Racism at UCLA – this is an honest and straightforward title I’m going to give to a series of articles I’ll have to write during my stay at UCLA. The circumstances force me to react, and I know by now that one article won’t be enough. A blackface party that took place a few days ago is only a shadow of a much bigger animal.
In my last post on this subject I called out the bland and manipulative titles of most articles covering the blackface party at UCLA. The very narratives too were sugarcoated (and in this country people only take white sugar). Today I want to talk about another article, this time hitting home, our home – The Daily Bruin, to which I dedicate this post.
Earlier today I read a submission by a confused freshman who demonstrated a classic example of getting a lot of things wrong at the same time. See, there’s no big problem when one person gets it all wrong, not even when a small fraction of the population does. Those who sincerely believe that having a certain percentage of individuals of every kind is called diversity may even rejoice at having a bunch of ignorant people around. But when a lot of folks get it all wrong – it’s a national tragedy. And I think we’re witnessing one today.
I have no intention of personally attacking the author of this article, she is but a product of our society. And again I’m not saying this in a condescending tone, I too get things wrong, I too get confused. The important thing is for us to tell each other when we stray too far from the truth, and when our attempts at having an objective approach fail due to certain distorting factors. At the same time, I feel rather comfortable with attacking institutions and organizations – you guys have more responsibility and therefore should know better.
There are many problems with modern journalism, but the major one is the utter confusion as to what constitutes unbiased reporting of facts and what is merely an opinion. All sorts of opinions exist – this is an objective fact. Not every opinion deserves to be heard from a certain platform – is my humble proposition. When a news agency (such as The Daily Bruin) gives an opportunity to somebody to provide their opinion, they should probably consider one important aspect: is that person an expert in this field, or, since I dislike the much-misused word ‘expert’, is that person qualified to provide a meaningful opinion that deserves to be heard?
The opinion (and I’m glad that it was at least labeled as such) that was formulated in this article is a rather well-put together amalgam of ideas that are widely circulated within many non-black circles in the U. S. And quite naturally it was synthesized by a non-black person. Oh, and one important component of this mixture was a statement of how Black Bruins SHOULD feel about this or that situation, particularly that ‘mildly inappropriate’ party.
Now it’s time for a simple metaphor. If you want to know what it feels like to run a marathon, who would you want to ask?
- a mathematician
- a ballet dancer
- a physician
- a marathon runner
Did you feel that ‘ding ding ding’ in your head when you stumbled upon the last option? That’s right, a mathematician may be able to describe the process of running in a series of equations, a ballet dancer, just like a marathon runner, knows a great deal about the physical strain associated with their craft, and a physician knows a lot about what happens to your body when you run, but the only person who can tell you what it FEELS like to run a marathon is somebody who’s tried doing that before. And now let’s extrapolate. If you want to understand what it feels like to be a Black Bruin, why events like this are not-so-mildly inappropriate, and why it hurts so much when they happen yet again – ask a Black Bruin! As easy as that, this in all probability would be the person who’s best qualified for the job!
What makes it even better, most Black Bruins still don’t have this convenient ability not to see patterns like, say, their white counterparts do. To many of us white people a blackface party is a singular event, it comes and it goes. To a Black Bruin it’s yet ANOTHER sick fun-a-palooza in a succession of similar parties that every so often sweep through college campuses like a vicious tornado. Or the police shootings of unarmed black people that to the white people who live in this beautiful world where ALL lives matter are again but a handful of singular occurrences that undoubtedly have nothing to do with each other. Well, a black person sees a pattern in there, maybe because they just don’t want to be the next singular case.
Anyway we as a society have mastered this ability not to see patterns and hurl the historical context as far away from our fragile egos as we can. Now if we want to ‘move on and get over things’, the time has come to unlearn this precious skill. But here’s an idea as to where to start – before you form your own opinion and approach, respectfully ask the nearest black person on campus if maybe they could infuse you with a little bit of the much needed objective first-hand knowledge of the subject.
This article is getting really long, but certainly not longer than the history of blackface parties in the U. S. colleges. We still need to discuss a few things. I actually specialize in statistics. And one thing I learned about it during my years in college is that this powerful and finely-tuned tool can prove to be a heavy unwieldy (and obviously threatening) ax in the wrong hands. The author of this article cites the figures reflecting black on black crime and other things that black people do, and I’m even pretty sure the figures are correct (although I haven’t tried to confirm this, it’s not the point anyway). The point is that there are two distinct concepts that we human beings so often misinterpret and confuse (writing this article now I can’t help but think just how we are a very confused species in general) – causality and correlation.
