Half-baked diversity plans

It's funny how a cookie can be such a "learning opportunity" for IU.\nWhen the new student group, the Committee for Freedom, held a bake sale Wednesday afternoon to highlight their views of affirmative action, things got a little heated.\nWhile for some, the sale sparked discussion, for others it simply brought out anger. One student even knocked the baked goods right out of someone's hands.\nBy the end of the event, it seemed people weren't just separated by the politics of affirmative action; they were separated by race.\nThis is just another instance proving Bloomington is a racially tense campus.\nBut what is the administration currently doing to alleviate this tension?\nThe Bloomington Faculty Council, after over a year of discussion, finally approved their Statement of Diversity for IU last week.\nThis statement takes a very bold "pro-diversity" stance, making such brave claims as "Interaction on our campus among persons and groups with diverse backgrounds and experiences facilitates those efforts by helping us to become more reflective about the varied historical and social contexts in which we work and learn."\nWow. Way to stir the waters.\nNobody is disagreeing with the BFC here, but it seems like it's easier said than done.\nAgain and again, IU has preached about how it wants to create a diverse campus, but little progress has been made.\nIn IU-Bloomington Chancellor Sharon Brehm's 2003 State of Diversity address, she said one of IU's major problems was decreasing minority enrollment and retention.\nAccording to the Office of Student Support and Diversity, IU's undergraduate enrollment for 2002 was 82 percent white, 3.8 percent black, 3.1 percent Asian American, 8.45 percent international and 2.1 percent Hispanic.\nIt seems like IU has become that guy who counts his black friends aloud just to prove he isn't racist.\nIU administrators need to realize the problem isn't that there aren't enough minority students or minority activities on campus. The problem is that, for many reasons, students from different backgrounds don't interact. \nDiversity isn't numbers. What's the point of having 30 percent black enrollment if we don't all get along?\nNelms and Brehm have said repeatedly that diversity is important because we learn from those that are different from ourselves. Well, if we don't hang out together, we don't learn anything from each other.\nThe solution to this tension should be simple: step out of your comfort zone.\nForget meaningless statements and diversity studies; We need to create programs where people from different cultures interact, events that are not designed solely to talk about the evils of racism. Pardon the informality, but we just need to "hang out." That's how we learn to accept and understand differences. Not by lectures or video presentations. No one wants to have a conversation about race. \nRacial tension ends where friendships begin.