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Trigger warning: The following post quotes a repulsive racist joke that features the N-word.
The Oxford University Conservative Association, one of Britain’s largest and most influential campus political organizations, has been stripped of its university recognition after members of its top leadership told racist jokes at an organization dinner — jokes that were met with applause, laughter, and cheers from the students in attendance.
OUCA is Oxford’s student affiliate of the right-wing Conservative Party. Many of the Conservatives’ top leaders are alumni of the OUCA, which has more than six hundred members. (Americans can think of the group as a vague equivalent of the Harvard Young Republicans, but much bigger and more influential.)
At a “hustings” dinner in June, candidates for the OUCA presidency were asked to repeat the most inappropriate joke they knew. One told a joke about lynching, while another, expatriate American Nick Gallagher, is said to have offered this: “What do you say when you see a television moving around in the dark? ‘Drop it nigger, or I’ll shoot you!’ ”
As I said at the top, reports suggest that there was no objection to either of these jokes from the crowd in attendance.
Gallagher and another student were suspended from OUCA after news of the jokes broke in the British press, and this week Oxford announced that it will no longer allow the group to use the university’s name or participate in the annual organizational fair for new students.
The most impressive part of the whole story was the defenses of Gallagher’s joke. Gallagher himself is said to have claimed that it was from a Chris Rock routine (um, no), while an unnamed friend offered this response:
“To suggest Nick is racist is just ridiculous. This has been blown out of all proportion and everyone just needs to lighten up.”
The remaining five Jena Six defendants pleaded to reduced charges yesterday, ending a court case that dragged on for two and a half years and sparked national controversy.
In the fall of 2006, three white students hung nooses from a tree on the grounds of Louisiana’s Jena High School, a mostly-white school in a rural part of the state, and school administrators called the incident a harmless prank.
A few months later a white student was beaten at school by six blacks, later identified as the Jena Six. Though no weapons were used in the assault, and the victim suffered no long-term physical harm, the six were initially charged with attempted murder, and one was convicted by an all-white jury of charges that carried a maximum jail term of twenty-two years. (His conviction was later thrown out, after which he pled guilty to a reduced charge.)
The other five defendants remained in legal limbo until yesterday, when each pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of simple battery. Each will pay $500 to $1,000 in court costs and fines, and will be placed on unsupervised probation for seven days. A civil lawsuit filed by the beating victim was settled immediately before the sentencing for undisclosed terms.
A tongue-in-cheek call for a campus club to “advocate for men in the same manner that female groups advocate for women” has resulted in the formation of a men’s advocacy organization at the University of Chicago.
Back in March, UC junior Steve Saltarelli wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Maroon announcing the creation of Men in Power, a new student group founded “to spread awareness and promote understanding of issues and challenges facing men today.” Proposing “a tutorial on barbecuing” and “fishing, hunting, and flag-football retreats” as club activities, Saltarelli soon started receiving emails from men looking to join.
So he set it up. MiP applied for official campus recognition and funding, and held its first meeting in mid-May.
The Chicago Tribune had no trouble finding men’s rights activists to cheer the group’s creation and feminists to deplore it, but it remains unclear just how serious Saltarelli is. His Maroon op-ed was an obvious spoof — “many don’t realize that men are in power all around us,” he noted, pointing out that “the last 44 presidents have been men.” But if the club itself is a hoax, it’s a subtle one, as interviews like this one make clear.
That said, the club is clearly uncomfortable with the charges of misogyny (and douchebaggery) that are directed its way. Its Facebook group and website each include a prominent notice that those “looking for a (white) male champion group that seeks to advance men at the expense of women and/or a clique to isolate yourselves … are in the wrong place.”
Links posted at the group’s Twitter feed make clear that it’s garnering quite a bit of media attention, but its first meeting drew fewer than twenty attendees. If it exists as a functioning campus group a year from now, I’ll be more than a little surprised.
Update: Okay, here’s my hunch. Saltarelli wrote the original Maroon piece as a not-feminist-but-not-antifeminist-either goof. He wasn’t serious about creating the group. But then he started getting attention, and he liked the attention, so he decided to go for it. And then he started getting a lot of attention, and a lot of questions he’d never really contemplated, and he had to start figuring out how to answer them. And now he, and the rest of the group, are trying to come up with a serious rationale for a project that didn’t start out serious, and negotiating some heavy gender politics that they don’t have a lot of tools to address.
(There are a lot of parallels here to the Veterans of Future Wars craze of 1936. I should really get some of the stuff I’ve written about those folks up online.)
December 2010 update : If you’re looking for information on the White Student Union at West Chester University, click here.
I’m having a conversation on Twitter this afternoon with a guy who proposed creating a “White Heterosexual Organization” on his campus. He did this, as he put it, to show “how f’ing stupid it was to have a group based on race, or sexual orientation.”
I’ve seen this argument a lot over the years: “If blacks can have a Black Student Union, why can’t whites have a White Student Union? Why is one okay and the other one not?”
When someone asks me this, my response is always pretty much the same: “Do you actually want to have a White Student Union on campus? Would you be active in a WSU there was one? Is there stuff you’d like to be doing that the absence of a WSU is keeping you from doing?”
So far, nobody has ever answered any of these questions with a yes.
The guy I’ve been talking to on Twitter says he wanted “to make a point about the wrongness of segregation, regardless of purpose.” But you don’t demonstrate that something is bad “regardless of purpose” by showing that it’s bad if it has no purpose, you demonstrate it by showing that it’s bad even if it has a great purpose.
That’s the first fundamental problem with the WSU thought experiment — it doesn’t engage with the reasons that BSUs exist.
The argument that people should never voluntarily separate themselves by race (or gender, or religion, or sexual orientation) is one I can respect. It’s not one that I agree with, but it’s one I can respect. But I can only respect it if the person making the argument understands the real-world reasons why people sometimes do separate themselves along such lines.
If you don’t know why people are doing something, why should I listen when you tell me they should stop?
A new article on segregated high school proms in the Deep South — which are still going on today — reveals a lot about the myths and realities of racism in America.
The article, from today’s New York Times Magazine, concentrates on Montgomery County High School, a small school in a southern Georgia community that’s about two-thirds white. The school itself didn’t integrate until 1971, and its proms have been segregated ever since.
Or rather, its white prom has been segregated. The students refer to the proms as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom,” but the black-folks prom is open to anyone, and it’s not uncommon for a few white students to show up. As with historical segregation, the point of the whites-only prom is less to keep the races separate than maintain whites-only space.
Another important fact about the proms is that it’s mostly white parents, not white students, who are behind the segregation. As one student told the Times, white parents tell their kids, “if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”
At the same time, though, the article doesn’t let the white students off the hook. As one black student notes, “half of those girls, when they get home, they’re gonna text a black boy.” That’s white privilege right there — participating in a exclusionary racist institution one moment, re-engaging with your black friends the next, and in many cases not even noticing the transition from one to the other.
studentactivism.net 
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