“History Is A Nightmare”: Why The Conversation About Race Can’t Be The Only Conversation
From sea to shining sea, college students seem determined to make us argue about race to the exclusion of all else. So here’s something I learned in college: Virtually every ugly stereotype applied to African-Americans by white racists was applied to my Irish-Catholic ancestors as well. Their English oppressors caricatured Irish peasants as shiftless, drunken, sexually promiscuous, donkey-strong but mentally deficient.
The Celtic race was good at singing, dancing, lifting heavy objects, and prizefighting. Red-haired women were thought sexually insatiable. We Celts also had an appalling odor.
Little historical imagination is required to grasp why slave owners needed to call their victims subhuman. Yes, I said slaves. During the 17th century, many thousands of native Irish were transported to the Caribbean and North America and sold into indentured servitude. During the Potato Famine of the 1840s, England sent soldiers to guard ships exporting food crops from Irish farms while the native population starved or emigrated.
Feeding them, it was believed, would compromise their work ethic.
But here’s the thing: At no point was I tempted to wonder if my ancestors were, in fact, inferior. Not once, not ever. Nor did I see any point in holding it against the Rolling Stones or The Who (although my grandfather Connors pretended to). It was ancient history to me, fascinating but of little import to my life as a first-generation college student.
My father, a donkey-strong man of fierce opinions, had a slogan he’d often repeat. It was his personal credo, a bedrock statement of Irish-American patriotism.
“You’re no better than anybody else,” he’d growl. “And NOBODY’S BETTER THAN YOU.”
It’s become my personal motto as well. You see, I don’t believe it of you or your ancestors either. That they’re inferior (or superior, for that matter). Never have. I used to joke that being Irish, I only looked white. But hardly anybody gets it anymore, so I quit saying it.
“History is a nightmare,” said James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, “from which I am trying to awake.”
I understand that it’s easier to resign from being Irish (in the political sense) than it is to resign from being black or Asian or Hispanic or whatever. But to me, the freedom to redefine yourself is the essence of being American.
We used to sit around in our freshman dorm at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, all us first-generation college boys with immigrant ancestors, comparing notes about the crazy stories our grandparents told us about the old country. Me and Czyza and Finelli and Sussman and Piskorowski and Sugarman and Grasso and Maloney… Well, you get the point.
Hardly a WASP in sight, although I’d actually dated one in high school.
So no, I won’t apologize for my “white privilege” either. Nor will I turn myself inside-out trying to prove my good faith to somebody who doubts it. I’m no better than you, and you’re no better than I am. If we can’t agree to meet in the middle, then maybe it’s best we not meet at all.
It will be seen that I’m temperamentally unqualified to be a college administrator, compelled as they are to remain solemn, as impassioned nineteen-year-olds demand — demand, no less — an immediate end to not only “white supremacy” but to “heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism.”
That’s from a recent list of grievances presented to the president of Amherst College. Somehow, they left out the designated hitter rule.
Writing in The Nation, Michelle Goldberg complained about “left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea…that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression.” She met fierce resistance from Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper in (where else?) Salon, who countered that “[T]he demand to be reasonable is a disingenuous demand. Black folks have been reasoning with white people forever. Racism is unreasonable, and that means reason has limited currency in the fight against it.”
No it doesn’t. Quite the opposite.
My view is that they’re being intellectually defrauded, all these idealistic kids who are being taught their race is destiny, and destiny is race.
Better by far that they should study entomology, urban planning, or 18th-century French literature — anything that fascinates them — rather than waste their college years pondering the exact color of their navels and compiling lists of fruitless demands.
End xenophobia? Wonderful. Tell it to ISIS.
However, the way it seems to work on many campuses these days, is that a tenured commissar like Cooper gets to make both ends of the argument: yours and hers. Needless to say, you’re wrong by definition.
Anyway, here’s what I’d tell her students if they asked me:
Yes, race can still be an obstacle. However, most Americans want to be fair. People will meet you more than halfway if you let them. As President Obama has shown, bigots no longer have the power to define your life.
Unless, that is, you give it to them.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, December 2, 2015
“Symptoms Of The Same Problem”: The Key Reason Why Racism Remains Alive And Well In America
In our faltering efforts to deal with race in this country, a great deal of time is devoted to responding to symptoms rather than root causes. That may help explain why racism keeps repeating itself.
Exhibit One is the recurring cases of racism at colleges.
In February 2013, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity was suspended by Washington University in St. Louis after the fraternity’s pledges were accused of singing racial slurs to African American students.
