Editorial: Charleston shooting forces students to look at on-campus racism
By Editorial Board
June 28, 2015 11:56 p.m.
In 1963, the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb in a church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four black girls.
The attack was a national tragedy that held a mirror up to America, revealing an ugly truth that spurred public support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 less than a year later.
It has been 50 years since the passage of that legislation, a century and a half since the abolition of slavery – but still, and with shocking regularity, acts of racial hatred reopen painful old wounds in this country that have never quite completely healed.
If it wasn’t abundantly clear before, the massacre in a historically black Charleston, S.C., church earlier this month that left nine bodies in its wake showed us that deeply entrenched racism still has bloody consequences for black Americans.
As expected, the shooter’s rampage was quickly met with outrage from most corners of American society; such overtly racist and violent acts are easy to condemn. But it’s a poorly kept secret that the general population still has a problem talking about racism in America. It’s a conversation which often takes the form of diplomatic ruminations on loss without actual acknowledgement of the underlying issues that have led to it.
In his moving eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of the Charleston 9, as they have become known, President Barack Obama spoke about what good he hoped would come from the awful events at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
“Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete,” he said. “But it would be a betrayal of everything Rev. Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again.”
At UCLA, we don’t have the same ingrained history of overtly racial violence that other areas of the country are chained to and we don’t have a flag that flies over our heads as a constant symbol of a shameful past.
We are, to invoke the president – comfortable – and more often than not, silent: about oppression, about racism, about hatred.
The Black Lives Matter movement and our student body’s reaction to it are prime examples. While many non-black Americans support the movement, many others see it is as just a nuisance.
Students on our campus, which supposedly champions compassion and forward-thinking values, booed their fellow students at a dining hall in November when they attempted to rally support against the decision not to indict the police officer who shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
The implication of the dining hall incident is that just saying racism is a problem, even if it delays dinner by a few minutes, elicits jeers rather than rage against a nationally endemic issue.
However, the problem is also evident at the top.
Angela Davis, the noted and vocal civil rights activist, has her face plastered across campus on official UCLA banners. But the administration which chose her image seems perennially reticent to confront the realities of racism head-on, opting instead for the easier routes of deflection and hollow rhetoric.
In their responses to incidents of racial injustice – like that of the hateful posters outside the Afrikan Student Union office – officials preferred to pass blame instead of demand a thorough examination of on-campus racism.
A pattern has arisen that starts with student outcry and unfavorable headlines, and ends with rote responses from the administration. The attitude seems to imply more the commitment to prevent incidents of bad publicity, and less acts of racism.
Nine people were killed because of this long-standing stain on the American consciousness, and it would be a betrayal to them to let the conversation about racism peter out when time eases the sting that we now feel so acutely in our hearts.
In extreme cases such as the mass shooting, most Americans, despite racial differences, come together. However, widespread epidemics like racial profiling, police brutality against blacks and race-based exclusion in higher education don’t create the same kind of societal cohesion and thus reveal the fault line that still exists along the racial divide.
The brutal act in Charleston has forced us yet again to ask the question of what our nation sees reflected back when we look in the mirror, and whether we will ignore it – or face it – before we move on.
