By Chaz Martin
“I made a decision from moral obligation… The fact that you didn’t believe me is your fault… I’m declaring war against racism. If you are not declaring it, the door is open.”
–Student Government Association President Carlton Brown.
“This is a war on terror. This is a war of good versus evil. If you are not with us, you are against us.”
–George W. Bush.When I was a child, I spent hours under the Cleveland smog lining up my legions of He-Men. Their purpose was clear: defeat the evil forces of Skeletor and Trap-Jaw. The violence that Skeletor had inflicted upon my plastic world of Eternia could be swept away by the good and just through good and just violence. If only the good guys could beat the bad guys, no one would be mean anymore. The righteous would lead in righteousness.
Oh, how happy we can be when we are on a holy crusade! When ideological quagmires such as terrorism and racism are stripped of complexity and simplified by slogans, anyone can be moved to fight dragons that come in boxes marked “bigot” and “hatemonger.”
Just as George W. Bush has streamlined his war on terror by ignoring the complicated issue of Palestinian occupation, Carlton Brown has ignored the fact that no one person or group is responsible for the University’s racial problems. Instead, Brown has called for the resignation of Dr. Gifford: the very administrator that suspended the TKE fraternity two working days after her investigation began.
To listen to Brown and others on this campus, one would believe that the TKE fraternity had performed a minstrel show in the public square before lynching a family of blacks and riding off on white horses under the moonlight. The truth is that while the TKE fraternity was obnoxious and extremely offensive in their portrayal of Snoop Doggy Dogg and Shaft, the frat boys were merely demonstrating ignorance and stupidity. For this asinine behavior, they have been rightly suspended. However, to portray the TKE fraternity as some stronghold of the Neo-Nazis is giving them too much credit.
If only every bigot at U of L could be tagged, hog-tied and sent off to Clarksville, perhaps Louisville’s disparity in wealth and opportunity would go away. Unfortunately, each of us is held back by our own lack of understanding and no one has yet suggested that the solution may lie in sitting down over a couple beers and asking the painful questions. Unfortunately, the hard questions are being held under a Sword of Damocles that threatens to brand those who address the complicated issues of race as “racist.”
Carlton Brown, although a much better speaker than George W., has fallen into the same trap as the President. He has attempted to blame a systemic problem on a scapegoat and ignored the fact that all racial groups on campus isolate themselves in lunchroom clusters, black/white fraternity houses, and academic departments. Brown has frozen the problem of racism into a Cold War dynamic (with he leading the good and the administration/fraternity/newpaper supporting the old and evil). If only it was that easy…
Chaz Martin is a senior history major and Opinion Editor of the Louisville Cardinal.You can e-mail him at [email protected].
