Campus Racism A Special Report: Disillusioned in the Promised Land

Here's some verse from one of many fliers that were slipped under the doors of various University of Michigan black students last year:

Nigger, nigger, go away,

For the white man is here to stay.

Everywhere you look,

Everywhere you'll see

The menacing branches of a tree.

And from that tree,

What do we see?

The beautiful sight of my friends and me,

Laughing at your dangling feet.

So be forewarned

And do be scared,

For I, nigger child, will see you there.

Take your black asses back to Africa,

Before it's too late.

•

Last year, Peter O. Steiner, dean of Michigan's College of Literature, Science and the Arts, announced, "Our challenge is not to change this university into another kind of institution where minorities would naturally flock in much greater numbers. I need not remind you that there are such institutions--including Wayne State and Howard University...." Sensing an ally, the student pamphleteers followed up quickly with more fliers:

"Niggers, get off campus!" they wrote. "Dean Steiner was right."

The smart money should start investing in Ann Arbor copy centers.

•

The ypsilanti City Limits sign slides past my eyes for the first time in 17 years; I feel old. Four years out of Stanford, I'm back in Ypsilanti, suburb of Ann Arbor, cradle of the University of Michigan, where my father and mother taught and where I napped on an oval rug and ate Nutter Butters in the campus nursery school.

My nursery class of 1967 was fashionably diverse: blacks, whites, Asians, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. You couldn't have stopped us from hugging and holding hands--just like the kids in the Benetton ads today. Our only fear was not outrunning Ruthie, a frisky-lipped white girl also known as the Kissing Cootie.

This year's freshmen weren't born yet in 1967. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, they were ten. If my childhood saw the explosion of progressivism, theirs witnessed its opposite--the systematic strangulation of liberal values. Having been educated to the old-fashioned intolerance of the Reagan years, this year's incoming frosh has found far more to fear than just a premature kiss on the lips.

At home in New York, I'd read about the University of Michigan's recent racist incidents; but surely, it couldn't have changed that much, I'd thought, heading west. After cruising State Street in person and hitting up both black and white Michigan students for the real deal, however, I hardly recognized my home town. I was going back--I just didn't know how far.

Here's the story of black U of M student Regina Parker (not her real name). Her parents have just hauled her footlockers and posters and radio up to her room and are driving back to Flint, Michigan, proud of their 18-year-old, all grown up. Regina thinks, How about a little Gap Band on the stereo to celebrate my new life as a collegian? Then in walks her new white roommate, who plugs in a new 40-watt sound system and cranks up the greatest hits of REO Speedwagon. After months of squabbling, Regina's roommate promises, "I'm gonna make life hell for you." Eventually, the white girl gives up and moves out. But it's not over. Some white guys, upset by the loss of a soulmate, start calling Regina the word--nigger--and late at night, while other U of M students are out distributing leaflets, the white guys regularly hurl blocks of ice at the black girl's door. Says Regina, "I thought about jumping out of school, out of the window."

Most of us would have dropped out or maybe dropped somebody with a punch and been kicked out, but Regina took a course in ego aerobics--she checked out the Center for Afro-American and African Studies (C.A.A.S.). The center reminded her that there are black doctors of political science, of sociology and most other disciplines, that blacks, indeed, finish school. In high school, she had been a cheerleader and believes, as ex-cheerleaders will, that "everybody used to be my friend--blacks and whites." In any case, Regina did not imagine when she arrived from Flint that she would ever voluntarily stay away from white folks. Now Regina, like other black students here, believes only separatism will pull her through.

•

When I was in fourth grade, my father took a job as a campus psychiatrist at Yale. We lived in Hamden, a not-very-ritzy Italian and Irish New Haven suburb, where I met a new kind of off-campus creature. I was doing yardwork one day when a big white seventh grader walked by.

"Keep raking, Toby," he taunted. At the time, Alex Haley's Roots, the miniseries, was breaking TV viewing records nationwide. I had been glued to it. That white boy profoundly rocked my world. Naturally, I wanted to fillet his back with my rake the way the slave master had whipped Kunta Kinte until he had given up his African name for Toby. But the seventh grader was bigger and older, so I stood there alone silently in my own damned front yard.