Last November, the University of Connecticut suspended Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity after a confrontation with members of the historically black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in which AKAs were called racially and sexually charged epithets.
This year in March, a University of Maryland student resigned from Kappa Sigma fraternity after being suspended for sending an e-mail containing racially and sexually suggestive language about African American, Indian and Asian women.
Also this year, disciplinary action was taken against members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma who participated in a racist chant, caught on video, about lynching African Americans.
We have not seen the end of racist fraternity and sorority actions on college campuses.
That’s because the actions taken in response to these incidents by well-meaning universities were directed at symptoms. Epithets, chants and derogatory language about African Americans are indicators of an underlying problem within the offending white students, namely an antagonism against blacks based upon feelings of white superiority. With suspensions and expulsions, the college community rids itself of a particular manifestation but not the underlying problem, which is racial prejudice.
The United States has been treating evidence of racism, and not the causes, since the Civil War.
Slavery; “separate but equal”; segregated pools, buses, trains and water fountains; workplace and housing discrimination; and other forms of bias and animus have served as painful barometers of the nation’s racial health. They have been, however, treated like the pain that accompanies a broken leg. The effort was to treat or reduce the agonizing symptoms of the break rather than fix it.
The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution extended civil and legal protections to former slaves. They eased the pain, but the leg was still broken.
Anti-lynching laws scattered the lynch mobs. But the pain flared up again with beatings, bombings and assassinations.
Our nation responded to racial anguish with a variety of measures: the 1954 Brown school desegregation decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and numerous rules and regulations to address those things that caused generations of African Americans — when the shades were drawn — to groan, weep, grit their teeth and swear that their children would not experience the demeaning, disrespectful and immoral treatment that they had to endure.
However, these legal remedies, while addressing the excruciating racial pain, didn’t deal with the enduring problem: the racism itself that caused the South to secede from the Union; that led state legislatures and governors to birth Jim Crow laws; that sparked the KKK’s reign of terror; and that encouraged school districts and town zoning officials to institutionalize barriers against black citizens in housing, education and employment. And racism is still at it in the 21st century. All you have to do is look at those frat boys cited above to see that it’s going strong.
Witness, too, the enactment of laws passed since President Obama’s 2008 election to make it harder for African Americans to vote.
And then there is Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston, S.C., assassin who takes his place among storied anti-black murderers such as James Earl Ray, who killed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; the Klansmen who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four little black girls; and Samuel H. Bowers Jr., the imperial wizard of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who with his KKK brethren murdered three civil rights workers.
Oh, yes, Roof has plenty of company; not necessarily in his homicidal rage but in his ideology. The manifesto that he purportedly wrote is replete with bigoted remarks common to right-wing talk radio and posted on Web sites.
Dylann Roof is this week’s manifestation of our racial sickness. But Roof and his ideological forbear President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America and those Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers are symptoms of the same problem. Until we get at the root cause, the problem lives on.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 26, 2015
“We’re In The Grip Of Madness”: Obsession With Guns Now Infects College Campuses
The Texas Legislature has just passed its version of campus-carry — a bill that allows students, teachers, janitors, administrators, and anyone else with a firearms permit to carry concealed handguns on college campuses throughout the state. That means students sitting in a library or classroom or strolling through a classic tree-lined quadrangle may be armed.
College campuses don’t have enough problems with student misbehavior? Administrators aren’t frazzled enough coping with rapes, binge drinking, and routine infractions such as cheating? The Legislature had to add concealed weapons to the mix?The illogic is hard to overstate. This is what one proponent of the measure, GOP state Rep. Jonathan Stickland, had to say: “An armed society is a safe society, so any time you have gun control, there is far more opportunity to become victims.”
Ah, where to begin?It should be clear from the recent spate of police shootings that even those who are highly trained make mistakes with their weapons. They fire too quickly, killing the unarmed. They shoot bystanders. They miss altogether. What makes the gun lobby think that civilians would handle their firearms with more precision and control?
One Texan who is intimately familiar with firearms tried to persuade the Legislature not to pass campus-carry. Adm. William McRaven, who is now the chancellor of the University of Texas System, said, “I’m a guy that loves my guns. I have all sorts of guns. I just don’t think bringing guns on campus is going to make us any safer.”
The man is a former Navy Seal. He commanded the U.S. Special Operations forces who killed Osama bin Laden. But the GOP-dominated Legislature ignored him.
