[Last week,] UC Berkeley’s College Republicans Chapter decided to have an “Affirmative Action Bakesale” to protest a new bill that has been introduced into the CA legistlature that would reverse parts of Prop 209, which in 1996 banned the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions in the UC system.

The premise of the bake sale is not new, and has definitely been used on other college campuses. The basic idea is that there is different pricing for different racial groups, as follows:

White: $2.00
Asian: $1.50
Latino: $1.00
Black: $.75
Native American: $.25
$.25 discount for women

The pricing implies that standards are lower for non-whites and women, and that the (poor, innocent!) White males are just royally screwed by the whole system. But you know what I see from that pricing? I GET FREE SNACKS. (I joke, I joke)

I’ll let the illustrious Tim Wise breakdown why this is so stupid (as if you needed an explanation):

Tim Wise, author of the book “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son,” calls the bake sale a “sarcastic and rather smarmy slap at people of color.”

“There are a lot of ways to make a point about your disagreement with affirmative action,”

“I get the joke,” he continued. “How very original. It’s been done for 15 years. The point that I think needs to be made … is that by the time anyone steps on a college campus … there has already been 12- to 13-years of institutionalized affirmative action for white folks, that is to say, racially embedded inequality, which has benefited those of us who are white. And it’s only at the point of college admissions that these folks seem to get concerned with color consciousness.”

So we’re clear why this was a silly publicity stunt. But what about those girls in the picture above wearing headdresses? They decided to be “cute” and pretend to be Native American women and get free cookies.

You can hear from them in their own words at this video here. But the gist of what they say is:

“This bake sale trivializes the issue of affirmative action, so we thought to show our opinion of the bake sale, we would trivialize their opinion.”

Um, that doesn’t even make sense. At all. In the words of my friend Kayla (a Native UC Berkeley student):

Even if anti-bake sale, [this] makes no sense to me, since the next logical step ought to have been “maybe we ought not to trivialize Native American (women) with stereotypical headdresses.”

Amen. Basically this whole thing was a big mess, and got far more attention than it deserved. There were several counter-protests, and even a table selling “Magical Costco Muffins” with different prices for Muggles and Wizards, but the bottom line is that, clearly, the College Republicans of UC Berkeley have no grasp of historical context, current systems of institutional racism and inequality, or their own blinding privilege.

(Thanks MK, Kayla, Caroline, and Olga!)

Maybe I’m naïve, but when I stepped on the campus of my New England public university, I was dumbstruck by the whiteness of it all. I was literally the only person of color in a sea of white people. This had never happened to me before. I grew up in New York City and had never been to a school that was predominantly white. As such, I was partial to the color-blind politics of the day. This is not to say that I never experienced racism, but I was lucky enough to discount the few times I had encountered racism as the statistical outliers of my life. However, I was surprised to learn that my peers at university had rarely come in contact with people of color and often times lacked any sort of tact when dealing with people of color. After revealing that my last name is Mohamed, the questions and comments that followed without fail went something like: A) “You don’t look Muslim! Are you religious?” B) “Is your family…y’know, religious?” C) (A look of relief when I revealed that, no, they aren’t that religious) “Oh! Good, cause I know how crazy they can be.” My friends at other universities felt the same alienation and we started to really pay attention to the racism surrounding us.

Most of my class and dorm mates were white, middle class kids who lived in small, predominantly white towns. As a light skinned Guyanese-American woman, they found me hard to peg and I was privy to my share of racist “jokes.” Once, during Black History Month, our dining hall happened to be serving fried chicken and watermelon, in addition to numerous other options. A girl on my floor dim wittedly cracked, “What a way to celebrate Black History Month!” Half the room shared an uneasy silence, while the other erupted into laughter. I was shocked into silence and, looking back, I wish I could have said something. Since then, I’ve found that dealing with racist jokes is best handled by playing dumb. A simple, “I don’t get it,” and a couple of leading questions will encourage them to try and explain their joke and help them realize that relying on tired and racist stereotypes isn’t funny or clever in the least.

