Black students have ramped up the rhetoric and demands on college campuses — and, in the case of the University of North Carolina, the college’s host community, Chapel Hill. In a Chapel Hill Town Hall meeting, 50 black demonstrators stood in unison and approached the dais to read a list of demands so preposterous that black college students have risked throwing away any credibility they may have possessed.
Martin Luther King must be gazing from above in amazement. His historical accomplishments to advance equality between whites and blacks have been contorted into a banal and self-destructive rant. The list of demands by black students aired in Chapel Hill – billed as an effort to combat alleged “systemic racism” and “make the University more inclusive” — contains elements of paranoia and misdirected anger at institutions that have bent over backwards to promote and embrace minority advancement.
The specific demands included eliminating tuition for black students, dropping the SAT for admission, firing the newly appointed president of the UNC system, implementing required “racial training,” increasing the number of black professors beyond the black percentage of the U. S. population, more campus space “dedicated” exclusively for black activities, eliminating outsourcing for university jobs, and, strangely, ceasing investment in prisons.
That last demand is representative of the disconnected and unrealistic nature of the current black student movements popping up around the country. Rather than advancing race relations, these absurd demands will undo the progress of the last 60 years. The current inchoate movement began with demands that campus buildings named for historical personages associated with ownership of slaves or white supremacy be changed. That many of these figures from the past were heroes, or strove for the advancement of education, made no difference to black activists. Instead, these demands highlight the zany futility of the entire movement. If all accomplished figures or significant events from the past are judged and airbrushed from history for alleged racism, then, in the South at least, there will be no history left to commemorate.
The most damaging result for the black student movement is the alienation of whites, most of whom supported black equality. They accepted affirmative action for college admissions and changes in the SAT to accommodate black culture; endured quietly the refusal by black activists to acknowledge the progress already accomplished in black advancement; and reluctantly accepted speech codes and toleration of the false claim that whites are the sole cause of violence against blacks. In other words, white guilt is reaching the point of exhaustion with the irrational demands, subtle extortion, and ungratefulness for the unprecedented effort to right the wrongs of discrimination.
The demands from the UNC-Chapel Hill black students, along with similar demonstrations across the country at public universities — and now including elite private colleges such as Yale, Dartmouth and Duke — are not rational or achievable. The movement is more a declaration of race war than a search for better race relations.