Clearly, we’re in the grip of a kind of madness, an irrational, fevered obsession with firearms. Sometime in the not-too-distant (I hope) future, historians and anthropologists will study our society’s gun sickness to try to figure out how we became so warped by firearms ownership. They’ll ponder this cultural weirdness just as we look back at the Salem witch trials and the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness.
To be sure, the vast majority of Americans are not persuaded that more guns are tantamount to more safety. They know better. Polls show that we support additional gun safety laws, including a ban on large-capacity magazines and broadening background checks to make it more difficult for criminals and the deranged to get guns.
But we don’t care enough. We haven’t gone about the business of isolating this madness, quarantining the fevered, protecting ourselves from the spread. We’ve allowed this infection to embed itself in the bloodstream of civil society.
Currently, according to the website of the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19 states prohibit concealed weapons on college campuses. Twenty-three others allow college presidents or regents to make the decision. But it seems inevitable that campus-carry laws will spread.
The gun lobby has more energy, more focus, more intensity. Its minions take their odd enthusiasm to state legislatures, to city councils, and to court, where they seek to overturn even modest gun safety laws. They target politicians who dare suggest that not every private citizen needs to own a shoulder-fired rocket launcher.
When Gov. Greg Abbott signs the bill, as expected, Texas will become the ninth state to allow campus-carry, and proponents will continue to push in gun-crazed states with Republican-dominated legislatures. Look for some to emulate Utah, which has the broadest (and nuttiest) law, outdoing Texas. Its statute specifically bans any college campus from prohibiting concealed weapons. In Texas, at least, private colleges may opt out.
There is a very real danger that some student will kill another on campus. Or kill a teacher with whom he or she has a disagreement. Or go on a rage-fueled spree and kill several people.
Texas, especially, ought to know better. It was the scene of one of the nation’s earliest spree shootings, in 1966, when former Marine Charles Whitman fired from the clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin.
Unfortunately, the Texas Legislature has trampled the memory of the dead.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize Commentary in 2007, The National Memo, June 6, 2015
“A Cycle Repeated On Other Campuses”: Racism In Greek Life Didn’t Start At The University Of Oklahoma, Or Sigma Alpha Epsilon
That shaky clip taken on a fraternity party bus at the University of Oklahoma ignited national nausea. It was something about the glee with which the young men, in formalwear, toss off the word “nigger” and the phrase “hang him from a tree,” the way the young woman blithely claps along. The video portrays a cavalier, virulent racism among the educated and privileged that some people like to pretend is extinct.
But while the words and images were shocking, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that racism has been uncovered anew at an American fraternity, given the number of incidents that have occurred at them in the past. In response to the University of Oklahoma incident, one of the school’s prized football recruits, an offensive lineman named Jean Delance, chose to rescind his acceptance. But at the University of Alabama, where Delance could wind up playing, the Kappa Alpha Order, until recently, held an “Old South” parade every year, replete with Confederate flags. The event was called off in 2010, after the previous year’s procession came to a halt in front of a historically black sorority during their 35th anniversary celebration. Of course, the reason black fraternities and sororities exist in the first place is that the white institutions would not accept students of color. As recently as 2013, there were at least four sororities at the University of Alabama that accepted no black women, according to an article in the school’s newspaper.
And a fraternity or sorority doesn’t have to have any ties to the South in order for its members to participate in behavior that is racist at worst and hurtful at best. In 1998, Dartmouth College’s chapters of Chi Gamma Epsilon (a sorority) and Alpha Xi Delta sponsored a “Ghetto Party” and made national headlines after attendees showed up wearing afros and carrying fake guns. Students protested and the groups apologized, but the story drew ample notice after the New York Times got wind of it. 1998 may seem to be ancient history—but it happened again in 2013, when two other Greek organizations co-hosted a “Bloods and Crips” event. Students came dressed much the same way as their forebears had, attracted national outrage and gave the same swift apology. Dartmouth has since banned Greek life and hard alcohol on its campus, primarily for safety reasons.
It’s a cycle that’s been repeated on other campuses. At Penn State in 2012, a chapter of Chi Omega took a picture of its members decked out in Mexican-themed costumes. The women wore sombreros, ponchos and fake mustaches. Two held signs. One said, “Will mow lawn for weed + beer,” while the other said “I don’t cut grass I smoke it.” Once again, students were predictably offended, the story hit Gawker, and the sorority members quickly apologized.
