats, hanging nooses, white hoods, and Confederate flags seen and heard on college campuses are seen and heard on billboards, signs, on web sites, and in chat rooms, at marches, and rallies across the country. The race pounding of President Obama by talk jocks, bloggers, tea baggers, and the usual suspect assorted kooks, zanies, and crazies has been non-stop.
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