The Undergraduate Government of Boston College has been doing a great job of keeping the students happy thus far, a fact best evidenced by the success of the AHANA Leadership Council's boat cruise and the return of the fall concert. The students that attended these events did not have to search for good entertainment and a good time. The other students - those who chose to ignore these opportunities - couldn't complain that wandering the Mods was all they could find to do. Kudos to the UGBC.
It's also impossible to ignore the success of the BC football team, which is continuing to make headlines, keeping the fans in the stands happy. With a 4-0 record, the No. 12 Eagles are changing the slogan of weekend partying from TGIF to TGWW (Thank God We Won). Kudos to Eagles football.
BC students have not yet had to deal with the horrid weather that is soon to come; the type that eliminates small chatter in the Quad, Frisbees, and sort of satisfaction that one gets on the walk through our beautiful campus to class. Oh, what a difference the sun makes. Kudos to Mother Nature.
But in Jena, La., not even the warm Southern weather could ease the feelings of discomfort the Jena High School students have been experiencing for the past year.
Imagine the Hellogoodbye concert in a segregated arena, or try to imagine a line of demarcation separating the sea of Superfan shirts into "black" and "white" sections. We all love to think that that we have moved beyond those days; we can hardly imagine these circumstances. For more reasons than I have stated before, it's good to be a BC student. As we have seen in the case of the Jena 6, the social understanding that we have is not afforded to every student in the nation.
The story of the Jena 6 is an ever-alarming reflection of how much work we still need to do as a society. For those who are not familiar with the story, the Jena 6 case began at Jena High School in Louisiana when a black student asked a principal if he could sit under "the white tree" on campus, as it was known by many of the students.
As hard as it might be to swallow, the name did not describe the color of the tree rather of the race of the people allowed to sit under it. The day after, a group of white students hung nooses on the tree to make a statement. Controversy erupted when the superintendent of the school felt that expulsion would be too harsh a punishment and decided that a few days of in-house suspension would be a fair response to this "joke."
Ha. I'm pretty sure that Michael Richards illustrated last year how unfunny and intolerable such jokes are.
Following fights among the students and the very blatant favoritism of the white students in the case, many public figures are speaking out about this unavoidable subject.
Neo-nazi activist William A. "Bill" White, after posting the names and addresses of the black students online, is urging that white citizens use the information and call for lynching. Meanwhile, the Rev. Jesse Jackson is continuing to speak out against racial inequality but is bashing those that he doesn't think are fighting hard enough. (He recently accused Barack Obama of "acting white" by not standing up enough for his black people).
Again, I reemphasize how much work America has to do. We have a man asking for lynching and another calling out only black politicians to speak on the matter. This is not a black issue but a human one, which we need to resolve once and for all.
Jackson could have called out Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, because this is not a black American issue but an American issue. The protestors of the next social movement need not be easily distinguishable on the basis of color: at this point, most of us would like to think that there is an outcry in most communities of the United States about this issue.
On BC's campus, I have heard many proposals to ease racial injustices by breaking down institutionalized racism, but I am waiting to hear even more dialogue about this very obvious and unsubtle racism going on in our country.
Oh, how I await the day that I will never have to write about racism in any other context than a history paper.
Nidia Fevry is a Heights staff columnist. She welcomes comments at nfevry@bcheights.com.
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