It would seem there are two kinds of racism at fraternities and sororities, both ingrained. There’s the historical kind, like the “Old South” parade, and the active discrimination against black members. Then there’s the casual wielding of cultural stereotypes, like the theme parties, which reveals prejudice in an almost childlike form. Perhaps there’s a thrill that accompanies such alcohol-fueled transgressions, and the sense of belonging in an exclusive group outweighs compassion. The ugliness, whether about women or nerds or minority groups, is part of the point, and it can, to outsiders, sometimes seem like a fundamental function of Greek life.
The Oklahoma incident straddles both kinds of racism. There’s the history, and the lily-white membership, and there’s the in-group disregard for others. There, on that enclosed bus, those men (and a few women) felt as if they were in an environment in which they could sing that racist and seemingly longstanding fraternity cheer, crossing a line they must have known was there, without fear of consequences. It’s not the first time there’s been photographic documentation of racism in a Greek organization. It’s just the first time it has been illustrated so clearly.
By: Ali Elkin, Bloomberg Politics, March 13, 2015
“Are We Still Thugs When You Pay To Watch Us Play Sports?”: Deified On Campus While Being Disrespected When The Uniform Comes Off
It is difficult to imagine two more different university towns than Madison, Wisconsin, and Norman, Oklahoma. Madison has a reputation stretching back decades as liberal—even radical—territory. That ain’t Norman. This week however, both of these communities were connected by the resistance of black students—along with allies and supporters—against racism. Madison and Norman are bringing together different aspects of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and demonstrating how this struggle is now firmly implanted among the young—and among young athletes—in a manner that for now seems set in stone. In Madison, several thousand high school students marched and sat in the streets demanding answers and justice after Tony Robinson, an unarmed 19-year-old, was killed by Madison police. In addition to protests and sit-ins, high school basketball fans, players and even coaches arrived at several games wearing either all-black or shirts that read #JusticeForTony or #BlackLivesMatter.
At Oklahoma, the campus has been roiled by a leaked video of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, caught on camera chanting racist slurs. The school immediately cut all ties with the frat and university president David Boren pledged immediately that the school would become “an example to the entire country of how to deal with this issue.”
That wasn’t enought for the Oklahoma Sooners football team, who canceled their practice and, wearing all black, walked off the field to join demonstrations. It is worth noting that Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops joined his team and marched. It is also worth noting that Bob Stoops has already lost a top-rated high school recruit because of the video.
The players, in addition, held an impromptu press conference saying that they wanted to use this opportunity to also speak about their own grievances about how they are treated on campus. On Thursday, Sooners Quarterback Trevor Knight issued a statement on behalf of the team. People should read it in its entirety because it is a powerful piece of work. The money quote in my mind is:
As a team, our goal first and foremost is to raise awareness of racism and discrimination on college campuses nationwide…. But before we can change the nation, we make it our mission to change our campus. We seek to accomplish this goal by stepping out of the spotlight and integrating the student-athlete experience and the student experience. As student athletes of all races, classes and creeds, we hope to show the university and the community that we are defined by more than the numbers on our jerseys, and that we are human beings that desire to get to know our classmates as we all attempt to end the culture of exclusivity on this campus. Secondary to accomplishing these goals, we also seek disciplinary action for those responsible.
The simultaneous real-time demonstrations for #BlackLivesMatter in these two seemingly polar opposite places of Madison and Norman speak glaringly to the fact that what they have in common is greater than what separates them. Both are state schools with small percentages of black students. Madison, with more than 40,000 students, has a black population of 2.3 percent, and OU, with an enrollment of about 30,000, has a black population of about 5 percent. Both schools field football teams that are nationally ranked, financially lucrative and highly dependent on black talent. This also means that on both campuses sports might be the most integrated public space. Several players at Oklahoma, as sports writer Aaron Leibowitz pointed out, have taken to social media to spell out the ways so-called “student athletes” can be deified on campus while being disrespected when the uniform comes off.
Both the stories out of Madison and Norman brought to mind a sign held up by University of Maryland wide receiver Deon Long when attending a Black Lives Matter rally on campus that read, “Are we still thugs when you pay to watch us play sports?” The answer for too many seems to be yes. We learned this week that the cities of Madison and Norman had more in common than college life and big time football. Here is hoping that as the Oklahoma football team confronts how it is going to “step out of the spotlight” and “raise awareness of racism,” its vision includes Tony Robinson and the growing list of unarmed black women and men felled by police violence.
By: Dave Zirin, The Nation, March 13, 2015
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