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A former medical student is claiming that he was suspended from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for describing himself as a “white, African, American.”
Paulo Serodio is of European descent, was born in Mozambique, and is a citizen of the United States, so each of the components of his self-identification is literally accurate, but he says that students and staff at the university objected to it.
Serodio claims that he was harassed and assaulted after making the comments, and his lawyer told the Associated Press that “directly” as a result of the comments he was suspended from the school. Serodio is now suing.
This story is already blowing up in the right-wing blogosphere, for obvious reasons, but as far as I can tell the AP article is the only source on it so far, and I have to say it doesn’t feel complete to me.
We don’t have the whole story on this yet, and I bet you ten bucks that the full version is going to be more interesting than the one we have now.
1 pm update: I’ve found a copy of the complaint. More soon.
An Entertainment Weekly blog claimed last week that a New York crowd “staged a ’60s-style sit-in at a Manhattan KFC” after the restaurant ran out of the grilled chicken that Oprah Winfrey had given away free coupons for online. The story has been repeated over and over again since.
But the sit-in never happened.
The EW story was based on a Gothamist post, and Gothamist got it from an anonymous emailer who’d written to say that customers at a midtown Manhattan KFC were “currently holding a sit-in and refusing to leave until they get their free chicken.” But that email was an obvious, crude, and not particularly funny joke — it went on to claim that the store’s “manager ran from [a] screaming horde” who were “spew[ing] racial epithets” and threatening other patrons with “a beatdown.”
If there had been an actual sit-in the New York tabloids and television news would have been all over it, but a Google news search for KFC protest Oprah “New York” brings up not a single hit from local media. It gets plenty of hits, but they’re all to stories that were based on the Gothamist’s joke.
Were people at that KFC upset about missing out on the promotion? Some of them probably were. Any time a business promises a free giveaway and fails to deliver there are going to be some pissed off customers, particularly if they’ve been waiting in line for a while.
But the crucial element of the Gothamist/EW story is the sit-in angle, and it’s obvious why. Claiming that there was a sit-in brings all the racially coded elements of the story — Oprah, fast food, New York, fried chicken — together, and turns a story about corporate bungling into a story about race. Gothamist cast the story as a story about angry, violent blacks, while EW went for a more sardonic approach, but both made the incident into a morality play with blackness taking center stage.
And so it was inevitable that white racist idiots would pounce on the story, just as it was inevitable that blacks would recoil in embarrassment. But there’s no reason for anyone to be smirking, and there’s no reason for anyone to be cringing.
The sit-in never happened.
Bucknell University’s administration has denied a conservative student group permission to hold an affirmative action bake sale.
Such sales, in which cupcakes and cookies are offered at full price to white male students and cheaper for women and students of color, have become a common attention-grabbing tactic for right-wing campus groups in recent years. Clashes with administrators over the sales have been common too, with sponsors claiming that they’re protected speech and universities noting that they’re — by design — a discriminatory practice.
Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on affirmative action bake sales, including mention of a nice move by the Graduate and Professional Students of Color student organization at the University of Illinois, which responded to one such sale by holding a white privilege popcorn giveaway in which white white men were given a full bag of popcorn, while women and people of color got a mostly-empty bag.
A second Binghamton Student Association representative who used racist slurs against an SA vice president last week has lost his position as a result.
As I reported last Saturday, representative Mike Lombardi resigned from the SA days after telling vice president for finance Alice Liou to “go eat a dog,” while Ehlad Bar-Shai, who had taunted Liou for having “squinty eyes” prior the Lombardi incident, was elected chair of the SA’s Student Assembly in a close vote.
News of Bar-Shai’s comments spread widely on campus after his election, however, and a protest rally was held last weekend calling for him to be removed from office.
Last night, at the final Assembly meeting of the year, Bar-Shai asked to make a formal apology, but a motion to reconsider his election was introduced before he was able to do so.
Bar-Shai argued that the motion to reconsider was out of order, but was turned aside. When the Assembly approved the motion Bar-Shai and several supporters withdrew from the meeting, causing it to lose quorum.
But the Assembly was eventually able to re-establish quorum, a new election was held, and incumbent Assembly chair Josh Berk, who had lost to Bar-Shai at the previous meeting, was re-elected by a vote of 15-4.
Steven Oliver and Kendra Key met in the contest for the student government presidency at the University of Alabama this year.
More than fourteen thousand students, well over half the campus population, voted — the most in UA history. The race was close, with less than two percentage points separating the two candidates. But in the end Olvier, a white man, defeated Key, a black woman, by two hundred and sixty-one votes.
UA is the flagship campus of Alabama’s state university system, and it has never had a black student body president. In the fourteen years since its current student government was established, seventeen students of color have run for campus-wide office. All have lost.
Race is not the only factor in Alabama’s student government elections, of course. (The campus’s student body is more than eighty-five percent white, to start with, which means the majority of Key’s support came from white students.) Oliver ran with heavy support from fraternities and sororities, and the divide between greeks and independents played a major role in the campaign.
But the fact that UA’s student officers have been — and remain — all white has significant consequences for the student government, and the campus as a whole. UA’s student newspaper, the Crimson White, grapples with those consequences in two articles — here and here.
studentactivism.net 
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