IT'S DEPRESSING to imagine what they must think of us. The outside world, Virginians unaffiliated with our school and folks as far north as Boston, who read about the University over their morning coffee, clucking their tongues at news stories about, as the Washington Post phrased it "at least nine racist incidents -- slurs shouted from cars, ugly words written on message boards, a racist threat scrawled on a bathroom wall." It's disheartening that this is the face of Mr. Jefferson's grand project to those outside our community -- not the architectural glory of the Lawn, not the top ranked academic programs, but the shameful acts of a handful of cowards.
There is no escaping it -- this is our school. But there is so much missed when we discuss the racial climate at this school in terms of these isolated acts. We are the school where the sheer force of tolerance -- and willingness to stand up to intolerance -- ended the cruel tradition of the "not gay" chant that once accompanied the singing of the Good Ol' Song. We are a school where Sustained Dialogue flourishes, not only as a CIO but as a concept, and we are a school that will earnestly share a past of discrimination with the tourists who travel to our Grounds in the hopes of creating a future of openness and equality.
We are a school that takes ownership, and these days, each nightfall proves it. Ben Sachs is a fourth year who, along with fellow Class of 2006 members Stewart Ackerly, Greg Jackson, Wyatt Robinson and Noah Sullivan, created a student watch program to patrol Grounds at night, picking up the slack where the police leave off, to make sure that students feel safe. Sachs is not a victim of any of these racial incidents, but he speaks about the situation with a passion representative of most students here when he explained that "students feeling afraid of what might happen to them at night is everyone's problem. A select group of instigators were trying to make students who were already in the minority feel uncomfortable about being at U.Va.. If the rest of us are not going to stand up for them, we might as well be keeping them down."
The uniformity of the black ribbons drawn on Lawn room whiteboards and the signs declaring that their residents would "not tolerate intolerance" represent a consensus among students of a magnitude too great to be dismissed. The students at this University are incapable of reaching agreement on any issue, be it single sanction or mandatory diversity training, and yet we stood unified in our opposition to this tiny, hateful minority. To see a student body usually bitterly divided between bowties and sea of orange uniformly pin black ribbons of solidarity to their sundresses and t-shirts alike at this weekend's football game was nothing short of inspiring. Usually factionalized into politicos, Greeks and countless other subgroups, students have come out of their usual cliques to paint Beta bridge and stand at rallies next to strangers. As Sachs said, "when we started our student patrol program, we got more volunteers than we knew what to do with. We actually had to turn people away! And these weren't just minority students or the usual go-getters; the volunteers were coming from everywhere."
It may sound Pollyana-ish at best, crass at worst, to praise the character of this student body when students here have been victimized by terrible acts of racism, made to feel threatened and scared by gutless gestures of homophobia. Not for a moment should such emotions be trivialized. Nor is everything perfect at the University; we're a number of security cameras and a more accessible reporting system away from saying that we've done all we can.And, ultimately, it is more than likely that the individuals perpetrating these ugly acts are students here, and they are blight on the face of the entire population.
Yet at the end of the day, you can judge a community by the worst of its members, or by the character of its overwhelming majority. I'll take the latter, and I'm still proud to be at U.Va.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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