Later, I transferred to Phillips Academy, Andover, one of the oldest boarding schools in the country and the high school home of Humphrey Bogart (before he was booted), Jack Lemmon and George Bush. By the time I got there, it was a progressive, coeducational junior think tank, ruled by hippie wanna bes playing 12-string guitars and reading Howl. But the Colonial town of Andover, squatting just north of Boston, offered me no such protection from traditional American values. It was the kind of town where a nine-year-old boy could freely shriek the word--nigger--at me from his school-bus window. If he eventually made it as far as college, he'd likely drive his primer-splotched Camaro an hour or so west to attend the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

An excellent school with one of the nation's first Afro-American studies departments, where Bill Cosby got his Ed.D. and where James Baldwin lectured, U Mass Amherst also boasts the first notable campus race riot of the modern era. After the last game of the 1986 world series, 1500 disgruntled white Red Sox fans took out their disappointment on 20 or so black students, including then-sophomore Yancey Robinson, who was "stomped on the ground and beaten with bats and clubs," in the words of one witness. The Red Sox fans assumed that all black students came from New York and therefore must be Mets fans.

Last year, two black freshmen were attacked by five white freshmen. The black guys had been seen with a white girl.

At U Mass, only 2.7 percent of the students are black. Most of the students come from eastern Massachusetts, from Andover, the other Boston suburbs and parts of the city itself. One famous Boston locale, South Boston, made headlines in 1974, when "Southies" rioted and stoned school buses rather than let black kids be bused there.

•

I'm getting another note pad from my trunk in the U Mass parking garage near the student union when a Toyota with Massachusetts plates, driven by a white guy in a baseball cap with another beside him in the front and a blonde in the back, drives into the garage. "Yo!" yells the driver in mock black B-boy, to the great amusement of his passengers as they drive past willfully only inches from my foot. Great, I think, running down the ramp after them--my very own racial incident. With luck, they'll be Southies, and I'll interview them. It will be like Oprah's broadcast from Georgia's all-white Forsyth County. But I lose them in the spiral of the garage, give up and go back to the student union to check out the Earth Foods Café, the People's Market and the Central American Solidarity Association, the hotbeds of U Mass progressivism. The Pioneer Valley, home of U Mass, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst and Hampshire, is, in fact, as liberal an area as our nation knows.

I see two white guys who look like possible Southies sitting in front of the union. Instead, David Martin, an economics major, is from Dorchester, another hard-scrabble urban Boston neighborhood, and Robert Thompson, a communications major, comes from down near the Cape. But they were both at the Red Sox riot and agree that there is a lot of racism on campus.

"U Mass reflects the attitude of Massachusetts in general," Robert says and splits for class.

"They bring the attitude up here," says David. He has a classic Boston-Irish accent--the "here" comes out he-ah--and he tells me he is going to try boxing in the Golden Gloves this summah. A tough (continued on page 84) Disillusioned (continued from page 76) and friendly street kid with feathered hair, he wears acid-washed jeans and jeans jacket buttoned up to the neck, brown loafers with white socks. "Kids in my neighborhood don't wear ripped-up jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts," he tells me, jerking his chin toward a fashionably unkempt barefoot couple. His Dorchester-ites are a dwindling working-class people whose urban neighborhood blackens as they, the last European immigrant offspring in America to make it, finally do.

David is a latter-day Bowery Boy, as alienated from this pastoral college life as many of the black students. "Suburban kids don't know what goes on in the city," he says. "People look at city kids here like they're some kind of maggot."

Here at U Mass, he has found other divisions besides white and black, Irish and not; you can hear him struggling to modernize his lifelong ethnocentric allegiances. "Of course, you'll have some, uh, city kids up here," he says. "My grandpa came from Ireland. He experienced racism." WASP New Englanders still have contempt for the Boston Irish. David and his friends don't like the children of the D.A.R. much, either. "We used to go up to Milton [a tony Boston suburb], beat kids up. That's when we were young, but that's all changed.

"This is much better than the city; it's good to get away. It's so quiet here.... But it feels kind of good to stay with kids of your own kind," he confesses, hinting at his own sense of isolation. Maybe that's why the traditions of his roots seem to be undergoing a transformation: "Racism is passed down from generations, but I'm still not prejudiced," he tells me, "and my friends aren't as bad as they used to be. Because there's nothing you can do. I don't want to die because some guy wants to play ball in the park."

I walk through the student-union building looking for black students to interview, but most I pass look away. It is a campus dotted with insular black strays, trying to be invisible. Usually, at a college, when you pass other blacks on the street or in the student union, you acknowledge them. Yo, what's up? Nothing much. All right. At the University of Michigan, a school of comparable size but with twice as not-very-many blacks, folks waved at me from their cars. But at U Mass, instead of consolidating their tiny community, a dozen black organizations compete for the same members and money.

Black students here complain of severe "creeping," gossipy backbiting. "Smile at your face, talk behind your back," says Scott Thompson, an industrial-engineering major. He and his friends tell me of fistfights between rival black factions at last year's Funkathon concert, just like those between white frat boys. You'd hope blacks would see the bigger picture.

