This article in today's Post illustrates the fact that it's not just backwater Louisiana towns that have a problem with very public displays of racism: A number of events on college campuses also reek of an era that most assume is long behind us. From a noose hung outside the African American cultural center at the University of Maryland to culturally insensitive cartoons at the University of Virginia, a number of racially-charged incidents have made it clear that campuses aren't necessarily the bastions of tolerance and progress some might expect.
The piece suggests that one of the reasons is that for more and more students, college is the first time they'll actually be in an integrated setting:
"Many people don't make that transition well," said Beverly Daniel Tatum, the president of Spelman College.
She said she doesn't expect that to change anytime soon, with public schools less integrated than they were 20 years ago. In 2005, for example, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than half of black students but only 3 percent of white students attended public elementary and secondary schools that were 75 percent or more black.
Dana pointed to some of these segregation trends in her piece last week, as well as the fact that there isn't much going on to reverse these trends. Between 1968 and 1980, the number of black students attending predominantly black schools fell from 77 percent to 63 percent, which many saw as a breakthrough in ending school segregation. But that number has been creeping back upward since then, to about 66 percent in 1993-94, and 73 percent in 2005-2006, according to a recent study (PDF) by the Pew Research Center.
While the number students attending "nearly all-white" schools (defined as a school in which fewer than 5 percent of the students are from minority groups) fell by more than a third between '93-'94 and '05-'06, 37 percent still attend schools with less than 10 percent minority students, and 87 percent attend schools with where white students are the clear majority.
While I think this is a sound point in the article, I also think there are other factors at play, not least of which is the idea that students do a lot of this to be contrarian. The piece highlights a lot of the "diversity" initiatives on campuses, and points to the possibility that students become inclined to rebel against "political correctness" when the initiatives are pushed to them as such, or simply view them as superfluous add-ons to the real reason they're in college.
But all of this should point to the value of more integrated schools throughout the education system, so students don't just appear at college and discover that brown people exist and may have had life experiences that differ from their own -- life experiences, say, that would make seeing your fellow students in blackface, even on "Politically Incorrect Day," pretty offensive.
While Robert Putnam's most recent findings about diversity and civic engagement indicate that the benefits of diversity might not be as great as my idealistic, liberal worldview inclines me to believe, there is something to be said for exposure to other people, and an awareness of the issues affecting other people, as the best way to reduce both prejudice and insensitivity. It's also a lot more effective than a few diversity courses at the college level or a seminar at your office. As a study put out by the Association for Psychological Science released this week found, "reducing prejudice may require more than simply adopting egalitarian values" -- which is a lot of what diversity curriculum and college-level programs for reducing bias appeal to. The study's authors argue that reason alone can't recondition people's attitudes toward people of other races, but they "could be reconditioned through positive interpersonal experiences."
--Kate Sheppard