I’ve also encountered a very common situation: People saying racist things, but not realizing, or refusing to acknowledge that they’re racist. The most bizarre example of this occurred as a group of friends and I were walking back from a party. Shortly after chastising someone for using the word “Jiggaboo” to describe his black friends back home, my roommate and another girl began to discuss the physical differences between white people and black people. A snippet of the conversation? “And why does their hair do that? Like, why is it like that? It’s like they’re a whole different species! They kind of,” here she lowered her voice, “look like animals a little.” I shared a look with another friend and simply said, “Whoa, I’m not even gonna participate in this conversation.” However, my roommate and the girl she was talking to still didn’t understand why what they said was offensive.

In this case, I was too tired and too overwhelmed to say anything else. I still get overwhelmed every time I think about this scenario because I can’t possibly conceive how they would think such banter is acceptable. I wish I had asked them why they think it’s okay to liken black people to animals and expand from there. Engaging them in a conversation would have helped me to sort out my own thoughts, while helping them to understand the underlying racism in their statements, but at the time I felt too emotional to understand that this could have been a key moment for dialogue, or, at the very least, a witty retort.

The scariest sort of situation was dealing with hostile, purposeful racism. At the beginning of the year, when people didn’t know I had a Muslim last name, or that my father was Muslim, I heard a student loudly decry, “Fucking Muslim scum, fucking ruining our country. Motherfuckers,” at a party further down my hall. I also heard cheers, egging him on. I was in my room at the time and couldn’t see who had said it. And quite frankly, I was too terrified to go see. When it comes to direct confrontations, I draw the line at putting myself in dangerous situations. I wish I would have told my RA, but I was too scared of stirring up trouble so early in the year. As a consequence, I often felt unsafe and alienated from many of the kids on my floor.

My first year of college went badly because I was often made to feel like the Other. I suffered most of it in silence because I was lucky enough to have this all be a new experience for me. But silence is rarely the way to handle racism. Earlier this year, Alexandria Wallace’s rant against Asians at her school shocked YouTube viewers. The media was quick to demonize her and use her as a figurehead to purport America’s supposed color-blind agenda. But how can we act so shocked when the same things Wallace said are repeated amongst friends “just sharing a joke” all the time on supposedly liberal college campuses? Wallace was surrounded by a culture that encouraged racism. I imagine the UCLA campus is probably ripe with racist jokes about Asians that go unchecked.

This fall, I’ll be attending a college in a more culturally diverse neighborhood in my hometown of New York City. But as the back-to-school-shopping ads start to filter in, I can’t help but wonder if there will ever be an escape from the racism touted by the “ironic” white teens that fill many of today’s college campuses at overwhelming majorities.

Wow. Now it’s not only college students playing with blackface, faculty and staff members are getting in on the act too. This Fresno, CA Christian school even played a game of “catch the runaway slave!” From Fresnobee.com:

Members of Fresno’s black community said they were stunned this week to see pictures of adults in blackface poking fun at slavery during a recent graduation celebration for Riverdale Christian Academy.

The photos, which were posted on the Internet shortly after the June 1 event, show staff and faculty of the small private Christian school dressed as slaves with captions describing activities at the party in Hanford.

“The slaves served lemonade — it was a riot,” read one caption beneath a photo of five women and a man at a lemonade stand. Each had dark face makeup and wore 19th century clothing.

“Someday we gonna be leavin’ when a workin’ day is done,” read another caption posted with a photo of three women holding gardening tools.

A third picture showed a white man in a Yankees jersey and top hat escorting another in blackface with the caption, “bringing home the runaway slave in the Senior skit.”

By now you know the drill with these blackface parties.

Step 1: Declare that you did not mean to offend anyone.

Step 2: Point to the fact that black people were at the party too, so obviously it wasn’t that racist!

Nice to see that Doug Spencer, the school’s principal, has been taking notes:

Spencer, who said he was sorry for the controversy, said his school, with a student body of 150, has “three or four” black students. One of those students attended the party. Spencer said that while he is willing to apologize to anyone offended by the skits, he has not apologized to the unnamed student.

