Off Course

Recent events in my life have helped me realize that being a bride is only a temporary distraction from life. It was a real duh moment to tell you the truth but instead of trying to think up countless interesting wedding things to put here I’ve decided to use this as a place to put all of my thoughts wedding or not.

Thanks to the teaching of a superb professor in college, I am hypersensitive to the inequalities of our society and how the media perpetuates them. Even more so, I am curious as to why, in 2008, we still perpetuate them ourselves. There are some people who think I’m nuts. Looking back at the progress we have made in the last 100 or even 50 years they say, “But look at how far we have come.” I tell them to read things like this quote that appeared on CNN today, May 19, 2008:

"I don't necessarily support him being here, but because he's here and we can't discriminate against other races, I support him and his mission to be successful in life. I just kind of wish he had done it at a different institution."

What color do you think the person making this comment is? It sounds like a white boy being appalled by a black boy attending his high school in 1953 doesn’t it? This is a direct quote made by a black man in 2008 about a white man graduating from his predominately black institution. What has bothered this man so much is not that the white man has attended his college. He is bothered that the white man has become valedictorian of his class. He continues:

"I think that it should be a wake-up call to an all black campus," says Muhammad. "At Morehouse we're supposed to be at the top as black men. We only have a few white students and to see a white student will rise to this - is something unsettling to me because it shows that we need to work harder."

To begin with, why is this even news? It’s news because it’s shocking to our country that a white man would even want to attend a black college. It’s news because it’s even more shocking to our country that the white man would dare to do so well at the college that he would become valedictorian. Thousands of people graduate as valedictorian of their class at thousands of colleges and universities every year, but the top news story on CNN today was that a white man was doing it at a black college. We never should have cared about the color of someone’s skin to begin with. In 2008, why do we still care?