Fighting Godzilla: Tackling racism on campus

By Lawrence Ross

So you wake up in the morning and nothing can stop you. Yeah, Godzilla may be destroying the city, but none of that matters because your pumpkin spice latte is in hand, and they even spelled your name correctly. Win!

Then your cellphone vibrates. It’s not exactly Godzilla, but it feels like his emissary delivering this reminder: Racism on campus still looms large.

The head honcho is on the line, the university president, the person with a check that has more zeroes in it than you’ll ever see. Last night, a group of white students, your white students, decided to wear black face to a Halloween party, and suddenly you’ve got a campus racism incident on your hands.

It may not have happened to you, but this sort of thing has happened to plenty of the faculty I’ve spoken with about racism on campus. And it is all over the headlines, screaming from stands like the one at that same coffee shop with the pumpkin latte:

“University of Missouri Black Students See a Campus Riven by Race”

“Racial Tensions Escalate at U Missouri and Yale”

“University of Oklahoma Frat Brothers Taught Racist Chant”

“Racist Signs Reportedly Found on Yale Campus”

Off campus the litany of abuses is worse: Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice. It’s bleak.

And it hits close to home.

If your campus is next, you cannot ignore the students outside your office shouting “Black Lives Matter,” and using terms like “systemic racism” and “racial micro-aggressions.” They may denounce you personally and the school generally for failing to address racism on campus. Or pin a list of demands to your office door that reads like a second coming of Martin Luther: At the University of Missouri, the list included increasing the number of black faculty, requiring cultural diversity training for all students and faculty, and boosting on-campus programming for students of color.

What do you do?

First, acknowledge that campus racism is just like your garden variety American racism, in that it’s a societal cancer.

The hard, unfortunate truth is that white supremacy is a foundation of this country, and from that, we get historical and contemporary racism. And yes,

while race is indeed a biological nothingness, we can’t be colorblind to the fact that it is very much a sociological something.

As a result, we’re not only fighting to change the behavior of the offending student, but the ideology behind it, even on the smallest campus.

Consequently, this shouldn’t be seen as an isolated incident, or simply the result of a few bad apples, but as a visible tumor of systemic racism on your campus. I see this all the time: Racist incidents interlock, with, say, a racial slur etched into a bathroom locker being preceded by weeks of anonymous postings on the social media app Yik Yak. And if you did an overlay of the schools in your area, you’d quickly find data points showing racial incidents to be either a trend, or at the least, a very worrisome pattern. The problem is that we’re typically myopic about racism and only see what directly affects us.

It’s also important to understand that your approach to a campus racism event tends to be influenced by your position in the racial hierarchy. Research shows us that black people and white people have different perspectives on race relations. According to John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner, whites tend to be race averse, meaning that while they want equality for everyone, they still hold implicit biases that color their judgment on racial issues. On the other hand, blacks tend to be race aware, always understanding the world as it is, and not how it should be.

So in numerous experiments where black and white subjects with equal qualifications are presented to whites for evaluation, the white subject is overwhelmingly chosen over the black subject. Add that we know that whites, at 75 percent, and blacks, at 50 percent, tend to associate whiteness with positive characteristics, and suddenly we have a white privilege that the offending white student carries with them, even as they’re judged for their racist action. It’s the benefit of the doubt that we give these white kids, as we think them to be inherently good but having made bad choices. It’s not necessarily a benefit of the doubt that they’ve earned, and if not acknowledged, it can inadvertently put us on the side of the offending white kid instead of the black students offended.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the endemic nature of racism — I live and breathe this stuff every day, and I know. But while you may not be able to change the world, you can help change your campus.

If a campus racism incident winds up at your door, remember this: Three “izes” equal a “miss.” In short, don’t individualIZE, minimIZE, or trivialIZE the racist incident, or it will appear to disMISS the concerns of your black and minority students.

By individualizing, I mean the reflexive action that says the racist incident is isolated to one or two bad apples. You don’t know that until you do a deeper dive. Minimizing reduces the racist act to a lack of intent, as in “he didn’t know putting on blackface was racist.” That may be true, but it doesn’t mean it’s any less offensive. Just as we say in law, ignorance is no excuse when it comes to racism. And don’t, both personally and publically, trivialize the concerns of the black students as them being too sensitive or “pulling the race card.” Because when you do any of these things, you’re dismissing those black students, and they’ll look at you as being part of the problem and not the solution.

Instead, be up front about the racist incident with your students, and make it a community issue, not just an individual issue. That means letting students who’ve been offended speak, and letting their words help educate those students who don’t understand why something could be racist. I’ve seen top-down education work and work well, but I’ve seen more profound connections when peers are given a space to articulate their own views. Students at all ages, from elementary school to college, are learning how to contextualize what they’ve learned in the classroom about racism, and what they’ve experienced in society. Let them work it out.

At the same time, don’t let this become just an exercise in free speech.

Never forget that the racist incident is a real and not theoretical offense.

At its root, racist incidents are designed to deny the humanity of blacks and minorities, and the harm to the student ranges from feelings of insecurity and reduced self-esteem, to justified anger. It is no surprise that one of the most common demands of black student activists is the hiring of more black mental health professionals on campus. Your job isn’t to provide a 100 percent racism-free environment, but to constantly ask, “What else can we do to make that environment happen?” So after the discussion, the education, make sure that the offending students are punished. If you don’t, black and minority students will feel as though they’re without allies.

Dealing with campus racism isn’t an official part of the job description for college professors, but faculty, as the people closest to students, play a crucial role. You can be a positive influence in helping to create change at your school. More importantly, as the memory of the racist incident fades, if you do things correctly, you may just help your students fight against societal injustice as they continue through their lives.

That’s better than the best pumpkin spice latte any day.

Lawrence Ross’ new book, Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses, came out in February. He also wrote The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities. You can follow him at thelawrenceross.com, on twitter @alpha1906 and facebook.com/groups/blackballed.