“It was not offensive,” Spencer said. “And she hasn’t asked for an apology.”

Hat tip to Tate Hill at Urban Knowledge and Resist Racism

Wow. This is priceless. Thanks Wayne for the tip! From Gawker:

—–

This weekend, on the bucolic Quad at Harvard University—typically, the site of a casual game of Ultimate, or perhaps an afternoon reading of some Shakespearean sonnets before English class—an unusual and, to some, frightening scene was played out. There were people throwing things! And running! And jumping! And most scary of all, every single one of them was black. So the Harvard students watching from their dormitory windows, growing increasingly agitated at the sights below, did what any normal, white Harvard student would do when they saw a large, seemingly unruly group of black people: They called the cops!

Except, well, oops—turns out it was just the Harvard Black Men’s Forum and Association of Black Harvard Women:

As members of the groups played games of dodgeball and capture-the-flag in the Quad as part of the annual “BMF-ABHW Challenge,” Cabot House residents fired off a string of impassioned e-mails questioning students’ presence on the public lawn—and whether they were students at all. Eventually, the Harvard University Police Department was called about the commotion, and officers asked the students to “keep the noise down,” according to police spokesman Steven G. Catalano.

Perhaps croquet would have been more appropriate?

Here we go again. Our supposedly racism-free youth at their finest. Thanks to Tereza and Kyla for the tips. I’ll have some links coming out tomorrow, but in the meantime you can read about it here.

It seems like college students across America were really busy on January 15th coming up with ways to mock the memory of Martin Luther King. Not only did students at Tarleton State University, University of Connecticut School of Law, and Clemson University throw “ghetto parties” on MLK Day, now comes word that students at the University of Arizona did the same (thanks for the tip, Kynn).

Only this party didn’t even go with the vague “ghetto” theme. They actually asked attendees to dress up as their “favorite black person.” From The Wildcat Online:

An image posted on the social networking Web site Facebook shows partygoers dressed in do-rags and fur coats with black-painted faces.

After being invited, pre-business freshman Brianna Tarleton and a friend inquired as to the meaning of a “black” party.

“My friend asked, ‘How would you do that?’ (Kuechel) said, ‘You know, dress up like gangsters, pimps and hos,’” Tarleton said.

You gotta love the justification given by Kuechel, the kid who threw the party:

While many UA students condemned the party, the UA student who threw the party, agricultural education sophomore Kyle Kuechel, said the party was not intended to be offensive.

“In order to come, you had to dress as your favorite black person,” Kuechel said. “Two people were dressed as lawyers, and two from ‘Family Matters.’”…

Kuechel said four of the 15 partygoers were black and were not offended by the party.

Oh, my bad! If those 15 four black people (thanks, Colin) thought it was all good, then I guess it was.

The latest in the rash of racist incidents sweeping across college campuses come from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri (hat tip to Rachel) and Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

From KMBC-TV:

Last Wednesday night, one student at William Jewell College is accused of painting his face and hands black, and then jumping from doorways at Eaton Hall and shouting racial slurs for about 30 minutes, officials said. A total of seven students are believed to have been involved.

From The Mac Weekly, Macalester’s student paper:

A party hosted by Macalester students on Tuesday, Jan. 16 is under investigation by the Macalester College Harassment Committee (MCHC). The costume party, themed “politically incorrect,” was hosted in one of the college’s cottages on Macalester Street.

A particular costume choice by two students caught the attention of Paul Maitland-McKinley ’09, president of the student organization Black Liberation Affairs Committee (BLAC). Maitland-McKinley learned of the party last Friday, Jan. 26, from an anonymous student who was present at the party. The costume involved one student dressing as a Ku Klux Klan member, with a second student wearing face paint to appear dark skinned. The costume also included a simulated noose, one end in the hand of the Klan-costumed member, the other end around the student with the blackface’s neck.

A brand-new episode (No. 58) of Addicted to Race is out! Addicted to Race is New Demographic’s weekly podcast about America’s obsession with race.

