The AP published a lengthy article today on the “sudden parade of predjudice” witnessed on campuses across California.
But, the writer forgot to mention that a minority student admitted to hanging the noose at the UCSD campus. It’s a slight detail.
From propagandist Christina Hoag at the Associated Press:
LOS ANGELES – Swastikas, nooses, a KKK hood, graffiti, epithets and jeers.
An ugly spate of bias incidents has crossed several University of California campuses over the past month, causing consternation, outcry and fear that bigotry is alive among the young and educated.
Students have protested and administrators have condemned, but the question remains of what lies behind the sudden parade of prejudice — a growing climate of insensitivity on campuses or a bunch of immature kids yearning for peer acceptance and attention.
“My guess is some of all of those things,” said interim UC Provost Lawrence H. Pitts. “I’d like to believe it’s really an extreme minority. It does suggest there’s some underlying feeling of intolerance in our community.”
The incidents have roiled several campuses in the 175,000-student state university system, which is one of the nation’s most respected and diverse.
At UC San Diego, black students were offended by an off-campus “Compton Cookout” party that mocked ghetto stereotypes, a noose and KKK-style hood found on campus and a student making racially derogatory remarks on a student-run TV station.
At UC Davis, swastikas cropped up and the gay and lesbian center was vandalized with graffiti. At UC Santa Cruz, a picture of a noose was scrawled. On the Irvine campus, the Israeli ambassador was heckled to the extent that he was forced to end a speech early.
The acts were particularly shocking because they occurred on university campuses — usually considered centers of intellectual enlightenment above acts commonly associated with ignorance.
But experts note that universities are microcosms of society at large, and that includes hatemongers. Upticks in hate crimes are often seen in times of economic malaise as people seek scapegoats, noted Jack Levin, a Northeastern University sociologist who has studied hate.
Still, surveys show that prejudice among today’s young people is at a low and interracial and interethnic marriages are at an all-time high, said Tom Smith, director of the general social survey at the National Opinion Research Center. Studies have also long found that education increases tolerance of different groups, he added.
“College students, as a group, are quite liberal on this issue,” Smith said.
Minority students said that’s why they’re galled that fellow students today would even think that something like hanging a noose in a library is funny or acceptable. The school paper later published a letter of apology from a female student who wrote that she had only been playing with a rope, accidentally left in the library and did not mean to offend.
“Part of the problem is that people don’t realize it’s insensitive,” said Joelle Gamble, a student at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They see it as free speech.”
Unreal.
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