As spring moves forward, state educational standardized testing has begun. Along with this testing, comes a long-standing blister in the test scores. State testing results display a serious gap in the academic performance of the black male population in comparison to same age white male peers. This dilemma is not an isolated event. It occurs in schools all across the nation.
Just one year ago, members of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), held an off-campus “Compton Cookout,” where guests were beckoned to don gold teeth, wear baggy sports gear, and enjoy watermelon in honor of Black History Month. It was followed by a campus television broadcast of the editor of Koala, a campus publication, denouncing black students as “ungrateful niggers.” Not long after the broadcast, a sign marked “Compton Cookout Lynching,” was left at the station, and a noose was hung from a bookcase at the university’s main library.
Just a generation ago, racism and segregation was a way of life for minorities all across the U.S. at colleges big and small. As time slowly marched on, it seems to the uninterested observer that these scourges on society have all but disappeared, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
Racism and segregation are alive and well on college campuses, but they merely take a more 21st Century form. Bullies and racists use technology to carry out their harassment. The youth of our country are more technologically advanced than any other generation.
College and university rhetoric is devised to supply students with a language to discuss difficult topics at a higher education level. One concept introduced early in many college educations is authority. Students learn to intensely evaluate articles, books, fiction, and other publications to assess the reliability of that source and whether that source is an authority on a subject.
The idea of authority is an on-going discussion on college campuses with the concept often posed by the “authority” in class, which normally is the professor.
