Bigotry Is Back in Fashion : Many Forms of Racism Infest Nation’s Campuses

Every measure with which we are familiar supports the observation that America is moving backward in race relations. What an indictment of our country. What an indictment of our leaders--President, Congress, Supreme Court, governors, state legislatures, mayors, city councils, corporate leaders, business executives and educators. What an indictment of us as citizens.

America is more like a salad bowl than a melting pot, according to former Rep. Shirley Chisholm of New York, but if we don’t pay more attention to making the mixture flavorful and nourishing, we will develop a national indigestion of such magnitude that it will stop us in our tracks.

We are a nation of great strengths. We put men and women into space, we lead the world in planetary exploration, we have unlocked the secret of the atom. But we have made little progress in resolving the conflicts between ethnic groups.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said it well when he stated: “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to re-establish the spiritual ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.”

We must be concerned about the signs of our collective failure. We must be concerned about the failure of our schools and, more specifically, the failure of African American students in our schools. We must be concerned that young black males in our cities know where every playground and basketball court is within a 10-mile radius and yet don’t have the slightest idea where the closest library is, while their parents encourage the former and don’t care about the latter. We must be concerned that these young black males constitute 3.5% of all college enrollment and comprise 46% of our prison population.

We must be concerned that every year for the past five years, fewer young black men and women have entered college--and many who choose predominantly white institutions face a level of hatred, prejudice and ignorance comparable to that of the days of Bull Connor, Lester Maddox and Orval Faubus, in the early civil-rights era. We must be concerned that twice as many black teen-age girls drop out of high school each year to have babies than graduate from college.

We must be concerned that 44% of the black adults in America are marginally, functionally or totally illiterate, and that in too many of our neighborhoods, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters are consumed by drugs, gangs, joblessness and despair. We must be concerned that we are faced with the challenge of breaking the cycle of debilitating poverty and exclusion that cripples the majority of African Americans and is every bit as evil, pervasive and pernicious as institutionalized racism.

Many people in America’s leadership act as if the war against racism were over. That attitude has emboldened the bigots among us, because they think our national guard has been dropped.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read a letter that Roger Stanton, publisher of Football News, sent to Tom Brokaw after NBC-TV did a special on blacks in athletics. Stanton criticized Brokaw for suggesting that the National Football League discriminated against black athletes. Stanton argued that blacks were incapable of doing certain things in football, including playing the position of quarterback. Doug Williams’ Super Bowl victory, in his mind, was a fluke that will not be repeated. After reflecting on his letter, I decided that crying was more appropriate than laughing.

Let’s talk for a moment about some of the signs of racism appearing on our college and university campuses. During the past year, about 200 cases of racial confrontations have been reported. Only the most optimistic person would believe that the total number of such incidents is nearly as low as that figure.

These confrontations have taken many forms. They include clashes between African American and white students at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UCLA; confrontations between Jewish and African American students at the University of Maryland; harassment of a black cadet at the Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, and countless other cases that have filled newspapers across the country.

The alarming rise in racial violence on campuses and the equally alarming revitalization of the white supremacist movement, as exemplified by the Nazi-like behavior of “skinhead” gangs, has not escaped notice. In a similar vein, the election to the Louisiana Legislature of David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, sends a signal that the gains of the 1960s and 1970s toward racial harmony are over.

Yes, racism and bigotry are back on campus with a vengeance. We can ask any of those black students who were chased and beaten at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who were taunted with defamatory posters at Penn State and Stanford, who were subjected to racist jokes on the University of Michigan radio station, or who were presented with a “mock slave auction” at the University of Wisconsin. Or we can ask the Jewish students who have had swastikas painted on their dormitory doors on campuses across the country, from Harvard to Occidental. Or ask the Latino students at UCLA about their reaction to the film “Animal Attraction,” which was produced by a UCLA graduate student with the support of many of his faculty members and portrayed Mexican Americans in a negative light.

We cannot afford to be discouraged, although there is much that is discouraging. We cannot let acts of violence and brutality cause us to lose sight of the benefits to be gained by joining together to create harmony from the jangling discord around us. We cannot let our national policies be set by personalities like Sen. Jesse Helms while we stand by silently. We cannot let the goals of brotherhood and justice be torn asunder by those who believe that any race has an inalienable right to control the lives of another.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said: “We must work unceasingly to lift this nation that we love to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness. . . . We must use time creatively in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”