Carmen is joined by guest co-host Liam McGrath in this episode. Liam is a long-time listener of the show, and is the man responsible for the voiceovers in our intro and outro.

They discuss the recent rash of “ghetto” or “gangsta” parties on college campuses, as well as the phenomenon of both Superbowl teams having black coaches this year. Carmen also interviews Sarita Malik, author of the book Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on British Television about the recent controversy surrounding the UK reality show Celebrity Big Brother.

This episode features the songs “Pop Rocks” by Junk Science and “Truth Is” by Brother Ali, courtesy of Spectre Entertainment Group.

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Given the proliferation of “ghetto” and “gangsta” parties, blackface and racist “satirical” student newspaper articles lately, the results of this study come as no great surprise.

From The Associated Press:

A University of Dayton sociologist who analyzed journals kept by 626 white college students found the students behaved substantially differently when they were in the company of other whites than when they were with other races.

Part of the culture?
When the students, who were asked to record their interactions with other people, were alone with other white students, racial stereotypes and racist language were surprisingly common, researcher Leslie Picca found. One student reported hearing the “n-word” among white students 27 times in a single day.

The results suggest white students have little sense of shame about racial insults and stereotyping and treat them as simply a part of the culture.

“This is a new generation who grew up watching ‘The Cosby Show,”’ Picca said. “They have the belief that racism isn’t a problem anymore so the words they use and the jokes they tell aren’t racist.”

Picca said she found it “heartbreaking” to see so many well-educated students perpetuating the stereotypes.

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

I’m with Philip on this. These pictures make me want to vomit. As if the head-to-toe blackface wasn’t enough, some girl had to stuff the seat of her pants to give herself an exaggerated butt?

According to this article, the students did not realize their “gangsta theme” party would coincide with MLK day and shocker, they did not realize this would be offensive to anyone:

Students who organized the party have come forward to school officials to express a desire to reach out to those who were offended by the event and the pictures posted of it, said Robin Denny, the university news services director.

“The students said this was not intended to be offensive to anybody at all and (they) did not realize it would be,” Ms. Denny said.

I’d like to hear from students of color at Clemson or any of the other universities that have thrown these “ghetto” or “gangsta” parties. I can’t imagine what it would be like to know that my classmates are indulging in this kind of racism.

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I knew I should have put a bet in for when we’d hear about college kids throwing ghetto parties on Martin Luther King Day. Absolutely despicable:

Authorities at Tarleton State University said they plan to investigate a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party that mocked black stereotypes by featuring fried chicken, malt liquor and faux gang apparel.

“I feel like there is no excuse for this type of ignorance,” said Donald Ray Elder, president of the Stephenville school’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Photographs posted on social networking Web site Facebook.com showed partygoers wearing Afro wigs and fake gold and silver teeth. One photo showed students “mocking how African-Americans do step shows,” Elder said. In another picture, a student is dressed as Aunt Jemima and carries a gun.

“That upsets me,” Elder said. “That’s someone who knows nothing about Dr. King, because Dr. King was totally about nonviolence.”

You can find photos from the entire event over at The Smoking Gun. Thanks so much for the tip, Rachel.

Speaking of white kids and gangster parties, The Smoking Gun has yet another story about some University of Connecticut Law students throwing a party of their own:

Seems that questionable parties were not limited this month to a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at a Texas college. Turns out students at the University of Connecticut School of Law also opted for do-rags, gang signs, gold teeth, malt liquor, and a fake machine gun during an off-campus gathering last weekend, just days after the civil rights leader’s January 15 birthday. One future attorney even wore fake tiger claw tattoos on her chest, an apparent homage to the rapper Eve.

I don’t want to make wild conclusions from all of this, but one thing that comes to mind is the reality that the legal system will one day be run by these people. Would it be a stretch to say, then, that the legal system is racist? Because these parties surely are.

Find more photos at The Smoking Gun, and stay the hell away from Facebook.com if you plan on being a racist party boy.

I’m continuing my series breaking down the top trends in race and pop culture of 2006. So here we go with numbers 7 through 4 of my list. Check back tomorrow for the top 3, and if you missed it, check out yesterday’s trends 10 through 8.

