Do the Huxtables make us feel too comfortable? (wikimedia)

It seems that precious little is sacred on college campuses — everything’s fair game for irreverent lambasting among college students: Students at a Texas college hosted an MLK Day party which “featured gang apparel, fried chicken, malt liquor.” A UConn law student party “featured gold teeth, do-rags, gang signs.”

And this isn’t just your daily dose of offbeat news — there’s a similar trend in mainstream headlines, too: “Asian-American parody inflames Princeton.” “Recent college parties mocking black stereotypes spark outrage.” And the latest from Penn, a law student charged with ethnic intimidation and attempted murder.

It’s as if we’ve come full circle in the diversity dialogue. Somehow, amidst all the talk of race and multiculturalism, the line between embracing diversity and being racist has become a bit blurred. According to University of Iowa professor of journalism Venise Berry, pop culture and media have a lot to do with the confusion. For example, we learn from comedians that as long as we make fun of ourselves, it’s OK to make fun of other ethnic groups. And also thanks to pop culture, we’re all fluent in racially-colored language (think FOBs, JAPs, Twinkies). As University of Dayton sociologist Leslie Picca explains it, “This is a new generation who grew up watching ‘The Cosby Show.’ They have the belief that racism isn’t a problem anymore so the words they use and the jokes they tell aren’t racist.” Having been on both the giving and receiving ends of racism, we seem to have become immune to it, viewing it as an inevitable “even harmless” fact of American culture.

The roots of racism go much deeper than any societal trend — or even any historical precedent. After all, we learn in Psych 101 that our brains are wired to categorize and make generalizations when we don’t have all the facts. And it’s probably also innately human to make non-neutral evaluations of the foreign and the unfamiliar. (Anyone who screamed bloody murder as a child when forced onto the lap of that unnaturally jolly fellow clad in red can testify to this.) So as long as our minds continue to organize information the way they do, we will be inclined to make unjust racist judgments.

But rather than complacent acceptance of the seeming inevitability of racism, our response should be to resist our less-than-admirable natural tendencies. We can’t go through life without making generalizations, but we can do without the self-aggrandizing, other-denigrating ones.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.