“Black Minds” Vs. “Black Faces” And Worries About UVa’s Racial Reputation

The Charlottesville Daily Progress has a very long article today, beginning above the fold with a big picture and spilling over to most of an inside page, wondering whether the reported racial “incidents” at the beginning of this academic year at the University of Virginia, mentioned here several times, will “have any long-term effects on the university, its students or its reputation?”

The official line, of course, is that the University’s reputation will probably be enhanced by the forthright way it has responded. According to William B. Harvey, UVa’s “inaugural vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity and a national higher education expert on diversity in colleges and universities,”

“The university’s approach was “very forward-looking, honest and painful. Most institutions would have attempted to stonewall it.”

In addition to the press releases, the administration began implementing 17 short-term strategies in response to the racial incidents. The strategies included distributing more than 60,000 black ribbons; mass e-mails outlining how to handle and report hate incidents; and among more than a dozen additional strategies, airing a video of [UVa President] Casteen before the kickoff of the homecoming football game.

Here is Daily Progress’s summary of the events that UVa’s Dean of African American Affairs (aka The Black Dean) M. Rick Turner persists in calling “racial terrorism”:

At the beginning of the school year, black students reported four incidents of epithets shouted from passing cars or by pedestrians. Other students told of slurs written on a birthday sign tacked to the door of an off-campus apartment, on a dry-erase board outside a Lawn room, on a note taped to a car windshield and some scrawled in a Newcomb Hall bathroom. Another student reported fraternity members’ refusal to allow her into a party until black members of the fraternity arrived. Later that evening, a white female poured beer down her back and insincerely apologized while pretending to be drunk, she alleged.

These incidents are regrettable, but “racial terrorism”? Since no one has been arrested for any of these reported incidents, there is no reason to assume the perpetrators had any connection with the University. That uncertainty, however, did not prevent Jade Craig, a black fourth year student from Mississippi, from declaring that

“I don’t call the events ‘incidents’ because I think they are part of a disturbing trend at the university,” Craig said. “It comes from the roots of our university, our past that’s supported a culture that’s made these incidents have a specific relationship to the university. The university must transform its image from being a rich white man’s school,” he said. “This is not your grandfather’s university. This is our UVa for the 21st century.”

Similarly, Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and a faculty member in the history dept. at UVa, said

“I think it’s inevitable that its location [in the South] helps to shape the culture,” Bond said. “This section of the country is where this ideology was most pronounced.”

It’s of course true that slavery was predominantly in the South, and the ideology of racism has been rampant here, but in the 20th Century racist ideology was certainly not limited to the South, and in any event I suspect there’s nothing at all uniquely Southern about racial slurs and graffiti.

A particularly telling observation was made by another student, although I suspect he does not agree with the truth that I find implicit in his statement:

Michael McElrath, a black fourth-year student from Texas, believes that racism is not the prevalent mindset of students on campus, but he thinks some students need to re-evaluate their perceptions of black students.

Some students think that some black students at the university “have been given some unfair advantage,” McElrath said. “The biggest problem we have on Grounds is the passiveness of the white students in terms of confronting these issues. It’s one thing when you don’t know these problems exist, but it’s another thing when they know things are going on and they do nothing to change.”

The problem with formulation is that those students who think some black students “have been given some unfair advantage” are not mistaken. As I pointed out (among other things) here in April 2004, based on data released by UVa for the 2004 academic year,

• 7% of the applicants were black;

• 12.3% of the admittees were black;

• 29.4% of the non-black applicants were admitted;

• 57.1% of the black applicants were admitted.

In addition, as I discussed here,

the SAT scores of entering black freshman at UVa are some 200 points lower than the average for the entering class (and thus even further below the average for whites and Asians). As the Center for Equal Opportunity found in a study, discussed here, the relative odds favoring black over white applicants with the same grades and test scores at UVa was 111 to 1.

Insofar as any racial tensions at UVa are caused by some whites believing that some blacks receive unfair advantages, the obvious solution would be for the University to stop giving those unfair advantages.

That’s not likely, unless some future Congress or future Supreme Court decides to take seriously both the letter and spirit of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (which provides for cutting off federal funds to institutions that discriminate on the basis of race). “Diversity” is simply too entrenched as both an ideology and a practice in Mr. Jefferson’s University, as elsewhere. One of its recurring tensions, however, was nicely if inadvertently revealed by none other than the good dean, M. Rick Turner, who “encourages faculty members to be more proactive in addressing black students’ needs.” But, he continued:

“More than black faces, we need black minds and black advocates,” he said. “Just having a black face doesn’t mean much.”

Perhaps the good dean could bring this matter of “black minds” up with his assistant, Dean Valerie Gregorie, director of the “outreach office” in the Office of Admissions who also, according to the DP article, “oversees the Black Student Admissions Committee.” (What, in fact, is a public university doing with a “Black Student Admissions Committee?” Oh, never mind.) I know what a black face is, and can generally recognize one when I see it — although not always, since there are many individuals who identify as black even though they are not visually identifiable as black. But I’m afraid I don’t know what a “black mind” is, and I doubt that the current admissions committee does, either.

Shouldn’t this uncertainty about “black minds” (assuming I’m right about the uncertainty) loom large as a problem for the admissions office to address? Since “just having a black face doesn’t mean much,” shouldn’t the admissions office identify and institute some procedures to limit its “outreach” and the resultant preferences to applicants who have “black minds”? Perhaps the SAT could also be revised to test minds for the extent and quality of their blackness, since UVa will want not just any “black minds” but the best of them.

Indeed, perhaps this approach can open one door out of purely racial preferences. Since in Dean Turner’s view not all blacks have “black minds,” i.e., that one’s mind is not determined by one’s skin color, it must also be true that “black minds” can also be found among whites, Asians, Latinos, and others.

Wow, what a fitting tribute moving away from preferences based on skin color would be to Dean Turner!

Say What? (2)

  1. superdestroyer November 27, 2005 at 7:40 pm | | Reply

    I wondered while watching the Bayou Classic if either Grambling or Southern University have a Office of White Students Affairs, a White Admission Committee, a Dean of white Students, or all the other trappings of “diversity” that UVA has for black students? Or if Florida A&M had like offices for Hispanic students?

    My guess is that there is not a single Office of White Student Affairs at any university in the US no matter how undiverse a minority-majority is.

  2. Jeffersonian November 27, 2005 at 10:17 pm | | Reply

    I remember seeing a show several years ago about some white supremecist cretin who headed a group called White Aryan Boneheads or something of the sort. He was on trial for inciting his mouth-breathing acolytes to kill dark-skinned folks on the West Coast.

    The interesting thing is that one of the pieces of evidence used against him was a flyer his bunch distributed called “What’s On a Nigger’s Mind?” It was a cross-section of a characatured African American’s head, with different parts of the brain duly labelled with what this lovely group believed to be the thoughts of black men: felony, drink, white women and – of course – watermelon.

    Now I see that owe this racist urchin an apology. While Mr. M. Rick Turner may quibble over the particulars of what African Americans may be thinking at any particular moment, he seems just as sure that their mental meanderings are just as color-constricted and melanin-dependent as our hooded exhibit.

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