February is designated "Black History Month." Thus, it feels rather appropriate to bring up some black history and relate it to UMass. In short, UMass's black history, like this nation's black history, reflects pretty poorly on the school's treatment of blacks.
The figures for minority and Afro-American access are dismal and do not look like they are getting much better unless drastic changes occur. This is a tragic and untenable phenomenon that must be dealt with. If we look around the UMass campus, sometimes it feels like Hitler won WWII and somehow managed to invade and conquer the United States as well. The scene is a veritable ocean of white faces, somewhat similar to a polar bear in a snow storm. Now, as rational college students with very expensive and prestigious educations, we must know that not everybody in the country is of European descent, and that there are people who were brought here as slaves several hundred years ago from Africa. Interestingly, one is hard pressed to find this population represented on campus. In fact, the numbers of African-American students enrolled are shocking. Even though they make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, African-Americans don't top 5 percent of the UMass population. This is a case of discrimination. Obviously the administration will not admit this blatant fact, but discrimination can take many different forms and can be deliberate or subconscious. An ingenious method of the racist power structure is to change the discrimination from strictly racially-based assessments, such as "we can't take no n---ers here," which did exist, to "we can only consider financially suitable applicants for admission to the University," the current justification for racist admissions policies. One question is, if the University isn't racist, then where are the people who don't look like everyone else? There is an incredible correlation between race and class in this country, the good ol' most racist country in the world, the U. S. of A. Let's not kid ourselves with all of the EPCOT, Mickey Mouse multiculturalism that we see around us, to quote Mike Dyson. The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is numbers that are easily accessible to college students who all have big brains. Black people are overwhelmingly poor compared to white people and go to jail in numbers that are vastly disproportionate to their numbers in the population. The means to keep black people poor and incarcerated were taken up on purpose and evidently so. So, administrators don't need to look at an applicant's race explicitly in order to discriminate against him or her. They only need to look at the family income, thus excluding anyone who can't pay, or their criminal history, thus excluding anyone who was the victim of a wanton police state's draconian policies. Of course, it is important to note that it is a police state for certain groups only, namely ethnic minorities and poor people. For upper-middle class white kids, the USA is like the world's biggest candy store. That is, if the mentioned kids can feel free to ignore their neighbors' problems. Despite the dismal results of an admissions policy that leaves out vast elements of the population, UMass can say that it is being fair and balanced, like Fox News. This is because they are not blatantly racist, but aversively racist. Down south, at least blacks knew who the enemy was. Here in the North, an enemy looks like a friend and will smile as he keeps you down. The most interesting part of UMass is how hard it tries to project an image of tolerance and yet how deeply prejudiced, as an institution, it really is. We need to stop pretending we don't live in a bigoted state in a bigoted country, where blacks go to jail at eight times the rate that whites do. These illusions will create false assumptions of security and will perpetuate hatred and ignorance. The first step is to smash assumptions like the following: 1. Laws are always fair, that's why they're laws. 2. Everyone has the same chance to succeed if they try hard enough. 3. Racism's over and it's time for minorities to stop complaining. Let's remember that African-America ns have contributed to the welfare of this country since 1619, in all possible ways from material to cultural to intellectual. As Kurt Vonnegut realized, the main reason the rest of the world doesn't hate us 100 percent is because of the black American music that unites the whole world, jazz and blues. Given that African-American culture is at the core of what it means to be an "American," UMass has a responsibility to at least allow blacks to learn along with their white counterparts. Anything short of this is ludicrous in the richest country in the world.
Bruce Lerner is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at bvlerner@student.umass.edu.
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