7. The new minstrel show
6. Racism on college campuses
5. Fear of a Latino takeover
4. The return of the white man’s burden

7. The new minstrel show

North Carolina hip hop group Little Brother titled its late 2005 release The Minstrel Show, and they couldn’t have been more prescient because minstrelsy made a huge comeback in 2006 in all forms of media: movies, television, music and even the internet.

• MOVIES: Tyler Perry made a killing by cashing in on the public’s love for black men in dresses. Diary of a Mad Black Woman was nominated for an NAACP Image Award (yeah, I know) and its sequel, Madea’s Family Reunion, opened No. 1 at the box office with $30 million.

• TV: Flava Flav, the new millenium’s Stepin Fetchit, ruled reality TV in 2006. The March finale of his VH1 show Flavor of Love drew 6 million viewers, making it the highest-rated show ever for the cable channel. And when the show returned in early August, 3 million people tuned in for the premiere. But Flavor of Love is just the tip of the iceberg in Viacom’s not-so-classy depictions of black folks, as I outlined in this post. In November we heard a rumor that BET was going to start a reality show starring Bobby Brown and Karrine “Superhead” Steffans (author of Confessions of a Video Vixen). And TV commercials continued to rely on the archetype of the big black sassy mammy for humor.

• MUSIC: Byron Crawford really nailed it when he wrote: “Flush with revenue from the likes of Mike Jones’ Who Is Mike Jones?, the Ying Yang Twins’ “Wait (The Whisper Song),” Three-Six Mafia’s Academy Award-winning theme to Hustle and Flow, and D4l’s “Laffy Taffy,” record labels are rushing out to sign the most coon-like negros they can find.” Cases in point: DJ Webstar and Young B’s Chicken Noodle Soup, Ms Peachez’ Fry That Chicken, but perhaps the most egregious example is Jibbs’ Chain Hang Low, which is set to an actual minstrel tune known as “Zip Coon” or “Turkey in the Straw.” No subtlety there. And don’t forget the ongoing tradition on The Maury Show known as the Not a Baby Daddy Dance. Of course, rapper NYOIL tried to address the minstrelsy problem in hip hop with his problematic and controversial video, Y’all Should All Get Lynched. See varying analyses of this video here and here.

• INTERNET: Not content with minstrelsy on television, in movies and music, the same knucklehead who brought us the god-awful movie Soul Plane decided to launch a social networking site named CrackSpace, because “MySpace is great but it doesn’t even come close to fully satisfying the hip-hop generation.” Not to be outdone, some genius decided to take it a step further by launching NiggaSpace: “We just want to embrace the black culture that continues to innovate and strive!”

6. Racism on college campuses

It seemed like a wave of racist incidents swept across college campuses all over the country in 2006. Just between October 1 and January 4 I bookmarked no less than 19 items relating to campus racism. Of course, it’s impossible to know whether racism is on the rise, or if we’re just hearing about it more often. Here are just some of the incidents we covered on Racialicious. See my del.icio.us page and this post from Rachel for even more stories.

• The Duke Lacrosse rape case has turned into a total mess, but right from the get-go it shone a spotlight on the many dicey issues surrounding race and class on the Duke campus.

• Two white students at Colorado University sent a Latino student an email calling him a “river rat” and “border hopper” and “bean eating peace of (expletive).” The message suggested O’Neal would drag Castro behind his car, an apparent reference to the 1998 dragging death in Texas of James Byrd Jr., a black man.

• The Asian American Students Alliance at Yale University issued a formal complaint against student publication Rumpus for two supposedly satirical articles they ran chock-full of racist statements about Asian-Americans and interracial couples. Like this one: “Asian girls are like SARS — they take my breath away…”

• One of Rice University’s student papers, The Rice Thresher, ran a “humor” column which declared that Asian people’s “eyes are so squinty that it is difficult for our friends from the Orient to see the page, so they must stare longer.”

• The University of Michigan’s College Republicans decided to plan a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day.”