The former deals with the questions of how one thing (cause) brings about the other thing (effect) as its consequence. The latter, however, merely reflects the relationship between two things that consists in how the dynamics of one indicator is similar (or dissimilar) to the dynamics of another indicator. For example, a super strong correlation was observed between suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation and U. S. spending on science, space and technology (I really hope you won’t blame the U. S. for spending so much on science just because of that). For a more accurate explanation of these two concepts please consult any good text book on statistics.
Statistics despite its sophisticated methods is not able to answer pretty much a single question about causality. There’s a strong temptation, however, to substitute correlation for causality. And I believe the author of this article (along with many a politician) indulges this temptation without any hesitation. There are indeed many socio-economic problems within the black community (not saying that the white community is not ridden with problems, maybe of a different kind, either). The way many people interpret that, if expressed in a frank straightforward way, is that there’s something inherently wrong with black people (you name it) and therefore we see all these problems.
Now if you still remember the idea of identifying patterns and placing things within a historical context, maybe you’ll arrive at the conclusion that the high crime rates and many other indicators are not the cause of all the troubles in the black community, and not even the effect of that imaginary inherent quality that somehow makes all black people bad, but rather the effect of something that the white community will only be able to identify once immersed into deep and sober introspection. Speaking only about the economic side of things (not even trying to bring up the subject of historically stripping black people of every possible unalienable right and dehumanizing them in every way imaginable), designing the institutions in such a way that a certain group of people is constantly propelled toward poverty and doesn’t have a privilege of accumulating wealth (this list can go on and on: denying access to workplaces, education etc. etc.) is a foolproof method to create all kinds of problems within that group. And this isn’t the matter of ‘back in the day’ and ‘in the 18th century’, we’re still doing it now folks!
However, there’s a much more important distorting factor to those figures cited in the article. There’s quite a significant disparity in how crime is defined for white people and people of color. Black people have been arrested disproportionately and oftentimes for something that a white person can more or less easily get away with. No surprise then that the crime rates among black people may be higher!
Incidentally, it’s important to mention that focusing on crime rates and black on black crime simply has nothing to do with the subject under discussion in the article. There is a particular incident, and the Afrikan Student Union is doing their best to address it. Why the author expects the ASU to deal with black on black crime while not urging all of the predominantly white organizations on campus to address white on white crime or school shootings carried out by white men – this is a mystery!
And the last point I have to make is that this article is, well, one fallacy on top of another. Ad hominem, tu quoque, loaded question, appeal to authority, balck-or-white (what a coincidence!), false cause (explained in detail above), personal incredulity, genetic fallacy, cherry-picking, appeal to emotion, and, most importantly, irrelevant conclusion. Take your time to Google all these and you’ll find great examples for each one in the article.
Before I wrap it up, I want to express respect and gratitude to the members of Afrikan Student Union (Janay Williams and everybody who worked hard to make black voices heard) and all the Black Bruins at UCLA. You guys have handled the situation the best way you could. And yet as we all can see with every such article, many of these efforts seem to go in vain. And I am firmly confident that I know why. White people get defensive. All the time. (ALL lives matter. We too are the targets of racism. And so on, and so on… Now try and explain that ‘reverse racism’ is not even a thing).
As I wrote in my previous article, that observation I made a few days ago: however sad it is, whatever fact, argument or opinion is put forth by a black person, it has less value to our society – it appears to be dubious, unconfirmed and less likely to be true (as in ‘Oh, several black students saw them in blackface? Where are the pictures though?’). A white person’s claim almost invariably is taken more seriously. Being white, with this undeserved privilege lavishly bestowed on me, I feel that it’s my responsibility to leverage my position and provide these arguments that I hope will find their reader. And since our society is so full of trust for the white man’s words, I hope mine will be listened to with the same depth of belief in their accuracy and honesty as any other white man’s. Just trust me, as you always do, I’m telling the truth.
And if you’re still full of attention to what I’m saying, I would like to direct you to a much more knowledgeable source of information on this topic (believe me) – the Black Bruins, try hearing them out, and maybe (just a suggestion) you might want to ask some of THEM to write an article about the topic.
Feel free to share and spread the message!
