A series in the
Christian Science Monitor
on campus racial problems included this episode:
When a dozen black youths crashed a Theta Delta Chi fraternity party at Berkeley last fall, pulling knives, hurling epithets, and putting two whites in the hospital, the student paper didn’t cover the story. “There were 11 cops and two ambulances—and
we
were the ones worried about a lawsuit!” says fraternity member Jon Orbik. “Can you imagine the media if it had been the other way around?”
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Double standards and hypocrisy are recurring complaints about the way racial issues are handled on campuses across the country. The specifics range from double standards of admission to charges of racism by minority students or faculty who make racist statements themselves, to self-segregation by students who claim to be “excluded.”
As regards preferential admissions, Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote:
The white student who gains admissions to a good college has undoubtedly worked hard for four years in secondary school and experienced the heavy anxiety of filing application for admission and waiting for acceptance or rejection. Such a student is very likely to be a competitive personality. That a black skin or a Hispanic surname is worth several hundred Scholastic Aptitude Test points sticks in the craw.
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Even those who are themselves admitted often feel resentment on behalf of relatives or friends who were not admitted, despite better records than minority students admitted preferentially.
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As a Rutgers University undergraduate said on the McNeil-Lehrer news program: “The reason why we have racial tensions at Rutgers is they have a very strong minority recruitment program, and this means that many of my friends from my hometown were not accepted, even though they are more qualified.”
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This was not peculiar to Rutgers. When two Californians from the same preparatory school applied to the University of California at Berkeley, this was the result:
Student A was ranked in the top third of his class, student B in the bottom third. Student A had SAT scores totaling 1290; student B’s scores totaled 890. Student A had a record of good citizenship while student B was expelled the previous winter for breaking a series of major rules. Student A was white; student B was black. Berkeley rejected student A and accepted student B.
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Similar stories abound. At Dartmouth, a student with uninspiring SAT scores and poor high school grades was admitted, even though students with far better academic records have been turned away. This young man had some trace of American Indian ancestry, though he was blond and blue-eyed.
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Whatever resentments grow out of this issue are compounded when college authorities stifle any complaints about it. At U.C.L.A., for example, a comic strip in the student newspaper contained an episode in which a student sees a rooster on campus and asks how he got admitted. “Affirmative action” was the rooster’s reply. The editor was removed from his job—and when the student newspaper at Cal State Northridge criticized
this action editorially, illustrating the editorial with the comic strip in question, that editor was also removed.
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At the University of Wisconsin (Eau Claire) a cartoon in the student newspaper showed two white students with faces darkened from a bucket of paint labeled “Minority in a Minute” and “E-Z 2-ITION.” One student says: “Who needs to work so hard to get a perfect G.P.A. or money for tuition, when ya have this stuff?” The other sings “Free tuition here we come.”
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A Michigan State University student who displayed this cartoon on his dormitory door was suspended.
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Self-segregation by minorities is another common complaint. Sometimes this extends from eating together—the “black table” is a common phenomenon at many colleges—to socializing exlusively within one’s own racial or ethnic group, to having separate dormitories. Nor is all this spontaneous. Often there are social pressures, sometimes abetted by college administrators in various ways.
The process begins even before the minority student sets foot on campus. Racial identity information on the admissions application form triggers racially separate listings of students, with these lists then being shared with the local Black Students Union or other minority organizations on campus. Students may be invited to campus as individuals, only to discover after arrival that the gathering is all-black, all-Hispanic, etc. In short, they do not join minority organizations the way Jewish students may join Hillel or Catholics may join Newman clubs; they are
delivered
to campus minority organizations.
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Pressures to self-segregate and adopt groupthink attitudes begin early. As an observer at Washington University in St. Louis said:
The minute they get on campus, the Legion of Black Collegians tells them that they are going to be discriminated against. So they stick together and ostracize any that might get involved on campus.
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Mark Mathabane, black South African author of
Kaffir Boy
, traveled to America to go to college and escape apartheid—only to discover its philosophy flourishing here:
When I was in college, I and a few other black students were labeled Uncle Toms for sitting with whites in the cafeteria,
sharing with them black culture, working with them on projects and socializing with them.
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Similar attitudes can be found among other minority groups, including Asians on some campuses. An Asian American student at Carleton College reported:
Students of color are looked down upon and sometimes openly criticized by their peers for having too many white friends, not doing enough for their respective multicultural groups, or just being too “Americanized” or trying too hard to blend in. Using the Asian American experience as an example, terms like “banana” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) arc sometime used and questions like “How come you don’t have an Asian first name?” come up in everyday conversation.
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The term “banana” for Asians who reject separatism parallels the use of the term “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside) for blacks and “coconut” (brown on the outside, etc.) for Mexican Americans who reject separatism. In short, campus political activists in various groups attempt to stigmatize those students of their own race who do not join their political constituency and share its groupthink. Such activism is, however, less common and less extreme among Asian Americans, though the general pattern is similar in those cases where Asian campus activists are at work.
