The Chronicle of Higher Education
At Oregon State, controversies over a noose and a blackface image force candid conversations
By PETER SCHMIDT
Corvallis, Ore.
"Racism is … "
A student group called Team Liberation wrote those words across the top of a sheet of easel-pad paper and hung it in Oregon State University's Memorial Union, to see what passers-by would jot down. The afternoon after it was taken down, about a dozen people gather around a table — at one of many diversity-related events held on campus these days — to discuss the experiment's results.
"Ignorance," one anonymous hand has written. Onto that response, someone has tacked the words "is an excuse," the "is" repeatedly underlined for emphasis.
Then appears a rebuttal: "Too often used as an excuse."
Other responses signal resentment toward the whole exercise. "Play the race card and you can get away with s — ." "Racist jokes are hilarious."
Like many campus events staged in response to racism, the discussion here has a preaching-to-the-choir dynamic. The group of people who have shown up is much more racially and ethnically diverse than Oregon State's overall student body, which is overwhelmingly white. And no one in the room challenges assertions by those around them that racism and capitalism are inextricably intertwined, and that only white people can be racist because they have all the power.
Again and again, Lauren L. Dillard, a white junior from Canby, Ore., finds herself in the hot seat as her peers bring up her involvement last fall in the publication of a controversial blackface image in the student newspaper.
She says little in response, mainly just taking notes.
What Hangs in the Air
Oregon State is hardly the only college in the nation grappling with the problem of racism and weighing sharply different views of how to deal with it.
For decades, campus racism has seemed to erupt into the public consciousness in cycles, usually after spates of incidents involving students' wearing blackface, parties with themes that mocked a minority group, or the publication of racially charged articles or cartoons in student newspapers.
Last fall it was the appearance of anonymously hung nooses at a long list of colleges — including Central Michigan University, Columbia University, Minneapolis Community and Technical College, and the University of Maryland at College Park — that stirred fears that colleges were becoming hotbeds of hate.
Typically, such incidents are followed by student protests, efforts to find and punish the perpetrators, and pledges by college administrations to promote diversity and tolerance. Often the uproar over the outward expression of racism dies down, but the underlying problem seems to remain.
Oregon State, a land-grant institution with an enrollment of almost 20,000, has been shaken by controversies over both blackface and a noose in the past year. But the incidents here were not seen as clear-cut expressions of racial animus, for which specific people should be held accountable, so much as acts of ignorance and insensitivity that pointed to a need for broader change.
Administrators at Oregon State, unlike their peers at many colleges, have taken the view that it would be a mistake for them to focus their energy on responding to various racist incidents. To make lasting progress in diminishing racism, they say, campus leaders must focus on promoting diversity in a forward-looking manner, between the controversies that erupt.
Last fall's events polarized the campus, but they also forced students to begin candid discussions of racism and examine their own biases.
"I'm not proud of where we are," says Terryl J. Ross, director of the university's office of community and diversity, but "all the conditions are right for us to go to the next level."
[To read the entire article, go to: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i27/27a01801.htm ] (Subscription needed)
No comments:
Post a Comment