Duke had its rape case. Dartmouth had its Native American iconography. Cornell had a student sentenced for a racially motivated stabbing. Wait, what?
It’s not been thirty days since Dick Clark and confetti and already racially motivated controversies have begun in earnest. Let’s take a spin around January at the Ivies. At Princeton , the editors of the Daily Princetonian came under fire last week for a controversial joke issue degrading Asian-Americans. At Columbia , the school severed ties with its popular Boredatbutler.com site, an anonymous discussion board, in response to student uproar over racist comments about its coach. And yes, at Cornell , Nathan Poffenbarger was sentenced yesterday for a federal hate crime. He is accused of, and pled guilty to, stabbing a black visiting student in 2005.
It seems like we don’t hear about these incidents unless they’re major national news. Even our own Daily Pennsylvanian has never reported on the Poffenbarger arrest, trial, or conviction. We rely on an “out of sight, out of mind” policy, one that lulls us into a false assumption of civility and maintenance of the status quo.
What can we do to affect change in this? As Karlene Burrell-McRae, director of the Black Cultural Center Makuu offers, “I loathe racist, sexist, homophobic, hateful language. But at the same time, I appreciate that we have been given this democracy to be individuals. I always try to charge myself with how to think about creating and sustaining a healthy community.” But in order to have constructive exchanges can happen, we’d need to know there was an issue. This lack of awareness, as seen (or not seen!) by minimal coverage in the DP, gives us a sense of perceived normalcy in our peer campuses.
Harvard Crimson columnist Sahil Mahtani is sympathetic to the Princeton editor’s plight, boldly ending his column by declaring “Most mean well. In fact, this is as close to a perfect community as we are likely to see in our lives.” Well, if we could read more of what’s actually happening around us, we’d see more of how “perfect” these communities are.
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January 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 am
Of the many needed corrections, Duke HAS it’s rape case, not “had.” Duke University is a classic example of an extremely poor absolutely and shameful reaction to a situation that inevitably has raised racial tensions. Our administration would do well to follow Duke as an example of the exactly wrong course of action to take. The Penn public needs to do far more than “read more of whats actually happening around us.” Should we be looking for racial issues instead of campus crime, sex offenders, and murderers?