The cumulative effects of self-segregation pressures eventually take their toll on many minority youngsters. An observer described the process among black students at Dartmouth:
Most have a healthy attitude when they come here. They want to meet all kinds of people, and expand their intellectual and cultural horizons. Yet, if they happen to make more white friends than black ones, they quickly learn the ugly reality of Dartmouth’s reverse racism. Normally-adjusted blacks are called “incogs” and “oreos,” meaning that they are “black on the outside and white on the inside.” Most frequently, it is blacks themselves who call other blacks by these hateful names.
Many black freshmen can’t withstand the pressure…. They begin to eat together, live together, and join all-black fraternities and sororities…. At first, they resisted the pressure
to abandon their well-integrated circle of friends, yet were unable to keep up the resistance.
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As on other campuses, the Dartmouth administration abetted this process, not only by arranging a special orientation weekend for blacks (at first not so labeled) and then by providing
de facto
segregated housing:
Dartmouth participates in the segregation process by providing Cutter Hall for black housing and the Afro-American Society. Although housing in Cutter is ostensibly available for anyone who wants it, the last time a white student lived there was the winter of 1986. Cutter’s militant, ingrown atmosphere ensures that few whites will ever cross the threshold, let alone consider living there.
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At Berkeley, self-segregation is achieved by matching room mates by race. “I came here expecting to have friends, even room-mates, of other races,” a white student at Berkeley said. Of the minority students she said, “They go around calling everybody ‘racist,’ but they’re the ones insisting on being separate.” She added: “If white students got together on the basis of race, they’d be considered Nazis.”
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Sometimes self-segregation endures right on through to graduation itself. The Stanford
Campus Report
for June 13, 1990, listed a “Black Baccalaureate,” a “Native American Graduation Dinner” and an “Asian American Graduation Reception” at separate locations.
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Minority students who insist on going their own way as individuals, not only socially but ideologically, face special pressures and even physical threats—often to the complete disinterest of college administrations. In Allan Bloom’s
Closing of the American Mind
, he reports going to Cornell University’s provost on behalf of “a black student whose life had been threatened by a black faculty member when he refused to participate in a demonstration.” The provost expressed sympathy but did nothing, because (1) the administration was preoccupied with current racial tensions on campus and (2) campus politics in general were such that “no university in the country could expel radical black students or dismiss the faculty members who incited them.”
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At about the same time, black educator Kenneth B. Clark
resigned from Antioch College’s board of directors in protest against the administration’s silence as militant black students “intimidate, threaten, and in some cases physically assault” other black students who disagreed with them.
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Similar patterns can still be found on elite college campuses today. Threats of violence against a black student who was also editor of the conservative
Dartmouth Review
evoked a similar lack of interest on the part of the Dartmouth administration,
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even though the student named names and had faculty witnesses. At Stanford, Hispanic students who complained of intimidation by more militant, organized Hispanic students found a similar indifference on the part of the administration. Moreover, a copy of their letter of complaint, complete with signatures of the complaining students, was turned over to the militant Hispanic organization.
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Often, college administrators deal with the most vocal minority organization as if it represents “the” blacks, “the” Hispanics, etc.—regardless of whether it does in fact. Hispanic students at Stanford, for example, claimed that “only 15.2 percent of Chicano/Latino students have ever participated in any way whatsoever” in any of the activities of the organization which speaks in their name.
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Nevertheless, such organizations tend to monopolize administrators’ attention, whether because of ideological affinity, administrative convenience, or because they represent a credible threat to campus tranquility.
Because college officials respond to the organized and vocal elements within each minority group, the whole racial atmosphere on campus tends to reflect the issues raised by these vocal elements and by administrators’ policy responses to their charges and demands. What
most
minority students think may carry far less weight. Sad as it is to have tensions between two racial groups when they disagree, it is tragic insanity to have racial tension when these groups as a whole are in fundamental agreement For example, a survey of 5,000 students at 40 colleges showed that, at predominantly white colleges, 76 percent of black students and 93 percent of white students agreed that all undergraduates should be admitted by meeting the same standards. At predominantly black colleges, more than 95 percent of the students of both races agreed.
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This divisive issue inflames campuses across the country because college officials respond to the vocal activists.
Another factor not to be overlooked in explaining college policies is the sheer, blind imitativeness of the academic world. Even colleges and universities which have lagged behind in the developments which have brought turmoil to other campuses, often decide later to imitate their less fortunate compatriots. For example, Whitman College, a somewhat traditional institution which escaped much of the turmoil and fashions of the 1960s, nevertheless chose later to establish a Director of Minority Affairs, and he in turn chose to invite to campus a speaker on racism, described—by the speaker’s own promotional literature—as someone who “draws out anger,” who is “loud, verbally brutal, demeaning, cold and oppressive.”
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Why invite such a man to Whitman College? According to an official of Whitman’s Multi-Ethnic Student Organization: “Just because we don’t have any real problem (at Whitman) doesn’t mean there is no problem…. Racial sensitivity is what we’re after.”
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In other words, they could not resist stirring up problems, instead of leaving well enough alone. This is all too typical of the mindset which has led to escalating racial polarization on many campuses—a polarization which, however, enhances the visibility and importance of people associated with “multicultural” and minority affairs.