The sobering reality of racism at IU

Earlier this week I made a disturbing discovery in a stairwell at the Collins Living-Learning Center.

If you haven’t noticed, members of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center have been putting up posters that proclaim, “Trayvon Martin is...” followed by a list of possibilities, including brother, sister and “Me.”

The poster is clearly meant to evoke solidarity and communal support in the wake of Martin’s murder.

However, under one such poster in Collins, a staggeringly ignorant person had scrawled, “(George) Zimmerman was acting in self-defense. Get over it!”

I’m not particularly interested in debating the facts of the shooting.

I believe that the murder of an unarmed minor by a gun-wielding, self-appointed neighborhood watchman speaks for itself.

In the words of the Crunk Feminist Collective, “If this were 1912 and not 2012, we would call a Black man killed by a one-man firing squad with no just cause what it is: a lynching.”

What I’m more interested in discussing is my own shock at discovering such an ignorant comment on our campus.

Perhaps some of my shock stems from my upbringing.

While I didn’t grow up in a utopia of racial harmony, I did attend a school district where the majority of students are black.

I’m not one of those unfortunate IU students who come from towns where there’s one non-white family, if that.

While I’m not suggesting I graduated high school with a savant-like knowledge of Critical Race Theory or a full understanding of my own privilege, I did grow up thinking of black people as people, not haunting figures on the edges of a white flight enclave.

Perhaps my shock came from Collins’ obviously unearned reputation for being a more progressive dorm.

The stereotypical residents of Collins are a bunch of hippies, nerds, leftists and stoners sitting in a drum circle.

But if you look around any of those drum circles, you’re likely to see only white faces.

Of course, I’m not suggesting Collins is a uniquely segregated environment on campus. After all, only 7.3 percent of students at IU identify as black.

This is a sobering statistic but shouldn’t come as a surprise. Attending college is a path open to the privileged, and our country does a great deal to privilege whites while pushing blacks back down.

While attending a cloistered majority-white university, it’s easy to remain unaware of the reality of race in our country.

How many of us know that in January 2012, black unemployment was at 14.2 percent, compared to a white unemployment rate of only 8 percent?

Who here knows that the median household income of white families in 2009 was 20 times higher than that of black families?

While we’re busy with classes, we’re also ignoring that more black men are in prison, on probation, or on parole now than there were slaves in the antebellum South.

The material conditions for blacks in our country are abysmal, even before we begin to consider the constant threat of violence that lingers in black communities, as manifested in Martin’s murder.

I fear that the murder of Martin and the ongoing trial of Zimmerman will only reveal the ignorance and latent racism in many whites at our University. I see a dreadful period ahead for those of us, black and white, who long for a more just and equal world.

­— atcrane@indiana.edu