Unfair and Imbalanced

It’s an ominous time to be an American college student. Sure, education is more important than ever in our current job market, and we at the most elite universities are lucky to be at institutions where admission is becoming more and more of a daunting task. Our lives look relatively easy on the surface: We live with our friends in an intellectual environment—on our parents’ dime, no less—with few pressures or worries lasting longer than a semester.

No doubt, it looks like we should have it made. So why are we facing accusations of being racists, shuddering under the media’s watchful (and often very judgmental) eye?

The answer is clear: It’s because we are racist. At least, we’re as racist as everyone else is. Subconsciously or otherwise, it explains why a collection of students at a Quad event last weekend involving two of Harvard’s most prominent black student organizations could be confused with campus trespassers. It explains why a recent Cinco de Mayo party at the University of Delaware had a “South of the Border” theme, featuring members of a predominantly white honor fraternity poking some highly-offensive fun at Latinos everywhere.

And it’s why it’s at least the ninth such party to occur on an American college campus since the start of this academic year. The media rightly remarked that this isn’t the first time in recent memory that glaring and overt racism has made waves at a US college, but the amount of attention makes clear that the media outcry is far from the “yet again” attitude expressed by a few online blogs.

But the media is being far too harsh in its indictment of all college students, acting as if a college student’s racism is more surprising—and should be less commonplace—than that of the average American. It’s just as surprising in the world of academia, and just as prevalent as anywhere else. We’re not of a higher moral stature than the rest of society.

To think otherwise would be ridiculous. Everyone is exposed to the same externalities, and as colleges are becoming more diverse—especially socioeconomically—the line between the college-educated and everyone else is getting more blurry.

That is why the expectations surrounding racism should be no different for any person—college-educated or high school dropout, rich or poor, Quad or river—than they are for anyone else. For news outlets, either explicitly or implicitly, to hold a certain sect of people to a higher standard than another gives some people more license than others to act unjustly.

It’s not fair to the people who are victims of racism in the real world, people who don’t have the backing of a couple hundred like-minded peers or a university administration desperate to make amends in the face of discrimination.

It’s up to the media to cover all instances of injustice equally and objectively. Varying standards are of no benefit to anyone—the victims continued to be victimized and the crimes themselves might not be punished as they should.

Some interesting comments emerged in the aftermath of last weekend’s BMF/ABHW snafu. Both on e-mail lists and in passing, students claimed shock that something like this could happen here, at Harvard, among minds thought to be above such poor judgment.

You can’t blame thoughts like these for presenting themselves, and it’s not the peoples’ fault for thinking them. After all, it’s what the media has told us for a long time: That we should multiply our shock and increase our outrage at a college kid’s narrow-mindedness, despite the fact that it happens all the time, everywhere, every day. Where’s that coverage?

I wasn’t all that shocked when a student called university police in fear of a harmless gathering of university students on university property. It’d be naïve for me to be. I know racism exists—not among all, but among enough that its occurrence is of little surprise. Despite what we’re fed by mass media, racism is racism, college campus or otherwise.

And as we all embark on the impending retreat away from the stresses of campus life, our expectation should not be to encounter more racism because we’re away from Harvard. We should expect the same, more or less, for better or for worse.

We might be living a sheltered existence within the gated community that is Harvard, but that does not mean our treatment of race should be sheltered, too. The media should better balance its college coverage with the rest of its coverage. It’s the only way we as a collective society will get any better.



Malcom A. Glenn ’09 is a history concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears regularly.