BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Recent flaps over racially offensive language at the University of Alabama fit a pattern that’s dogged the state’s flagship school since it was integrated: Missteps along the path to greater diversity and inclusion often make more of an impression than positive strides do.
Months after the university unveiled a plaza and clock tower named for its earliest Black students, the campus was swamped within the past two weeks with unwelcome attention after a White student was disciplined for yelling racial slurs at a Black student. Days after that incident, more racial slurs were written on a campus sidewalk in chalk.
The school’s president, Robert Witt, has drawn praise for instituting programs to increase diversity. But it’s student foibles that garner the national headlines, such as when a parade of White students in Confederate uniforms stopped in front of a Black sorority house in 2009 and angered alumnae gathered for a party.
“Given the long history, stretching back to the days of slavery and running through the dark and difficult years of Jim Crow up through the integration of the university, racial insults are particularly poignant and powerful at the university,” says Al Brophy, a University of North Carolina law professor who previously taught at Alabama.
“While racial insults would be offensive in any school, North or South, at UA they take on more power and are more hurtful than at many other places,” he adds.
In 2004, Brophy helped push the Faculty Senate at Alabama to issue a formal apology to the descendants of slaves who were owned by faculty members or who worked on campus during the antebellum period. The action was met on campus both with praise and complaints that it was pointless for anyone to apologize for the sins of the 1800s.
Alabama’s student body has grown dramatically in recent years because of an aggressive recruitment campaign, and there are now more than 30,200 students on a campus that bustles with construction. But while the student body is more than 12 percent Black, the proportion is still small when compared to the state’s population, which is 26 percent Black.