• A video surfaced made by two white Texas A&M students. One of them is in blackface, playing the role of the “slave” and is put through a mock whipping and sexual assault.

• I commended Whitman College for their reaction when photos were found of students putting on blackface at a party to mimic the racially segregated cast of Survivor: Cook Islands. Instead of merely denouncing this act, Whitman College cancelled classes for an entire day and organized a full-day symposium on race relations which every single student had to attend.

• And of course, conservatives continued to the win the war against affirmative action. From Inside Higher Ed: “Michigan voters on Tuesday approved a ban on affirmative action at the state’s public colleges and in government contracting. The vote came despite opposition to the ban from most academic and business leaders in the state — and the history in which the University of Michigan played a key role in preserving the right of colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions.”

5. Fear of a Latino takeover

Immigration reform was all over the news last year. And though it was rarely addressed openly, racism often reared its ugly head when it came to anti-immigrant sentiments.

• Jenn at Reappropriate summed it up nicely when she wrote “this is not a controversy about laws, about immigration, or about border security reform. This is a controversy about race. This is a countroversy surrounding White nationals who insist that the American Dream should be reserved for their White bretheren who “deserve it” more.”

• Fox News openly called for white people to outbreed minorities. From Media Matters: On the May 11 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story, host John Gibson advised viewers during the “My Word” segment of his program to “[d]o your duty. Make more babies.” He then cited a May 10 article, which reported that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson added: “By far, the greatest number [of children under five] are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.” Gibson later claimed: “To put it bluntly, we need more babies.”

• The Los Angeles Times asked if New Orleans, with its influx of Latino immigrants, would become the new Los Angeles: “No matter what all the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they’re done, they’re going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles.”

• The Alderman of Springfield, Tennessee proposed banning Latinos from the town’s public parks because they cause crowds on weekends: “When asked to comment on the possibility that not every Hispanic using the park was an ‘illegal immigrant’, Alderman Cherry responded, ‘If they’re speaking Spanish, I tend to think they are illegal.’”

4. The return of the white man’s burden

A couple of you remarked on this trend and you were right on the money. Jason suggested the topic of “transracial adoption (re: white saviour/white man’s burden complex a.k.a colonial benevolence)” and Nina wrote: “All things Africa. Adoption in Africa (Madonna), AIDS in Africa (The I Am African and RED campaign), war in Africa (Darfur), lack of potable water in Africa (Jay Z and Beyonce) even disfugured smiles in Africa (Jessica Simpson. All of it brought to you in the vein of ‘wealthy (primarily) white Westerners must save poor black Africans.’”

From the absurd “I Am Africa” campaign to Kate Moss rocking blackface on the cover of The Independent’s Africa issue, from Bono’s (PRODUCT)RED campaign to Oprah’s $40 million school for South African girls, from Angelina Jolie birthing Shiloh in Namibia to Madonna adopting baby David from Malawi, Africa was everywhere in 2006.

• Dr. Marc Lamont Hill did a great job explaining why all these campaigns shouldn’t be uncritically celebrated: “My worry, however, is that such acts are prompted by a paternalism (in Pitt’s case, a literal one) that undermines African agency and prosperity. Instead of advocating the development of infra-strutures for increased self-governance and self-reliance, these acts reinforce the dominant notion that Africa needs to be saved by White heroes. Additionally, much of the philanthropic work being done obscures more profound and causal structural factors such as globalization, neo-liberalism, and environmental racism.”

• Richard Kim, writing for The Nation blog, suggested an alternative to buying one of the (PRODUCT)RED items: “Here’s my DIY solution that still involves shopping and branding. A red Sharpie marker costs about a $1. Go get one and mark up something you already own. A giant red A will suffice, I suppose, but don’t be afraid to stretch your imagination. Then send $198 (or $149 or whatever you can afford) to the Global Fund.”

