Common Ground: Confessing our racism at WKU
September 19, 2013
This country has experienced more racism in the last week than I can recall in my last three years at WKU.
Last Thursday, the student newspaper at the University of Alabama reported that many of its sororities denied bids to black women during its fall recruitment, based solely on their race.
On Sunday, the United States crowned its first ever Indian-American Miss America.
But instead of celebrating this milestone, I sat horrified by my Twitter feed as it ran ablaze with users tweeting accusations of crowning a terrorist or gas station attendant.
But the most disturbing tweets I readโ some of the ugliest utterances of nonsensical bigotry Iโve ever witnessed โ came from all the users crying out that it was offensive to give her the crown so close to Sept. 11.
I wish I were kidding.
I came out of high school under the impression that we left racism in the 1960s.
Itโs been a half-century since Martin Luther King, Jr. told us he had a dream.
But in Alabama, people are still picking their friend groups based on garbage thatโs so mind-numbingly irrelevant that I can hardly stand to think about it.
Others across this nation are complaining that someone white didnโt win Miss America this year.
If youโre anything like me, youโre probably horrified by all this continued racism and injustice.
When I sat down to write this column, I was with you โ all too ready to rip into this group of people in our nation that obviously do not understand the concept of basic human rights, equality or freedom.
Youโre probably glad you donโt know anyone like those people tweeting those nasty things or denying bids to a fraternity or sorority based on the color of someoneโs skin.
But I think you do.
We all do.
How many of the Twitter accounts that we follow at WKU make racist jokes? Many of these parody and confession accounts are masked as a โsatirical stewโ but are often worse than anything tweeted during the Miss America pageant.
On Sept. 13, @WKUHouseMom tweeted โApparently Sigma Nu has a black new boy? I canโt fry that much chicken in one night. #LordHelpMe.โ
On June 12, one of WKUโs most popular fake Twitter accounts, @PimpRansdell, tweeted that black people like Popeyes and white people like Panda Express.
If a person you actually knew tweeted those things, would they still be funny? Yes, I realize that the played-out stereotypes arenโt even that funny now, but stick with me.
I must confess that I used to spend hours scrolling through my feed, laughing at โharmlessโ comments like this.
But what WKU parody and confession accounts really do is breed division among people by pointing out their differences and spreading false stereotypes โ sometimes based on race and other times based on something just as meaningless, like whether youโre Greek or not.
They mean nothing without followers, but they mean everything as long as we listen to their lies.
We all need to take a hard look in the mirror and click the unfollow button, or else risk casting the first stone at ourselves.
The writers of these slurs are anonymous, but the people theyโre talking about are not.
This is not a joke.
Itโs real life, and weโre the reason they exist.