Paulette Granberry Russell
The propitiation of the idea of a “post-racial” or “color-blind” society does more harm than good, some say.
“This mainstream narrative that we have that these ideas of color-blind ideology and the sentiment that we live in a post-racial society, if we look at the messages of those two, … the message we send to young people is that all of these things that happen, it’s never about race,” said Dr. Derrick Brooms, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Louisville. “Therefore I can engage in behaviors and not necessarily think about them or see them through the racial lens that they are filtered through.”
But Paulette Granberry Russell, chief diversity officer at Michigan State University and first vice president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), said, regardless of the lens filtering the incidents, “to see a swastika is disruptive. It’s disrespectful.”
“Others would say it’s an issue of free speech,” Russell continued. “That’s for a different conversation … but what it does, in this particular instance, is it disrupts the feelings of safety for the Jewish community and their allies. It disrupts the broader campus community, because now (Emory officials) have to deal with it … in a way that would hopefully reduce the likelihood of this happening again.”
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident, or even one that generated a tremendous amount of outrage and attention.
“Emory, Oberlin, the University of Michigan, UCLA—large public schools, smaller private schools—these things keep happening,” Brooms said.