Margaret Jones, a psychology major, Afro-American studies minor, sits by herself in one of the student-union cafeterias, watching a soap. She says white students smile when they tell her she "doesn't sound black," as if it's a compliment. She has heard it a million times. Jones is not yet used to being a living science project, a lab rat.

Even in good situations, minority students remain curiosities--objects of social vivisection. Maybe that's one reason even brilliant black students burn out and don't graduate: "What is that you're putting in your hair?" "What does Jesse really want?" "Whitney Houston's really attractive--don't you think?" Just a day of racial Q. & A. tires you out. Try to imagine four years of it. Can't? Neither can a lot of black students. At such humongous labyrinths as U Mass and UC Berkeley, about three black students in four drop out. At the University of Michigan, if you're black, your chances of getting out with a degree are 30 percent. Universities with a primarily black enrollment graduate percentages in the 90s. No wonder Denise Huxtable chose Hillman College.

The problem is that both sides need to be educated about each other. It's not only that the white kids see the blacks as illiterate athletes or affirmative-action-lottery winners. The blacks see the whites as callous and corny, garden-variety rich kids. But those polarities are seldom acknowledged publicly. That's why "the occupation" was an event of such magnitude at U Mass.

Jones's eyes widen as she tells me about it. After those two black freshmen were beaten up and after the university nibbled off yet another classroom in the black-studies building, hundreds of black students stormed New Africa House and locked its doors. Jesse Jackson and Mike Dukakis called the school's chancellor in support of the students. "I was almost in tears," says Jones. Not since Isaac Hayes had a hit has the campus' black community knitted together so tightly. And yet, now it is over and I discover a campus again dotted with strays, separate and alone.

•

As a black student entering Phillips Academy at Andover, I had the option of choosing a black roommate to watch my back, but I integrated. I think I felt then as neoconservatives feel now: Black separatism is as bad as segregation and talk about racism and bigotry is distasteful.

At Stanford, I snapped out of my naïveté. I chose to have a black roommate in the black dorm. Ujamaa, the black cultural house, half black, half white by population, is a mini black college within a mostly white university. The sense of safety in numbers that Jones felt during the New Africa House occupation existed in "Ooj" year round. Thanks to this dorm and the relatively large number of black students at Stanford (approaching ten percent), 87 percent of its black students graduate.

My senior year, I worked on a committee that demanded that the works of women and minorities be added to the reading list of the mandatory freshman Western Culture class. Our demands didn't get very far, but last year, after much screaming and lobbying from both the Black Student Union and campus conservatives, the Stanford faculty senate finally agreed to open up the reading list.

Before that fight, Stanford had been racially tranquil. The campus looks like a golf course and most of the students were as political as a seven iron--until then--Secretary of Education William J. Bennett got wind of the reading-list debate and decided to take sides. The proposed changes, the way Bennett apparently saw them, would bring down the cornerstones of the culture. The Black Student Union, the women and the other protesters were not broadening Western civilization, he said, they were trashing it.

Bennett goosed the proto-Yuppies into action--miraculously, they started giving a damn. Where previously the white students had had no visible gripes, Bennett supplied them with a cause. Last year, a group of freshmen printed up T-shirts saying Aryan by the Grace of God. This year, in Ujamaa, somebody added the word Nigger to a poster for a black fraternity. But more specifically, the new white consciousness got political. Every Stanford student organization exists on fee assessments voted on by the entire student body. The Black Student Union had always easily won approval; but last year, in a climate that feels increasingly alien to black students, it lost (until, after a (continued on page 157) Disillusioned (continued from page 84) fracas, overseas-studies votes were added to the tally and the B.S.U. squeaked by).

•

Black students are five times more likely than whites to drop out of a mainly white university. And those are middle-class, well-prepared black students. Walter Allen, director of the National Study of Black College Students and professor of sociology and Afro-American and African Studies at Michigan, told me, "Universities don't go to the street corner; they take the cream of the crop now more so than ever. Yet it's not a supportive environment. Fully seventy-five percent of black students report they don't feel a part of campus life."

Be that as it may, affirmative action has become a dirty phrase. Syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak concluded last spring that affirmative action itself "is the only plausible explanation" for the rise in campus racism. It's like blaming the miniskirt for the rape.

