Just wanted to chip in and say “Yay for a thread mentioning UCF!”, and yay for us reaching the NCAA tourney and… well, losing in the first round.
You are correct that racial tensions on campus are astoundingly low; the Barbara Ying Center (UCF’s international student department) did a study a while back (I wrote part of the analysis) showing that less than 11% of the campus’ minorities (and less than 3% of white students) thought race “was an issue UCF students should be concerned with”. Add to that the fact that Dr. Cornell West of Harvard gave a lecture last month on Brown v. Board of Education at 50 which was the most highly-attended speech in UCF history (beating out William Cohen’s speech last week, among others), and I’d say racial tension is not a problem.
Plus, I’m a minority student at UCF, which automatically qualifies me to speak for all other minority students at UCF, you know.
It is incredible how different somethings are when the whole race issue is brought to the forefront. In the '80s and '90s one of the best, and most stangely coiffed, soccer players in the world was Carlos ‘El Pibe’ Valderrama from Colombia. During the elimination rounds for the 1990, 1994 and 1998 world cups most Colombians donned the ‘pibe’ wig to show their support for the whole team, embodied in their leader. Valderrama is mulatto, but not once did anyone think it racist for people to don their idol’s tresses. This also happend (Gasp!) while he played at Tampa Bay (in the deep South).
I think that if they had an afro night and it had become part of the culture of the school, the president’s use of the wig can be seen as trying to ‘cozy’ up to the student body, but nothing else.
Help, I’m white with curly black hair that often resembles an Afro hair cut. I must be a racist.
I am highly sceptical of anyone being offended on behalf of another, such action is condescending and rude.
[QUOTE=furt Biggirl, pizzabrat … you out there?[/QUOTE]
The worst part of this stupidity is that it just reinforces the general idea that blacks are just PC whiners who take offence at everything and nothing when this isn’t the case. Well, not in this particular incident.
I am the anti-taking things out of context in order to twist them to serve your need to be able to cry victim police.
I am the not going to let agenda’ed whiners dictate social behaviors that do not cause any harm to anyone but ping their hypersensitive white-people-did-it-so-it-must-be-bad meters.
Case in point: the only way to be offended by the university president’s actions is if they are taken entirely out of their context and turned into something much bigger and from an entirely opposite motivation than it was. You must turn the president of the college into a liar, and proclaim that he wasn’t honoring Dexter Lyons and the team, but mocking them and all blacks. You must have the audacity to present yourself as being a higher authority on what is and was truly on the man’s mind than he himself.
And if you are doing all of that, then yes, you need to be shamed from your position of stupidity, arrogance and phony self-righteousness, because you have no right to it. Shame on you, shame on you not for your own patheticness but for, as Biggirl noted, the fact that it rubs off on the rest of us and makes us look as miserable and useless and disgusting and disreputable as you are.