BY JOSH COHEN

In print | Published October 4, 2007

I guess this is the way it works: after the nationwide attention given to the Jena 6 several weeks ago, I’m suddenly seeing and reading about incidences of racism everywhere, as if it were a resurgence and not a reality that’s been there all along. I don’t know if it’s because my eyes scan front pages for the words “college” and “university”, if newspapers are more likely to report on a Durham, NC than a Jena, LA, or if it’s actually representative of something, but it feels like the majority of these incidences are taking place on college campuses.

At the University of Maryland and the US Coast Guard Academy, nooses have been found outside the African-American cultural centers and placed amongst the personal effects of a black cadet, examples that pay further testament to the lasting power of an odious symbol. Similarly, though also very differently, the student paper at the University of Virginia printed cartoons depicting starving Ethiopians and a slave and “politically incorrect” parties at Macalester, UT-Austin, Johns Hopkins University and Clemson University, among others, have had students dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, in blackface and wearing a noose, among other costumes.

The first two examples are inarguably hateful while the cartoons and costumes are ambiguous enough to make prime fodder for the sort of conversations academia loves to have about freedom of speech, ethics and the state of society. And yet, the responses to these incidences by authorities affiliated with the various institutions have implicitly lumped them together, offering indistinguishable official condemnations of “intolerance” and “insensitivity” and calls for an increase in “racial sensitivity training.” The argument is that things like nooses end up outside African-American cultural centers because “young people” don’t know any better.

The notion that “education” is the cure-all for deeply embedded racism in society would be naive if it weren’t coming from professors and administrators — in which case, it’s irresponsible. Consider the following explanation — and implicit justification — given by a professor of law at the University of Maryland for the incident at her college: “Young people can sense it’s a powerful symbol … I think they know it’s racially charged, but they don’t know its full history … how many lynchings there were, how many were there watching — sometimes whole towns, including here in Maryland.”

Similarly, the vice president and chief officer at the University of Virginia said that “some students arrive with prejudices and stereotypes they don’t even know they have,” and the president of Spelman College explained that college is the first time many students experience so many different types of people and that “many people don’t make that transition well.”

Self-congratulation looms large when you play the Swarthmore card, but it really is relevant to note here that Swarthmore is the exception when it comes to things like this. Most of us arrive at our diversity workshops almost excessively aware and eager to talk. I’ve been to an orientation diversity workshop at a large Midwestern university, though, and if I think about that experience — in which we went around the group and named an instance in which we interacted with “someone of another color” — it’s clear to me that the responses by administrators and professors to racism on their campuses are a serious failure, if not contributory to the problem itself. The truth is that treating students like ignorant children ends up giving them license to act accordingly.

To put it another way: Why should “sensitivity training” entail sensitivity for the racists? While it’s true that lots of students come to college from comparatively homogenous communities and interact with people of other colors, shapes and sizes, for the first time in their first weeks at college, it is insulting to suggest that racism is a growing pain. You “make the transition” into drinking, dorm life, staying home alone; you don’t need to take a semester of classes with students of different races to “transition” your way into humanity, not unless you were actually raised by wolves (or their parental equivalent).

Beyond tolerance, active respect should be a prerequisite for membership in a college community, which purports to be peddling enlightenment, since active respect is the ideal for a society at large that is still working on tolerance. Instead, though, colleges are justifying the racism occurring on their campuses by telling students that they are victims of their own ignorance, that they learn tolerance like a subject in school rather than practice it, and that morality is, in more ways than one, skin-deep.

Several students who participated in the “politically incorrect” parties said that the parties were in response to the absurdity of the “sensitivity training” on their campuses. Others said it was in response to the injustice of affirmative action. None of this makes dressing up like a Klan member justifiable, let alone funny, but it does point to the fact that these students are smarter than their colleges give them credit for — that is, they are responding to farce of their colleges’ attitude towards racial issues with farce of their own. If there is a message to be drawn from a “politically incorrect” party, it is the students exploiting the fact that their university is more interested in self-promotional talk of tolerance than in the actual everyday experiences of its students in which racism and racists, regardless of “diversity”, remain the norm.

Diversity workshops should be discussions that ask the questions society at large isn’t asking, not condescendingly scripted lessons in the fundamentals of humanity. At my first diversity workshop at the large Midwestern University, we made a list of examples of racism, and then we signed a pledge to be tolerant, which most students threw out afterwards. Really progressive education is demanding: a college should assume racial enlightenment of its students, and be accordingly unequivocal, even err on the side of moral superiority, in its reaction to students who fail to meet our 21st century standards for morality. “Insensitivity” is laughing during Beaches; a racist joke is racist. If you leave a noose outside an African-American cultural center, or if you dress up like one for a party, your institution should hold you accountable — but it can’t, and shouldn’t, aim to change you. It’s your job to educate yourself.

Josh is a junior. You can reach him at jcohen2@swarthmore.edu.

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