Vanessa Gibson, a Mount Holyoke student from Detroit, is in a sociology class. The discussion lights on poverty and all eyes respectfully turn to her. Like Cliff Huxtable, Vanessa's dad is an obstetrician-gynecologist. Her mother is a schoolteacher. The talk eventually centers on low test scores among blacks and, again, all eyes face her. She argues that plenty of blacks score well on the college boards. The other women are silent, but after class, one white classmate pulls her aside to compare S.A.T. scores. Gibson wins and the white girl walks away. Gibson isn't trying to separate herself; it just happens.

•

The most famous case of campus racism created international notoriety for the University of Mississippi. In 1962, a month before I was born, a riot over the admission of its first black student, James Meredith, ended with two people dead and 375 wounded.

At the Memphis airport on my way to Ole Miss in Oxford, I tell the white, born-again shuttle-bus driver that I'm on my way to Ole Miss.

"You know there's a time change in Mississippi," the Tennessean tells me. "You turn the clock back twenty-five years."

Actually, Oxford is a charming college town with a Benetton store across the street from Square Books, where you can buy both Capote and cappuccino. Both face the county courthouse and a white obelisk commemorating the Confederate dead.

I drive past another Civil War monument approaching the Lyceum, Ole Miss's administration building. Giant letters on the neoclassical pediment proclaim Randolph University and I'm sure I'm lostost. In fact, the campus has turned its clock back 25 years--for the filming of Heart of Dixie, a movie about a Sixties Southern deb turned civil rights activist starring Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen and Phoebe Cates.

The campus needed little alteration for the film: A gray-bearded "rebel" colonel remains the official school mascot, and Confederate flags, while no longer officially endorsed by the university, pop up frequently at football games. Blacks are even more underrepresented at Ole Miss than at U Mass--seven and one half percent in a 40-percent-black state--only at Ole Miss, you don't get called nigger as often.

After a basketball game last year, a car filled with white boys passed Charlsy Wise and her friends, screeching "Niggers!" as they drove by. A white student approached Charlsy and her friends and apologized. "That was real nice," she says. "They've had so many problems here that people bend over backward to be race considerate."

Not everybody. Arson is suspected in last August's burning of Phi Beta Sigma house, which was about to be the first black frat house on fraternity row. Yet, in response, white Mississippians were "race considerate." The interfraternity council swiftly pledged to raise $20,000 to rebuild Phi Beta Sigma house. The university and the alumni association have also donated money.

Segregation on campus remains nearly absolute. Barbara Britten, a black student from Oxford, finds Ole Miss "more divided than high school. There, most of my friends were white," she remembers, "but at Ole Miss, you're frowned on if you run with a group of white people or vice versa."

Derek Nelson, a white student with an earring, who comes from the heart of Klan country, complains that some white students choose Ole Miss "because there aren't going to be too many blacks here."

To kill time the night before graduation, I go to the Hoka, a dilapidated, ex-hippie restaurant/movie barn to watch what's playing. It turns out to be John Waters' civil rights dance farce, Hairspray. On the screen, a black teenaged boy says, "Our love is taboo." His white girlfriend snuggles up and coaches him, "Go to second, go to second." At Ole Miss, a few of the black track stars now have white girlfriends, so I ask Charlsy if any of the black women go out with white men on campus. She says, "I've never seen that, except on TV."

Unsurprisingly, separateness of the races here is as ingrained as in the North. But here I sense an aggressive dedication to reversing the pattern that is absent at the Northern schools. James Brown, assistant dean of students, a black ex-pro linebacker, has helped institute programs to make sure students stay in school once they're admitted. Now, about 70 percent of the black students graduate. "When I start talking about this, I get happy, because I can make a difference," Brown says. "I see this state as a new frontier." And Toni Avant, Ole Miss class of 1986 and an admissions counselor, recruits the state's best black students. If they don't have transportation to visit the school, says Avant, she drives out and gets them.

At the class of 1988's graduation, Governor Ray Mabus, Ole Miss class of 1969, is the commencement speaker. As the organ pipes Pomp and Circumstance, the basketball floor fills with black caps and gowns. Parents happily collapse in the stands, finally shaded from the sticky broil of the Mississippi sun. One especially proud black family takes up nearly a whole row and shines smiles from grandpa to toddlers as their graduate files past, breaking rank for a moment to beam back.

Despite "entrenched interests to be discomforted," testifies the liberal governor in dramatic contrast to former governor Ross Barnett, who defended the whiteness of Ole Miss by physically blocking Meredith from registering. No matter the intentions of those who have reshackled minority progress in a decade that "in many ways has sanctified selfishness," the state and the country will not truly live up to their potential for equality and for good, he proclaims, "unless we succeed in educating all our children."

Amen. And just singing Ebony and Ivory won't make it so.

"Last year, a group of freshmen printed up T-shirts saying Aryan by the grace of God."