Christensen: UCSD students revive the ignorance

Students at the University of California, San Diego held an off-campus cookout called… Students at the University of California, San Diego held an off-campus cookout called “Compton Cookout” last month to mock Black History Month. Guests were invited to wear gold teeth, eat watermelon and dress in baggy clothes, according to the New York Times.

The event was offensive and malicious. It also could have been marginally resolved with prompt action from the university, but racial tensions only continued to escalate. When the small population of black students at UCSD became rightfully outraged at the “Compton Cookout,” a campus TV program satirized the party and used “a racial epithet to denounce black students,” according to the Post-Gazette. Thursday night culminated in a third event when a student hung a noose from a bookcase in the main library.

It’s sickening to realize that ignorance can permeate a respectable institution. UCSD’s undergraduate program ranked 7th on the US News & World Report’s list of public universities for research, endowment and prior high school achievement of incoming freshmen. Over 99 percent of UCSD students were in the top 10 percent of their high school class, with an average high school GPA of 3.9. One would think that such a well-educated population of students would be more socially perceptive.

Only about 4.5 percent of the student population is composed of black students. A state ballot proposition currently bars the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.

Would reinstating affirmative action in California public schools resolve race relations at the school? Probably not. One school of thought says affirmative action promotes the belief that minorities can’t stand on their own without a predominantly white legislature’s support. It’s not that the UCSD campus isn’t culturally diverse. Black students are just drastically underrepresented. The minority-majority of students at UCSD are Asian (39.8 percent), followed by white (30.5 percent) and Hispanic (20.4 percent).

I’m not about to offer a solution solving the underlying issues behind the admissions process at UCSD and colleges across the nation. That job is for policymakers with more experience in the fields of education and sociology than me.

And UCSD isn’t the only victim. Just on Friday, two students at the University of Missouri covered the lawn of the Gaines/Oldham Black Cultural Center with cotton balls.

It would be easy to dismiss the actions at UCSD as a malicious, misguided prank gone wrong. But to do so would be oversimplifying the matter. Rather than being left behind in the last century, racist mindsets remain at our universities, even in the era of Obama.

Racism is too often considered either a sentiment of the outgoing generation or a complex, subtle issue — surely not a prevelant problem among today’s educated youth. While these are hopefully isolated incidents, they suggest that we haven’t come as far as we’d like to think.

Fortunately, students aren’t remaining quiet at UCSD. A multicultural mass swarmed the chancellor’s office Friday in protest. The school suspended funding to all campus media while it studies how to respond to the satire about the cookout, and it is investigating whether it can sanction students for attending the “Compton Cookout” event. Police have not released the name of the student charged with hanging the noose, nor indicated whether charges will be filed.

While it’s somewhat comforting to recognize that the perpetrators of the acts probably won’t get off easy, it’s disconcerting to realize that the past isn’t over. The “Compton Cookout” was held by well-educated members of our generation. Will legal punishment truly make the perpetrators change their beliefs? Probably not. How much time is needed for the lessons of the 1960s to sink into the social conscience? Haven’t we learned anything?

Barring academic expulsion or identification, the racist perpetrators at UCSD could graduate to pursue top-rate jobs in science, engineering and other positions of power, making it difficult to dream of an end to racism in our lifetime. It’s naïve to think that social ignorance is confined to an uneducated population of decades past. Swift action is needed on the part of universities to silence displays of ignorance before they escalate into nooses in the library, racial slurs on television broadcasts and racist displays in institutions of higher learning.

E-mail Caitlyn at cac141@pitt.edu.