The first night the chalk messages appeared, I [Hannah Borja, guest writer] was walking home around midnight from Old Cabell with my friend when I encountered a message on the sidewalk that read, “Wealth Gap Explained: Average White IQ: 102, Average Black IQ: 87.” I scuffed the message out and kept walking. Less than two hours later, when I was in my dorm and my friend had gone to flyer around Grounds, he texted me a picture that showed the exact same message with the same handwriting just under the bit I had erased. In response, I went back out and scuffed out that second message. The primary reason I could not stand to have the message written on Grounds did not necessarily have to do with how I feel about racism. The chalk message I encountered was simply not true, so I saw no purpose in it being there.
The racial wealth gap can never be explained with chalk clauses. There is far too much academic research on this subject to even think that is possible. The reasons for the incredible wealth gap between white and black Americans have historical and structural origins. First, wealth is cumulative and most Americans store their wealth in value of their home. With the creation of the Federal Housing Administration,blacks were cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market from the 1930s to the 1960s by the federal government, and it was thus impossible for black families to begin to build wealth. Alarmingly, this housing market discrimination is not even that far into the past. As recently as 2010, Wells Fargo was caught preying on black families. The reverberating effects of this these predatory housing policies include a nearly inescapable downward economic cycle in black neighborhoods and lower wealth return on black incomes in the labor market, all long after slavery and the Jim Crow South.
The use of IQs to explain the wealth gap is also highly disconcerting, echoing biological or scientific racism. We cannot help but be reminded of Jared Taylor, a present-day white nationalist and white supremacist who, like the bigoted chalkers, attributes the problems in black America to nature and intelligence. This line of reasoning was previously used to justify the pseudoscience of eugenics. Promoting the notion that some groups were intellectually inferior via their genetics, eugenicists succeeded in passing mandatory sterilization laws, which aimed to expunge particular groups of people, including those with mental illnesses, immigrants, the poor LGBTQ people and black people. American eugenicists actually served as an inspiration behind Nazism and the Holocaust. While these chalking incidents may not spark such huge consequences, they do reflect the beliefs of the rising white nationalist and white supremacist movements.
As people became aware of these bigoted incidents, they responded to them on social media. Unfortunately, those who condemn others for being “hypersensitive” in response to microaggressions seem to view microaggressions as isolated incidents. The truth is microaggressions have a cumulative impact on people, so minorities are not simply reacting to one instance of a microaggression but rather to both the present incident and the cumulative impact of past incidents. As leading scholar Derald Wing Sue has shown, these microaggressions can result in psychological and emotional agitations, leading targets of microaggressions to experience higher levels of anger and loss of self-esteem. Similarly, microaggressions lead people who experience them to experience anxiety, depression, stress and feelings of isolation. Knowing the potential impact of these acts, our community should continually condemn all forms of microaggressions, expunging them from our culture and protecting our fellow human from potential harm.
These chalk markings reveal two things. Blatant racism is not only real but also present at the University. Minority students, who are as deserving as non-minority students in their right to attend this university, are still at risk for harassment when they are doing something as simple as walking on the sidewalk. The generally positive response of the University community also deserves to be recognized, as it reveals something else: the University may be moving in the right direction. Many students and faculty, including those within the racial majority, are willing to at least publicly condemn harassment of marginalized students. Given that the bigoted chalk markings still happened, however, we are clearly not where we want to be.
Alexander Adames is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.adames@cavalierdaily.com. Hannah Borja is a first-year in the College.
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