Editorial Serves No Purpose

There is much truth to the staff's position; if Clarke meant to present the theories in the first paragraph of her letter to the editors as factual information, then she is guilty of an error in judgment at best and unacceptable prejudice at worst.

In Clarke's comment to a Crimson reporter that the information was "not necessarily something we believe," Clarke may have been indicating that she did not at first communicate her views accurately. If this is true, we encourage her to set the record straight on what she really thinks.

But we disagree with the very premise of the staff's editorial, as it serves no useful purpose. We do not need to combat a growing sentiment among Harvard students that melanin equals superiority. Instead, the editorial serves only to aggravate racial tensions on a campus where past experience shows the balance to be a fragile one.

Further, The Crimson is a particularly unsuited group for issuing proclamations on issues of race, given its own lack of racial diversity. The staff's lack of African-American representation makes its attempt to say who should or should not be president of the BSA especially egregious. We have no business doing so.

The staff would have been wise not to take this position, and sometimes it is more important to be wise than to be right.