• Adam Elkus drew a comparison between celebrity do-gooders and turn-of-the-century colonialist missionaries: “This brand of moral grandstanding suggests that Africa has become a kind of plaything for some campaigners, a backdrop against which they can make themselves feel good and ‘special’. They are searching for personal meaning and purpose in the deserts and grasslands of Africa, not kickstarting a meaningful debate about how to take Africa forward. There is little new about this. The 19th century missionaries and explorers who established European control over the continent saw it as an exotic and forbidding land in which a similar kind of personal meaning could be found (or lost). The actual thoughts and desires of the inhabitants mattered little.”

• Hannah Pool, herself adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea, also likened Madonna and co. with missionaries: “It’s arrogant to assume the only way to deal with poverty in the developing world is for westerners to adopt a few “lucky” children. Adoption can be a wonderful thing, but when it comes to inter-country adoption it’s easy to confuse what the parents want (a nice shiny, new baby) with what’s best for the child. Inter-country adoption might seem well-intentioned but when white people from rich countries adopt black children from poor countries it smacks of missionary-like behaviour.”

• With the Madonna adoption, we again saw people react to the complex issue of international and transracial adoption by saying things like “what, would you rather have the children die in orphanages?” I encouraged people to move beyond this simplistic either/or mindset by posing a series of questions that never seem to be addressed in media coverage of adoption: “Can a better standard of living, healthcare, education and loving adoptive parents ever make up for what is lost when a child is removed from his or her country and culture? Shouldn’t every effort be made to try and keep families together? Shouldn’t adoption be a final resort?”

• We also saw shades of White Man’s Burden in the resurgence of depictions of indigenous people as dumb savages. From the awful Bud Light Steve and Zagar ad campaign to the insulting Virgin Trains commercial with American Indians attacking the train, to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, the underlying message was that these savages needed to be saved from themselves.

We’ve documented the upward rise in blackface and “ghetto party” incidents extensively on this blog, but I’m still amazed by how prevalent it is, and how it seems to be spreading faster than ever, especially on college campuses.

The latest blackface incident comes from Texas A&M (thanks Sandra!). Two white students made a video in which one of them was supposed to be a “slave” being disciplined by the other one. You can view a clip of it here (you’ll have to sit through a few commercials first). Here’s the description of the tape from ABC News:

On the tape, the white student in blackface is disciplined by a second white student playing the role of a slave master with a belt. Professors say the white student is carrying a “12th Man Towel,” a symbol of how Texas A&M fans help the football team. In the three-and-a-half minute tape, the student in blackface is put through a mock whipping and sexual assault.

University spokespeople don’t want to confirm that the students involved were disciplined, but they did say that both students are no longer enrolled at the school. Texas A&M President Robert Gates (about to leave the post to be the new Secretary of Defense) also issued a statement saying that the video is “so utterly disgusting that, regardless of race, religion, or background, I believe virtually any member of our Aggie family would be outraged and ashamed if they viewed it.”

It’s good that the responses have been unambiguously condemnatory, but at the end of the day, condemning these actions won’t bring about any real change.

I hope that Texas A&M will learn something from Whitman College (thanks Lyonside!). There was an outcry among the student body when photos were found of students who put on blackface to mimic the racially segregated cast of “Survivor: Cook Islands” at an off-campus party.

Instead of merely denouncing this act, Whitman College cancelled classes for an entire day and organized a full-day symposium on race relations which every single student had to attend.

And this wasn’t some lame “we are the world,” “there’s no race but the human race” crapfest. Take a look at the agenda. Some of the panels and workshops included:

• The History of Blackface
• Creepy Fun, Complicit Thoughtlessness, and Taking Action
• On Being White in A Racist Society: A Workshop on Becoming An Effective Ally
• Individual vs. Institutional Discrimination
• “I’m Not a Racist”: Feigning Moral Blindness
• Race, Class and Gender in Outdoor Sports and Institutions; AKA “Why is it Always White Dudes Leading Trips?”
• The History of Race in the Greek System

Wow. Now that demonstrates a commitment to diversity.

I sincerely hope that Texas A&M, and all the other schools that have experienced similar incidents, will look to Whitman as an example of what to do. Condemning these racist acts is important. But at the end of the day, if the perpetrator doesn’t understand why what he/she did was wrong or offensive, nothing is going to change.

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