Mainstream discussions about race here are, to put it nicely, lacking. Lacking in frequency, information, experience, and a historical understanding of racial prejudice and discrimination in this country. I want to talk about a few incidents over the last few weeks and months that bring this to mind. The incidents themselves are upsetting, but the ways they are discussed in the public are even scarier.

After going to a club one night, my white female friend took a couple of male, Southeast Asian grad students home. She had not been drinking. A police officer pulled her over for not signaling a lane change and asked more than once how and where she met the men in her car. She answered curtly that they were all friends, and the officer let her go with a warning. The next day, the very same friend overheard an argument between a mixed race couple in a bookstore who accused a white man of following them around making racist statements. They left the bookstore after a shouting match. I could provide several more examples of racial profiling by police officers in this city.

I talked to an older white man about his last few years of activism with different cultures in Fargo. He was astounded by how little he knew about the kinds of prejudice Native Americans, African-Americans, refugees, and immigrants in this small city face. He provided about 30 minutes worth of examples of run-ins with the police, courts, on the streets, and after each one, he shook his head and said he had no idea because, as a white man, he had never had such experiences.

Mevludin Hidanovic, a Bosnian Romani man, was wrongly convicted for a crime he didn’t commit. He was nowhere near a fight that occurred at the Red River Valley Fairgrounds. A juror confessed to her own prejudice against Bosnians and admitted to swaying the rest of the jurors. He and others who were with him or who witnessed the fight passed a lie detector test. Not only was there no mistrial, but the North Dakota Supreme Court recently upheld the decision and he will be deported. To support him and his family, go to their website!

Last fall, a UND sorority hosted a party where some students wore red face and body paint and dressed in mock American Indian attire. In March, at an NDSU frat party, a white student in black face and wearing an afro wig portrayed Barack Obama receiving a lap dance by a female student dressed the woman from the Internet video “I Got a Crush on Obama.” Two other students dressed as cowboys simulated anal sex while holding an Obama sign that one student ripped after the 30-second performance. Presidents of the sorority and the club for students interested in animal agriculture publicly apologized at an NDSU town hall meeting the following week. Not even a week later, a student of color at NDSU student applied white face paint to mock pop superstar Michael Jackson during another campus event (which is racialized, but not in the way most folks around here think it is, because this is just pointing out further stereotypes of what “race” means in terms of skin color!).

In the last few weeks, there have been at least two incidences of anti-Semitic graffiti drawn on dorm-room walls of a student.

All of these cases are upsetting, but what bothers me more, and what gets to the some of the ultimate causes behind these racist incidents are the reactions of people, people in power. Several people chalk them up to “stupid college antics” or random acts. Stupid college antics need not involve race.

In response to the college faux paus, on April 6, 2008, Von Pinnon, the Fargo Forum newspaper editor attempts to provide cause and meaning to some of the above incidents. You’ll need to read the whole letter so I paste it below (the Forum would make you pay to read it on their website):

“All have some similarities: College students, face paint and stupidity. But are these events truly the isolated and ignorant acting out of the few? I thought probably, until last week when I spoke with some NDSU students who were surprisingly candid about why they think these things happened and why they’ll happen again, if only in not-so-public ways. Simply put: College students are raging against the machine. For the uninitiated, “the machine” is society, the norm, conventional thought. Following these incidents, there were several very public calls for more diversity initiatives, sensitivity training and awareness campaigns. But, if you believe the college students I spoke with, that’s the kind of stuff that led to these tasteless actions in the first place.

See, their take was that this generation of young people has had so much tolerance, diversity and sensitivity training drummed into them that some feel compelled to rebel from it. Think 1960s counterculture turned on its head. Their theory may not be far off. After each of these recent incidents, college officials publicly apologized on behalf of their universities. At NDSU, the issues were discussed at a campus town hall meeting. Those reactions, though necessary, were establishment-based. If today’s college students feel compelled to rebel against authority like they always have, diversity initiatives and their powerful advocates are ripe targets. Add to that the oft-seen satirical pieces about America’s struggle with race on popular programs like “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live” and you’ve got an anti-establishment undercurrent toward subjects such as diversity, tolerance and sensitivity. When asked whether they were considering attending Friday’s diversity rally on campus, some of the NDSU students I spoke with couldn’t help but roll their eyes. Don’t get them wrong, they quickly added: They have no problem with those not like themselves, whether that be color, race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

They say they truly believe diversity makes us stronger. They just don’t want to be lectured to anymore. That may explain why, at a campus of more than 12,000 students, about 200 people attended Friday’s well-publicized diversity rally, and some said half of them were too well-dressed to be students.”

RIGHT. So, this isn’t about race? It’s about rebelling. Raging against the machine. Sick of talking about race. Been there. Done that. Civil Rights ended a long time ago. We had the Martin Luther King, Jr. until every year since kindergarten. Sorry, but this sort of education or experience does not get at causes for racism. This is a misinformed attitude. I am telling you right now that racism is alive and well and the above incidents are only a few examples. Racial incidents like this are not printed often enough and when they are, they are justified. These are not isolated cases; they demonstrate entrenched racism coming from various sources (police, courts, students, teachers) backed by institutions.

