SEPARATE but equal has achieved its highest point - or, arguably, its lowest point - in higher education. Instead of trying to maintain different classrooms and cafeterias for different races, America has put all the students in the same buildings, and students voluntarily segregate themselves. "Self-segregation" appropriately describes this behavior, as segregation can be either imposed or chosen. We now have facilities so equal that they are not separate, while the separation of the students continues.
According to The Cavalier Daily's Managing Board, "Self-separation is not a problem," apparently because choosing associations by racial criteria is a personal decision. The Board also thought that the personal decision ("Separation anxiety," March 7) of students not to attend basketball games was a hypocrisy worth an entire column of criticism ("Fair weather fears," Feb. 12). The two lead editorials, when contrasted, reveal a skewed sense of the import of personal decisions.
When students choose not to cheer on the University's men's basketball team, they may be making one of several statements. They may be evincing a lack of interest in basketball, in University athletics generally or in men in baggy shorts. The failure to attend games could be blamed on a shortage of time or a paucity of friends who want to go.
Whatever the reason, it is unlikely to mean much in the long run. Students who do not go to games miss out on the opportunity to paint themselves orange and get an occasional free T-shirt. But life goes on, and if no student ever attended a University men's basketball game ever again, the tragedy would be a minor one. At least then the new arena could be built strictly for profit, without a clamor for priority seating for students.
When students choose to associate exclusively with members of a particular race, they are saying something worth noticing. They are saying that they feel less comfortable with people of other races. This certainly does not make the people who feel the discomfort bad people in any way. However, it does signal a larger problem, whether it is in the University community or the larger society: Many students prefer the company of people of their own race to that of people of other races.
If this is a behavior occurring solely at colleges and universities, then all institutions of higher education need to evaluate what it is about them that causes this self-segregation.
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More likely, this is a behavioral pattern learned in childhood and carried throughout life. The entire nation needs to think about why, nearly 50 years after the Brown v Board of Education decision made imposed segregation in education illegal, people continue to separate themselves by race.
As legal barriers fall, personal decisions become increasingly important. They are made under certain constraints, and now many of these constraints are social and economic rather than legal.
The decision not to finish high school or college is a personal one; no law requires students to drop out - or finish. Does that mean that the lower graduation rates of blacks are not worthy of concern? The decision of a white family to leave a neighborhood because Latino families are moving in is an extremely personal choice; the government does not mandate it. Does that mean that white flight is not a disturbing and regrettable phenomenon?
Americans should pay attention to personal decisions, because they show what we are feeling. Maybe people of all races would have loved to hang out together in the days of legal segregation, and were kept from doing so only by the coercive state. Now, however, people are free to do what they want - and some of the old patterns remain. The ghost of Jim Crow has not departed as long as someone avoids a club because it is "too black."
Certainly, we could mind our own business and ignore that America continues to be, as James Baldwin dryly noted, "these yet-to-be united states." Now that the legal obstacles to association across racial lines are gone, some would say that there is no reason to worry about the fact that many people act like those walls are still in place. America can continue to split itself into hostile factions and practice voluntary, de facto segregation.
But change begins with us. The students who become comfortable living with people of other races while at the University will retain that ease when they choose where to raise their families as adults. Otherwise, we will continue to go through the same circle.
When parents choose neighborhoods by race, children's playmates are all of the same race. They grow up feeling less comfortable with people of another race, and perpetuate the cycle again. Personal decisions create the informal rules of society, and we should feel anxiety over them. Desegregation in principle means little when we continue to be separate in real life.
(Pallavi Guniganti's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at pguniganti@cavalierdaily.com.)
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