COMING to the University as a law student, my first experience with the University was being racially profiled. Upon arriving at an admitted students' reception, I was presumptively directed to the Asian-American student group by a well-intentioned white student. While incoming students will be accosted with the same racial segregation I encountered, they should be assured that the University is not an inherently racist institution. In my instance, what racism there is may be of the untraditional type -- the ironic, self-created type that stems from liberal society's obsessive mantra of racial consciousness and identity politics.
Admittedly, the University lags in racial diversity compared with some peer institutions, whether it is at the undergraduate or graduate school levels. However, it would be foolish for incoming students to attribute this phenomenon to any invidious University-wide discrimination. A Bob Jones University U.Va. is not. While the University practices racial classification, conducts racially segregated recruiting and orientation programs and maintains racially segregated academic support departments, all of this is in the name of creating racial diversity -- not discrimination. When the admissions office asks students to declare their race, it is certainly not for the purpose of keeping "underrepresented" minorities out (although it may have such an effect on "overrepresented" minorities -- an oxymoron in itself). The University's motivations may be mistaken, but I am generally confident that they are genuine and benign.
The University's relative racial homogeneity is also probably not the result of a reputation that precedes it. Certainly, the University, while not situated in the "Deep South," is still located in the South, and Charlottesville, despite being a liberal outlier today, was no stranger to rampant discrimination just a few decades ago. University veterans have also heard of various racial incidents over the years, most notably an alleged racial assault on a Student Council candidate, a racial epithet scrawled on a student's car and a Halloween party where some revelers showed up in blackface.
Despite the racists' best efforts to turn members of the community against each other, their antics have failed to cast a pall over the University, at least not before students have set foot here. When I covered a Fall Fling event targeted at African-American students and parents, I asked several participants whether they were mindful of these incidents. None expressed any particular concern. Had I thought of it, I should have posed the same question after the administrators gave their ominous and overblown warnings on the subject. I probably would have received some different responses.
The point is, racial incidents happen at all colleges, especially at a premier public institution like U.Va., which attracts top students from all over the Commonwealth, many of whom grew up having little experience with other races. Because the administrators have yet to arrive at an appropriate response to such incidents, it is incumbent on incoming students to give them their due weight. To wit, students must condemn intolerance and bigotry, but they must not let such incidents wreak a state of constant paranoia and animosity, or else the racists have won.
Having condemned the racists, we must also confront the racialists. We must learn that it is possible for students to reach across racial lines regardless of the University's race-based admissions and orientation programs, and even irrespective of race itself. In a free society, individuals are free to choose their own identities -- society's best efforts to the contrary be damned. One's physical race does not physiologically predetermine his or her academic, social and cultural preferences and interests.
Accordingly, if there is one thing I would recommend to incoming undergraduates, it is to take an introductory philosophy course that forces them to confront the constituents of individual identity. While we casually throw the term around, very few of us have thought through the fundamental determinants of identity and what it means to be an autonomous being.
While I would like to extend a warm welcome to incoming students on behalf of all individualists at the University, that would be a non sequitur. So as a minority of one, I only speak for myself in wishing you the best of luck, success and personal fulfillment at the University.
Eric Wang is a Cavalier Daily columnist. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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