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Look inward before condemning racism

The hypocrisy is gargantuan.

These few words are primarily aimed toward the people who attended the Women Studies 240 lecture on Jan. 29 but the University community will benefit as well from it.

As part of the class, and on the section of race and ethnicity, a film was shown. The film documented various ways in which black people were atrociously oppressed: socially, politically and physically.

As you all watched, the black and white photos of calloused scars, grotesque and fresh on a slave's back, you gasped in alarm. Further along, as the charred remains of a lynched black men jumped from the screen to your eyes, you felt repulsed. How about the freshly pummeled and garroted bodies swinging from the trees, their lifeless eyes a chasm replete with pain, their limp bodies hung by a rope: Did you cringe? Did you feel sad? Of course, don't forget, the degrading imagery of popular culture, depicting black men and women as ugly savages. Did that come as a big surprise to you? If you were not asleep, or tuned out by the middle of the film, some of you may have been surprised by the dates, locality and proximity of these nightmares that happened to black people. Oh, the horror! The revelation! These things were happening in your parents', and your parents' parents' times. Would you be even more shocked if I told you that these things happened with as little justification as a black man staring at a white woman too long? You recoiled in horror, or at least skipped a breath in shock.

Yet, you think: Oh, thank goodness this doesn't happen now. People were really ignorant back then. Me, I have nothing to do with any of that. By golly, my parents never told me those things, nor my grandparents. Perhaps it's a fiction. I mean, look at us now. We're much better. Certainly, not I. I wouldn't have done those things.

What hypocrisy! You don't think like they do, but now you think: Black men can date white women, as long as it's not with me. Black men can join the workforce, as long as it's not with me. Everyone should have a friend of a different ethnicity, as long as it's not with me. Look at yourself now. Look at all the friends of different ethnicities that you have. Look at who you hang out with, who you talk to at work, at parties. Are you so enlightened? Are you so much better than those, like your parents and grandparents were carrying the popular sentiment of their time? What are the sentiments now? Feel the pang of guilt overwhelming you. You better, because if not, you are no different from the same individuals who conformed to the murderous and barbarous standards of their times. Cease your naive angle of life and learn it. Don't be shocked by it.

ZENO LEE
LSA SENIOR