White people painting their faces black MUST be in this season.
Halloween in the Hood showed us that racism still exist even on college campuses where our minds are to be stimulated and our prejudices obliterated. Well, this doesnt seem to be the current case. Another predominantly white institution, Whitman College in Oregon, has been the latest location of white students painting their faces black. The article states that the students painted their faces for a party in efforts to be the black team from the latest Survivor.
Whatever the purpose may be, the “incident” sparked Whitman College to cancel class and hold an all day conference focusing on, yep you guessed it, DIVERSITY. The event was not open to the public and focused on analytical research regarding the importance of diversity, etc.
Now after reading the article, I realized that I wasnt upset with the absurdity of a liberal arts institution thinking one day of diversity would solve their problem. No, it was the fact that Whitman’s director of Public Relations noted that
“A series of things happened. It was exacerbated in some ways by modern communications. Photos of the students got on MySpace or Facebook, or something like that,” Wardwell said. “It was offensive to some people.” (Danielle’s read: its the facebook’s fault we got caught being racist and only those anal kids saw a problem with it)
He then called this sad excuse for a good time… “an innocent incident”.
This is disturbing. The college’s representative of the university does not seem to see the intense problem with white students painting their faces black, be for the sake of humor or not. If the representatives do not see the problem here, then why would the students.
The other situation that makes me uneasy is within the black community at Whitman. Whitman college’s black community makes up a mere 3% of the college. The article notes that “A phone call to the school’s Black Student Union rang unanswered Wednesday, and four of its student leaders did not immediately return e-mails seeking comment. “ What does this mean? Why would they not feel compelled to urgently respond to this situation? Is there a level of intimidation present, seeing as they only make up 3%?
There is more of a problem here than white people painting their faces black (though it is intriguing that some white people just don’t learn…PAINTING YOUR WHITE FACES BLACK WILL NEVER BE FUNNY… but I digress). Why is it ok for a college’s representative to call such an event an ”innocent incident” and why is a black community not responding to the situation?
Am I alone in thinking this is far from ok?
Published on November 13, 2006 at 4:30 pm.
10 Comments.
Filed under ridiculousness, ignorance.
