In 1963, nine years after Brown v. Board and 93 after the ratification of the 14th Amendment and the guarantee of equal legal protections regardless of race, the University of South Carolina finally desegregated.
We've made progress since then, but USC still doesn't have racial unity.
Tuesday night, a State of the Unity forum was held in the Russell House Theater to discuss and address problems in attaining racial unity on campus. In the end, a consensus was reached that gaps and grievances exist, but fairly few concrete solutions were formed.
A large issue was the cancellation of the step show and subsequent mishandling of the stroll off during homecoming that led to every NPHC and three other Greek organizations withdrawing from the proceedings. The slights would be almost unimaginable if they had occurred to Spurs and Struts, but because the outrage was mostly localized to majority black organizations, the saga had little impact on the vast majority of the white population at USC. That's a problem.
The apathy and the Homecoming Committee’s response, a non-apology that held NPHC primarily responsible for the debacle, mean that very little is likely to be done to rectify the situation because the pressure is not there.
Here begins a series of chicken-and-egg scenarios.
A large portion of white USC students can ignore it because they don’t interact with black USC students to any large degree. They aren’t aware of the problem because they disproportionately congregate in different organizations and at different events. Organizations have little diversity because they could be seen as unwelcoming because of insensitivity or lack of diversity. The perception exists because they have little diversity.
To some extent this boils down to the disproportionately white character of USC, which has a 10.2 percent black student body in a state where 27.8 percent of the populace is black. The unrepresentative proportion of nonwhite students makes interaction less frequent and self-segregation possible. These conditions could deter potential students of color from coming, making fixing the problem more difficult.
So with a self-fulfilling cultural divide between white USC and black USC — and the mere fact that we have a white and black USC — we need action to break out of the cycle. Forums like State of the Unity are undeniably important, but if a substantial number of white students don’t go, they can’t bring about a large shift in attitude.
Instead, broader discussion between leaders of different student organization, regardless of their internal demographics, might lead to students becoming more aware of the problems affecting others. It is harder to ignore problems when you talk to people experiencing them on a regular basis.
Student Government could relax its rules and allow for more open dialogue at its meetings. Individual students could take active steps to join organizations and talk to people they currently don’t in order to broaden their horizons and learn more about other perspectives on the world. The university and higher levels of administration could take more active steps to ensure that all students are receiving the full experience they pay for, regardless of their skin color. The university could, at the very least, comment on the NPHC's withdrawal from homecoming.
After all, in order for the school to claim to be treating all students equally there must exist a broad equality of experience. The growing outrage among one segment of the school population and the obliviousness of another suggests that this is not the case.