I have tried several times throughout the last few years to engage white people in the upper Midwest in discussions about race (and refugees) and find that 1) many people associate the word or concept of “refugee” with “race” which is associated with “black” or people of color and different, hence bad or at least suspicious. White folks have a race. It’s called “white.” As in, there goes a white man walking down the street. (And there are white refugees.) 2) Many white people around here think that talking about race insinuates that they are racist. Sometimes when I ask people about refugees, they tell me they are not prejudice. I assure you I did not ask about or accuse them of being prejudice.

Anthropologist Ruth Frankenberg explains that some white people think of “whiteness” and “Americanness” as an “absence of color.” She says there’s a problem with valorizing difference in terms of diversity because such discussions do not address power differentials among different people and leaves the idea that people of color, or all marginalized people, are not necessary for the nation; they are optional or even an act of compassion to include them. In other words, in order to decrease racism, we first need to acknowledge that it exists and that we need to talk about it, not in terms of diversity per se but which races (whites) have more power and privilege and why. Talking about slavery, genocide of Native Americans, Japanese internment camps during World War II, and the list goes on, as something that started and ended in the past, and has no bearing on the present, is not correct or useful – except to those in power.

Keeping the above in mind, read what Von Pinnon wrote in his column the following Sunday, April 13, 2008:

“The theory: Students are rebelling against mainstream authoritative messages that preach diversity, tolerance and sensitivity toward others. My theory was just that, gained from a recent discussion with a small group of students at North Dakota State University.

Apparently intrigued by the column’s hypothesis and having discussed the recent events in class, an adjunct professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead assigned her students to read my column and respond with their own thoughts.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson said she was surprised to learn of her students’ “almost universally angry response to the big deal made of it (their words, not mine)” regarding the recently well-publicized skits or parties in which students used face or body paint to portray or mock someone else’s race.

She provided me copies of the 33 written responses from her two classes. Most, though not all, really mirrored the sentiments of the NDSU students I spoke with.

Most, though again not all, said they felt their generation was generally tolerant, sensitive to others’ feelings and more diverse than any before it. In fact, several stated that because their generation is more diverse than, say, their parents’ generation, they feel more able to poke fun at race and race-related issues because it’s truly done in jest, not to offend or hurt anyone. Here are some excerpts from their writings in response to my column. I chose to not name the writers because they were not told their responses may be published.

‘The actions of these college students is more of an acceptance of diversity instead of a rebellion against it and the establishment.’

‘All of today’s young adults know nothing other than tolerance. We grew up thinking this is how life has always been because we weren’t around for the 1960s when race was more of an issue. We feel it’s OK to make jokes like that.’

‘The now generation doesn’t see this as a problem because we’re so diverse, but the other generations grew up thinking this kind of stuff is racism and wrong.’

‘The students should not be sorry for anything. If we can’t express ourselves as college students, then what’s the point of attending school?’

‘It is most likely that the students involved in the recent incidents didn’t think they were being offensive – not because they are ignorant, but because the social climate is nearing a point where people truly don’t think so much about race (at least for the current college generation).’

‘This shows college students really are comfortable and tolerant of people different from themselves. It is the older generations who have witnessed the same acts and found some sort of racist undertones in them. It is simply a difference in our generation’s way of looking at things.’”

North Dakota is one of the whitest, least racially, culturally, and religiously diverse states in the country so I find it tragically comical that these students are talking about their knowledge of diversity. The seemingly “common sense” attitude that is culture here thinks racism ended with the Civil Rights Movement. I have met a lot of people here who have almost no experience at all with people from another race. That in itself is not “bad.” Or racist. What’s wrong is to have little contact with other races or cultures and then purport to understand what we’re talking about here because of the Internet or classes. I’ve talked to a lot people of color and refugees around here and many, if not most, have experienced multiple forms of discrimination. North Dakota, and Fargo in particular, has become significantly more diverse over the last 15 years, but that does not necessarily mean that the majority of white people are interacting with people from other races or cultures (it’s still over 90% white). In fact, it seems that outside of some churches, businesses that employ a diverse work force, and increasingly schools (not necessarily universities), it would be easy for a person in Fargo to never come across someone from another culture. Again, this in itself is not a bad thing…unless people with little knowledge AND little interest in people from different races or cultures are in positions of power (supervisors, teachers/professors, doctors/nurses, religious figures, social workers) and they have no desire to interact with, learn about, decrease stereotypes about, and increase information about people who are not like themselves. After all, it can be challenging.

There are plenty of people here in North Dakota who ARE fighting racism so kudos to them because it’s a big job. I have met people in nonprofit organizations, teachers, professors, workers, students, supervisors, and on and on who enjoy advocating for and learning about long-standing (Native Americans) and new populations of people in Fargo-Moorhead. Others with little contact with other cultures have asked me what they could do to learn, which is great! So it’s not all doom and gloom, but it’s important to talk about these things so incidents like the ones above don’t occur and are not justified. For example, some faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Dakota, where some of these racist student-led antics happened, wrote a letter to the university calling on them to address the institutionalized racism that promotes such behavior. Read about it in the Bismarck Tribune.

By the way – I’m not saying that racism is better or worse here than elsewhere. I’m just reporting on what I see here. There is a neverending list of examples of racism from elsewhere but I’m living and working in ND and it’s important to see the different ways that racism manifests itself around the country/world.

There so much more I want to say, but I think this is enough for one post. Kudos if you made it this far and thanks for reading. If you have time, let me know what you think. Don’t be shy.