Editorial: Charleston shooting forces students to look at on-campus racism

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.

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5 Comments

  1. Editorial Board, You Wrote…

    “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.”

    On the contrary, UCLA now has a well earned, national reputation for blatant antisemitism and The Daily Bruin significantly contributed this reputation by frequently publishing lies and distortions about Israel, the Israeli people, and Jews.

    The Daily Bruin Editorial Board openly supported the BDS movement. UCLA is one of the few prominent Universities in the country where the boycott actually passed. That boycott singles out Israel – a democracy where Arabs, Jews, Christians and even people of the LGBT community live and enjoy rights beyond anything offered from any other country in the region. At the same time, the boycott ignores far worse human rights violators and terrorists all over the world. It is a blatant double-standard. It hangs over UCLA and the Daily Bruin like a Confederate flag.

    The Daily Bruin frequently publishes commentary from people like Aram Ghoogasian. The hundreds of anti-Semitic lies and distortions in his commentary have been detailed beneath the comments of his articles, and yet the Daily Bruin still feels comfortable allowing Ghoogasian to spew his hate on a monthly basis.

    The Daily Bruin didn’t take a serious stance on the growing antisemitism in UCLA until the Rachel Beyda incident revealed that anti-Semitic oppression was openly occurring in student government. Even then, the Daily Bruin frequently attempted to conflate antisemitism with some kind of protest against Israel – as if Rachel Beyda was some how responsible for Israeli policy!

    To this day, UCLA is rated in the top ten of the most anti-Semitic universities in the country.

    Frankly, you people have a helluva a lot of nerve writing an opinion piece like this.

    1. You know they’ll say it’s different, that somehow the Jews have it coming, and hey, it’s freedom of speech.

      Examples of how Jews deserve less protection as espoused by past proponents of discrimination include: supporting Israel, controlling the banks and the media, and eating Christian babies on Passover.

      And that Holocaust thing? The Bruin might just say it never happened – just a fantasy to get sympathy.

      See, the Jews are the problem at UCLA for the Bruin, not any antisemitism. If those Jews would just shut up and go away, UCLA would be perfect.

  2. As one who is old enough to remember the murders in Birmingham, I feel it would be a mistake and unfair to use the Charleston murders to imply that this is the same America as 1963.

    Yes, we still have racial issues and disagreements, but while it was true that America had institutional racism in 1963-especially in the South, I disagree that America today -including the South- is a racist country. The actions of one deranged racist don’t make America racist.

    As to the Black Lives Matter issue-yes, they matter, but why is there no attention paid to the epidemic of blacks murdered by other blacks? Your average three-day weekend in Chicago normally surpasses Charleston in terms of a death toll. Whites killing blacks is not the problem. The problem is blacks killing blacks. And using the Ferguson case as an issue is now discredited. The evidence has clearly established that it was a justified shooting.

    I have to agree with the other reader, Adam: The biggest problem of -ism on college campuses today-including UCLA is anti-Semitism. There is a world-wide resurgence in anti-Jewish feeling, and in the US the focal point is on our college campuses. We need to band together and stop it in its tracks.

    Look, we all mourn the victims in Charleston, and we should not allow the actions of one man to divide us. We should follow the example of the good people of Charleston who came together and showed the nation how we should live.

  3. So what about all the rapes going on at UCLA…/the most dangerous school for women? I guess female lives don’t matter.

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